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"Another future that 9/11 brought forward was an American reckoning over race and nationhood. The nation was becoming more diverse and more culturally liberal, and that was always going to provoke some sort of a conflict. As it happened, it was 9/11 and the War on Terror that precipitated that conflict, causing a wrenching and contentious debate over whether America was still a Christian country (a debate the Christians increasingly look to have lost). But already, there was a feeling that this struggle over religion was a proxy for a deeper struggle over race — when people on the Right insisted that Barack Obama was a Muslim, it was widely understood that his religion was not what was making them uncomfortable.

And so the true battle came — the Woke Era and the Trump Era. But that was destined to happen anyway, as anyone who has read American history, seen the statistics on changing demographics, and listened to subterranean chatter on the Right would have realized. And in a way, the 9/11 Era and the War on Terror might have delayed the eruption a few years, by keeping the focus on religious conflict for a little while longer, and by briefly uniting the country over the need to destroy the people who committed the attacks (as we in fact did). "

I'm really not sure about this.

First off, read the transcripts for the 2000 Presidential debates, and immigration is not mentioned once (despite unauthorized border crossings being far more frequent then than they are today), and racial issues only come up a few times, mostly with boilerplate talking points about racial profiling and school funding and stuff like that. https://www.debates.org/voter-education/debate-transcripts/ So that's where we were before 9/11. Keep that in mind.

Second, it seems to me that a lot of the rise of racial issues on the right was tied to post-9/11 trends. The Paleocon branch of the Right, represented by Pat Buchanan and so on, gained a lot of traction because they turned out to be right about invading Iraq being a bad idea while the immigrant-friendly and business-friendly Neocons turned out to be horribly wrong. The Tea Party and Birtherism, similarly, seemed to arise out of a need to fill the vacuum left by Bush's brand of conservatism after it was discredited by the one-two punch of the Iraq disaster and the financial crisis (The financial crisis would probably still happen without 9/11, but would it be enough by itself? Hard to say.). And Trump himself clearly benefited in the primary from attacking establishment Republicans over Iraq and in the general from not wanting to go to war with Russia over Syria. Studies have found that Trump made greater electoral gains in 2016 in counties with higher levels of Iraq War casualties: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/abs/battlefield-casualties-and-ballotbox-defeat-did-the-bushobama-wars-cost-clinton-the-white-house/4E889EA6F4E606EC4279A06F46E1B59F

Third, on the left side of the political spectrum, it also seems like the hard-left socialist branch, represented by people like Noam Chomsky, likewise benefited by being right about Iraq while establishment Democrats such as our current President were wrong. Thus, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, and while it would take too long to explain I strongly suspect that a lot of Wokeness was a reaction to that. So the left side of the political spectrum would likely look quite a bit different without 9/11 as well.

Fourth, just looking at general trends in feelings about immigration, anti-immigration sentiment was going down before 9/11, they went up a lot in the immediate aftermath, and didn't get back to pre-9/11 levels for several years. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx So clearly it had some impact on the issue directly.

Fifth, one also has to wonder about the impact on the high levels of unauthorized Mexican immigration that were going on at the time. Post-9/11 reforms tightened security at the Southern border a lot. Without that, would illegal immigration have just been a bit higher, or might the increased trade have led to faster Mexican economic growth and ended the great Mexican immigration wave a few years earlier than it did in OTL? Just eyeballing the economic growth graphs, it does seem like Mexico had a bit of a slowdown in the early 2000s, but was that due to 9/11 or due to unrelated factors that would have happened anyway? https://www.google.com/search?q=mexico+gni+per+capita+ppp&ei=CkI-YaymB4To9APBobnQDw&oq=mexico+gni+per+capita+ppp&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMyBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeMgUIABCGAzoHCAAQRxCwA0oECEEYAFDDEFjxEWDQE2gBcAJ4AYABeogByAKSAQMxLjKYAQCgAQHIAQjAAQE&sclient=gws-wiz&ved=0ahUKEwis07vZg_ryAhUENH0KHcFQDvoQ4dUDCA0&uact=5 This is especially important to the immigration debate, because pro-immigration sentiment seems to go up when the Southern border is perceived as secure, and go down when it isn't perceived as secure. The summer 2014 start of the Central American migrant crisis caused a drop of support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants of: 5% among the general electorate, 10% among Republicans, and 15% among Tea Party Republicans. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/07/16/surge-of-central-american-children-roils-u-s-immigration-debate/ This is another issue that is really hard to predict.

Sixth, there's a lot of evidence that post-9/11 reforms greatly increased the militarization of local police. The probable impact of this on recent political events in this country should be obvious.

Bottom line, 9/11 and the ensuing wars clearly had a huge impact on US politics, and I think that today's politics would probably be very different, and quite possibly even unrecognizable, in a world in which 9/11 never happened.

