The 9/11 Generation Rises in American Politics

The September 11 attacks are one of those events — like Pearl Harbor, the 1929 stock-market crash, or the fall of the Berlin Wall — that marks a sharp discontinuity not only in our history, but in how people who lived through those events understood the world around them. That is true even if, unlike me, you weren’t there. For people around my age (I turned 30 a month after the attacks), they marked the end of the “holiday from history” that had marked our 20s, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet empire. Even when America went to war in Kosovo in the spring of 1999, it was possible for an ordinary American to remain only vaguely aware of what was happening there. But after 9/11, everyone felt that everything had changed. That sentiment was vivid for the next two or three years, and really only began to fade after the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan at the hands of Navy SEALs.