Austin Sarat ScheerPost
Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, 20001, the United States suffered a tragic, surprise attack from the Afghanistan-based terrorist group, Al-Qaeda. Their coordinated efforts caused devastating losses in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in the fields of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and left 2,977 people dead.
At the time, America was still recovering from the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, which was decided only after the Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida. But in many other ways, this country was riding high.
Since then, we have squandered our many economic, social, and geopolitical advantages. Americans now live in a country that is, by almost every measure, weaker, more divided, and on a downward trajectory than it was the day we watched the Twin Towers crumble and disappear from the New York skyline.
Anniversaries of national tragedies ought to be occasions for remembering and mourning our losses, but also rallying and uniting the nation. Recall what President Lyndon Johnson said in 1966, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; “Today we are once again called upon to stand in the cause of freedom and justice….that day in 1941 kindled in the hearts of all Americans a bright light of courage rallying them to supreme effort and sacrifice, and sustaining them throughout the terrible, long ordeal until final victory.”
Even in the midst of the Vietnam War, which brought its own period of national division, those words still captured the reality of America’s self-conception. Even then, we still seemed to be an exceptional nation, what Ronald Reagan would later call a “shining city on a hill.”
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, such words ring hollow for many Americans, and
sadly, there is no sign that anyone has a clear plan to reverse the trend of national decline. But one thing is clear: The first step on the road to healing is for political leaders to level with the American people about what has happened here since 9/11.
They should not do so in the spirit of partisan rancor, but rather in the recognition that the road to recovery begins by acknowledging the condition from which one is trying to recover.
That’s why all of President Trump’s talk about the “golden age” in which he says Americans now live, rings hollow for millions of his fellow citizens.
The Washington Post offers one example of this mismatch.
In a story published on September 6, the Post describes “A young father (who) lost faith in his country’s defining idea and began to share his frustrations on social media. He found an eager audience.” It quotes thirty-four-year-old Wilton Lemieux of Westwego, Louisiana, who says, “‘Why are they lying to the American public?’”
“‘They,’” the Post explains, “were his shorthand for politicians, corporate suits and tech bros — the elites he viewed as too preoccupied with artificial intelligence and a White House ballroom and a war that never made sense to him while everyone he knew struggled with the rising cost of survival.”
To Wilton, the president’s claim that, “‘We never had the American Dream like we have it right now,’ …sounded… like a sales pitch or a delusion or both.” His views have gone viral, as millions of others join him in lamenting that the American Dream is nothing more than “an illusion of something better that never is going to come.”
A February 2026 Gallup Poll found that “The percentage of U.S. adults who anticipate high-quality lives in five years declined to 59.2% in 2025, the lowest level since measurement began nearly two decades ago. Since 2020, future life ratings have fallen a total of 9.1 percentage points, projecting to an estimated 24.5 million fewer people who are optimistic about the future now versus then.”
Gallup notes that “the percentage of American adults who rate both their current and future lives high enough to be classified as ‘thriving’ dropped to 48.0%, down over 11 points from the 59.2% high measured in June 2021.”
Go back to 2000, and you get a sense of the magnitude of the change in public sentiments that has occurred over the past quarter-century. At that time, Americans were “near(ly) unanimous in their confidence that life will get better for themselves, their families, and the country as a whole.”
They were optimistic in spite of the fact that they believed that the country would likely suffer both a major terrorist attack and a public health emergency worse than the AIDS epidemic then raging in the United States.
They had reason to be.
Recall that in 2000, we were in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history, unemployment was low, as were crime rates, which had fallen to their lowest levels in a quarter-century. And though it is hard to believe, the federal government ran back-to-back budget surpluses.
And in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, “Public trust (in government) reached a three-decade high….” when 60% of the American people said they trusted the government in Washington “to do what is right just about always/most of the time.”
Today, that figure is just 17%.
At 8:30 pm on September 11, 2001, when President George W Bush addressed the nation he said: “A great people has been moved to defend a great nation. Terror attacks you can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings but they cannot touch the foundation of America… America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity in the world and no one will keep that light from shining.”
Alas, twenty-five years later, that light has dimmed. To paraphrase Thomas Paine, a hero of the American Revolution, we now live in “times that try men’s souls.” Our commitment to freedom and democracy is being put to the test.
As we mark the anniversary of 9/11, people who love this country would be well advised to heed to advice of Freedom House, a well-known human rights and democracy organization. “To reignite the promise of US democracy and safeguard their freedoms,” it argues, “Americans must rise above partisan divisions, renew their shared commitment to fundamental democratic principles, and bolster rules and structures that maximize the common good.”
The Atlantic’s George Packer rightly reminds us that the real lesson of 9/11 (as well as the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic) is that “the alternative to solidarity is death.”
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others
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