What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity
Joseph Margulies - Yale University Press, 2013
Beautifully
written and carefully reasoned, this bold and provocative work upends
the conventional wisdom about the American reaction to crisis. Margulies
demonstrates that for key elements of the post-9/11
landscape—especially support for counterterror policies like torture and
hostility to Islam—American identity is not only darker than it was
before September 11, 2001, but substantially more repressive than it was
immediately after the attacks. These repressive attitudes, Margulies
shows us, have taken hold even as the terrorist threat has diminished
significantly.
Contrary to what is widely imagined, at the moment
of greatest perceived threat, when the fear of another attack “hung
over the country like a shroud,” favorable attitudes toward Muslims and
Islam were at record highs, and the suggestion that America should
torture was denounced in the public square. Only much later did it
become socially acceptable to favor “enhanced interrogation” and exhibit
clear anti-Muslim prejudice. Margulies accounts for this unexpected
turn and explains what it means to the nation’s identity as it moves
beyond 9/11. We express our values in the same language, but that
language can hide profound differences and radical changes in what we
actually believe. “National identity,” he writes, “is not fixed, it is
made.”