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Sep 12, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Noah writes: "And “free” societies like the U.S. and Europe were always going to use the tools of digital surveillance as the inevitable counter to the problem of non-state terrorism."

What are a couple, or so, things that need to change for those quotation marks around "free" to come off?

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I think another key aspect of the generational ‘divide’ is between those born under the belief of Pax Americana (accurate or not), and those who came after who now view that mindset as largely anachronistic.

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There is a large chunk of Muslim population which still supports religious conservatism and we really do not know when that turns into fanaticism. Also countries like Turkey and Pakistan are continuously talking about the concept of "Riasat-e-medina" which is referenced to in Quran. I don't think these countries are subscribing to the western notion or concepts of freedom and progress. Infact they are just making the Islamic concepts more palatable to the western "thinkers" by shrouding them with acceptable western terminologies. We are still waiting for the prosperous Muslim countries to make it easy for people of other faiths to practice their religion. Several Gulf countries are have higher per capital GDP than the western countries and yet the concept of religious freedom in those countries are sacrilege. I am sorry but don't buy into your argument that economic progress will mean that people will also adopt different "ideas" than what they hold or have held with regards to other spheres of life. Unless you measure the progressive nature with a different yardstick I doubt that much is coming in these places.

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Made it through "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden" this week, along with "The Afghanistan Papers" and "The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State." Saw the new 9/11 Netflix series. I can recommend all of them if anyone's interested.

It occurred to me that, although he achieved everything beyond his wildest dreams, the O-man still may not have grasped that religious rigidity was the very thing holding his group back. He never had a chance.

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In what Islamic states has McWorld defeated Jihad? Iraq was secularist in 2001, now its an Islamic-leaning weak democracy. Iran has pretty much crushed any institutional influence from secularists. Saudi Arabia has liberalized a bit, but the clerics are still very solidly in control. Pakistan and Indonesia have slid to greater Islamist influence. Libya is a mess, but Islamist had next to no power in 2001 and now they're a substantial power bloc. The only places that have liberalized I can think of are Malaysia and some of the Gulf ministates, and in neither case has the move been decisive; probably less of a shift than the opposite direction shifts in the far larger and more consequential Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia.

AFAICT the battle is still very much on in the Islamic world and Jihad has something of the upper hand at present. The main change is that some of the local opponents to Islamism like China, India, and Israel have become much more vociferously opposed, and not in a good way. If anything, I expect their agitation to accelerate Islamism other than in areas they control, and maybe even there (Palestine says hi!)

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"In other words, McWorld defeated Jihad — and it was never really a contest — while America largely thrashed around and inserted chaos and destruction into that process."

"The U.S. won the War on (Islamist) Terror the old-fashioned way: By being an effective state and outfighting the enemy. I know people don’t like hearing that the U.S. is an effective state, but it is. We rolled up terrorist financing networks, infiltrated and disrupted terrorist organizations online, and built a massive security state."

These seem like contradictory positions.

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9/11 may be talked out, but the failed effort in Afghanistan and the blind rush to Iraq that made both such disasters are not behind us. I was reminded of this by seeing "Shock and Awe" on Prime just now. The role of the Times in this national gaslighting was appalling.

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"What happened, as I see it, was that globalization, economic development, and the internet brought many Muslim societies into closer contact with Europe, America and other societies around the globe. Foreign ideas and opportunities for consumption caused friction within those societies, some of which spilled over into friction between those societies and other countries. It was this latter spillover that we perceived as the “War on Terror”, but in fact this was largely a sideshow compared to the upheavals that were happening within the Muslim world. And now both those upheavals and their international sequelae are dying down, because the process of rapid cultural modernization is now clearly ascendant, and the conservative backlash within Muslim societies has mostly been crushed or forced to acknowledge the inevitable. In other words, McWorld defeated Jihad — and it was never really a contest — while America largely thrashed around and inserted chaos and destruction into that process. "

I've thought about this a lot since I first read this post, and I'm starting to wonder: what if what's happening now is happening not because McWorld won, but *because* it's getting weaker?

I think we can all agree that the political victories of right wing populists such as Orban and Trump and Duda have at least slowed down the progress of McWorld. What if would-be Islamic radicals the world over saw this and took this as a sign that McWorld isn't some kind of unstoppable juggernaut that can only be stopped by a violent worldwide revolution, but can instead be defeated by local efforts, just as it has in Hungary, Poland, etc.? If Hungary can have Christian Conservatism In One Country, then why not try to build Sharia In One Country?

But you might ask, isn't Saudi Arabia getting less strict than it was a decade ago? Doesn't Taliban rule in Afghanistan seem a lot less strict now than it was in the 90s? Like you said, don't they seem less like medieval LARPers and more like the sort of religious conservatives that we see in the West? Yes, but that's not just consistent with, but actually anticipated by this theory. If McWorld is an unstoppable virus that infects and converts everything that it touches, then maybe the only alternative is to ban all Western pop culture, have secret police patrol malls watching for teenage boys trying to toss to teenage girls crumpled up papers with their cell phone numbers (yes, that was a real thing: https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/jihad-hyperpanda/ ), and otherwise build a giant wall and constantly patrol it to plug any leaks. But if McWorld isn't so unstoppable after all, then you don't need to be nearly as repressive to keep it at bay.

