Has the US Response to 9/11 Brought About the Exact Destabilization the Attack was Meant to Cause?

[Jub]

Looking back at US politics, policies, and culture it seems like an argument could be made that many of Americas current divides were vastly deepened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Those deepened divides widened the gulf between the two American parties and solidified adversarial politics as the order of the day. Leading to the current state of the US.

This is pretty surface level and it wouldn't surprise me if these trends developed without such a singular event but it still seems worth discussion.

[Zaune]

I think if 9/11 hadn't happened, the various powerful people who used it to their advantage would have found another excuse. But maybe a series of smaller, less dramatic and high-profile attacks would have made it more of a slow burn, with more chances for cooler heads to weigh in and take a stand against the worse excesses.

Or maybe the unholy alliance between Halliburton et al and the "destroy the village to save the village" lobby in the three-letter agencies would've got impatient and tried to stage an actual false-flag op instead of just accidentally-on-purpose letting the bad guys slip something past them, like I've always half-suspected happened in 2001. I dunno.

[Ralin]

Well yes. Obviously.

If it hadn't happened the war mongers would have ramped up beating the anti-China and anti-Russia drums that much sooner. Probably would have been more controlled to keep the inmates from running the asylum like what happened with the Tea Party

[Knife]

I think it has more to do with the generational change. Boomers retiring and worried they don't get all the stuff they've been promised all their life. I think September 11th gave us more of a toxic patriotism/nationalism, but the root problem was the Boomers as a block.

[LadyTevar]

I think it has more to do with the generational change. Boomers retiring and worried they don't get all the stuff they've been promised all their life. I think September 11th gave us more of a toxic patriotism/nationalism, but the root problem was the Boomers as a block.

Boomers, maybe, but definitely the Religious Right Bloc is still a major problem.

[madd0ct0r]

Internet are my reply last week.

The way I see it is that the two party system will always have a pressure to congeal, then freeze into sharp ideological opposed crystals.
This is diffused by internal tensions and faction priorities shifting in prominence. The slow churn of a slushie maker that stops full freeze.


The way I see it, the deep freeze occurred before 9/11, back in the month of the contested election of dubya. That was when red and blue got fixed to a party each in the public's mind in a winner takes all drawn out battle. A team sport not a negotiation.

The Iraq war would have been attempted by Dubya with or without 9/11. Blair's messainic legacy started earlier, with Clinton in Kosovo. He would still have collaborated to produce an excuse for Iraq.
America would still have had a generation of body bags and traumatised vets and families with consequent hardening of politics, same as Russia saw from their Afghan war.