The cliché is true: September 11, 2001, represents a defining American moment. Generation X and Millennials suddenly had their own day of infamy, just as their parents and grandparents had Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination. 9/11 marked the end of a relatively untroubled time in the US following the 1980 and 90s, and the beginning of a dark turn that continues to this day. Optimism, an enduring feature of the American psyche (rightly or wrongly identified as buncombe by Mencken) suddenly was in short supply.
Lives were lost, along with innocence. But the innocence lost that day had less to do with terrorism or even the threat of terrorism than it did with what we all knew was coming: an exponential rise in the size and scope of the American state. The specter of growing state power frightened even those eager to endorse it, as most Americans were in the days following.
For libertarians 9/11 was especially troubling precisely because of the intense public demand for Congress and the Bush administration to do something. Whether that something was rational, just, or even served American interests was almost beside the point. The people wanted blood, and after the images of bodies jumping from the twin towers who can blame the politicians in DC for obliging them? If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are very few libertarians after terrorist attacks. Our uneasy job was to counsel reason and restraint, even if that meant shouting into a wind tunnel.
The entire US national security apparatus, a trillion-dollar enterprise extending far beyond the Pentagon and alphabet soup intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA, had failed utterly in its ostensible mission. All the airport security, nuclear missiles, air defense command centers, bombers, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, destroyers, spooks, spies, analysts, and supercomputers could not protect a single American from a small group of middle-class Saudi kids with box-cutters and a few hours of Cessna training.
So what should have been a profoundly embarrassing and soul-searching moment for the US national security state became an exercise in chest thumping. War room sessions at the White House made for good TV optics, but humility rather that hubris was in order. The question of what to do could not be answered without understanding what went wrong and what motivated the perpetrators. But not a single federal employee was fired because of 9/11, at least not so far as Senator Rand Paul can tell.
Instead, both Congress and the Bush 43 administration reacted predictably to 9/11 and poured it on: we will spend whatever it takes, do whatever it takes, and go wherever it takes to get the people who did this.
16 years later, the War on Terror™ has yielded hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Americans, Iraqis, and Afghans, ongoing and intractable wars disguised as nation building, the Patriot Act, illegal executive actions, trillions in new federal debt, vastly increased federal surveillance powers, rubber stamped FISA court warrants, TSA at the airports, a useless Department of Homeland Security, overflowing VA hospitals, and increasingly militarized police here at home. More importantly, it has yielded a distressing complacency toward grotesque federal power.
It has not yielded peace, or liberty, or security. But liberty vs. security was never the choice.