And on the flipside, in Muslim countries that were more secular a decade ago such as Turkey, if it becomes apparent that the aforementioned countries led by right wing populists can deviate from the McWorld liberal democracy "consensus" in major ways without suffering the crippling international isolation experienced by Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the 90s, then why not follow their example?

Matt Yglesias likes to point out that Hungary is well behind the "globalist" West economically, and he's probably right that this isn't a coincidence. But it's *far* ahead of the vast majority of the Muslim world, so it's not hard to see why it might seem like an attractive option over there.

And in such a scenario it's not hard to see why this might make Muslims gradually seem like less of a threat to right wingers in the West. If they're willing to do their own thing in their own countries over there, and in any case what they desire isn't actually that far off from what you want for your own society, then what's the problem? Which is why you see right wing online spaces that were rabidly anti-Islam just a few years ago now "ironically" sharing Taliban memes.

It's just a theory, but I think it fits pretty well with the available evidence.

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Also, not mutually exclusive from the above, I've wondered for a while if one of the reasons why Al Qaeda doesn't attack the West so much nowadays is because they currently see the Iran-led Axis of Resistance as a greater threat, and most of their recent attacks just get reported as additional war casualties in Syria, Yemen, etc. No idea how you would go about checking whether or not this is true.

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As to the question of whether this means that Bin Laden won or lost his war? Well, the global Islamic Caliphate that he dreamed of doesn't seem to be any closer to fruition, and he certainly didn't intend for much of his home region of the Middle East to end up dominated by a rising Shiite New Persian Empire, or for much of the rest of the Muslim World to fall under the influence of other powers such as Russia, China, and Pakistan. So while the American Empire is weaker on the global stage than it was 20 years ago in part due to his actions, I wouldn't say that he won. But this outcome is also pretty far from what the Neoconservatives and Liberal Hawks that launched the Global War On Terror had in mind 20 years ago...

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Re "appeasement of China": unlike Al Qaeda, China wants - and is achieving - national development with "common prosperity" regardless of ethnicity or religion. And speaking of Islamic terrorism, China had to deal with it in Xinjiang.

[And how will the US achieve some "common prosperity", given its crap NAIRU economic orthodoxy which will always negatively affect the most disadvantaged, eg, blacks).

Anyway, there is no "appeasement" going on; Biden called Xi the other day to confirm the competition between the two systems should not devolve into conflict (....smart thinking, in the age of MAD.....), and China has been forced to develop its own home-grown technology in chips, space technology and AI, as a result of US paranoia about losing global hegemony to China (which the US will lose in any case).

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Wasn't one of those six ISIS attacks on US soil a dude attacking an art exhibit in Texas, where he somehow forgot that he was in Texas meaning the odds of his victims shooting back were extremely high, and his attack ending in the only person dead being himself? Lol

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I'm a little surprised you didn't touch on the $20 trillion spent to militarize the USA post 9/11 in reaction to "terrorists" and what efforts you would take to demilitarize. Especially when you look specifically at Afghanistan, we spent $2.3 trillion to "nation-build" and left the Afghan people in worse shape than when we arrived. Where did all that money go?

I'm also with the over three thousand architects and engineers who aren't buying the government's explanation of how two aluminum planes brought down three concrete and steel buildings. We are supposed to be a scientific society, but we didn't follow the science on 9/11/2001 or after.

Lastly, we've got a problem with war criminals, including the last two drone strikes when leaving Afghanistan. Neither one hit fleeing or planning terrorists. They both hit families.

We also have to war criminals pointed out by Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning in 2011 and a POTUS and VP (along with all their top administrators) who lied to the world. We also have the military brass who lied about their successful venture over the past 20 years.

I don't think we can heal until all those who committed crimes are brought to justice, and we release Julian Assange from the hell we've put him through for doing award-winning journalism. Otherwise, it's a wound that won't heal. Of course, we can do the American white-washing and denialism, but that is so 17th-20th century bullcrap.

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Great post, and I sincerely hope your optimism is warranted. The implication that the internet and globalization will make repressive regimes less tenable still needs to deal with the reality that is North Korea. Maybe the internet never got there so they've been able to hang on? China seems to be making moves to try and put the internet genie back in the bottle, we'll see if that works.

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Oregon Trail generation? Is this a Portlandia reference?

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"It was a nasty, destructive, stupid interregnum between the 20th century and the 21st."

Indeed - the pointless, farcical side show between Cold Wars I and II.

The real engine of history begins to churn yet again -- great power competition.

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