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“Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States”: that sentence began the report of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. Since that terrible morning, 21st century Americans have faced some of the most alarming national security challenges — and the worst sociopolitical strains — since the 1960s and beyond.
Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists destroyed New York’s World Trade Center, slammed a jetliner into the Pentagon and seem to have been prevented from demolishing the U.S. Capitol only by the heroic passengers on United Flight 93. The largest terrorist attacks in U.S. history ended a post-Cold War idyll that lasted from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the collapse of the Twin Towers.
Republicans called the 1990s a “holiday from history” — but after 9/11, history roared back. “The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952, “have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.”
That September morning was the first of a drumbeat of huge, early 21st century events that corroded public trust among America’s increasingly polarized citizenry. After al-Qaeda’s attacks, President George W. Bush stretched the presidency’s writ — and pushed the envelope of legality — to prosecute a war on terrorism, including new surveillance powers and the torture of some al-Qaeda detainees.
Bush fought a war of necessity to oust al-Qaeda’s Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, but he also embarked on a war of choice to topple Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq. “The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program,” Bush said. It was not.
Public trust took another massive hit in 2007: Financial services firms’ risky bets on subprime mortgages sparked a vast financial crisis, pushing American home values down and shoving unemployment up. In the crisis’ wake, Barack Obama made history in 2008 by being elected as the first Black president and, later, with his signature domestic policy achievement, the 2010 Affordable Care Act. As commander-in-chief, Obama ended the Iraq war, ordered the raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and negotiated a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
But Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, purported that America’s first Black president wasn’t even a U.S. citizen. As political scientist Theda Skopcol has noted, migration, polarized media and rising income inequality let populist politicians “stoke fears about who is truly ‘American’ and what kind of nation the United States has been and should be.”
Trump cut taxes, restricted immigration, derided civil rights protesters and excoriated the left. He also declared an “America First” foreign policy that saw the U.S.-forged, post-World War II order as a burden and many U.S. allies as freeloaders. In his first term, Trump ripped up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, wooed Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and helped establish ties between Israel and three Arab states. In 2019, Trump was impeached for strong-arming Ukraine’s leaders to find dirt on his Democratic political rival Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, technological advances — especially the rise of social media — further hypercharged the pace of American life. Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the early 21st century, captured in his 1968 classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” missed the rise of cellphones and overestimated the arrival of commercial space travel — but it did presage tablets that look strikingly like iPads, video calling and artificially intelligent computers.
Even America’s most significant innovations quickly met backlash. Social media giants built echo chambers that divided Americans. Whistleblowers revealed the recklessness of big-tech firms. Members of the digital-native “Anxious Generation” suffered alarming levels of mental illness, with a fifth of Americans aged 12 to 17 suffering “at least one major depressive episode.”
In 2020, the country reeled again — and public trust eroded further — when a terrifying pandemic shut down the planet. By March 2023, when Johns Hopkins University stopped collecting data, the new virus SARS-CoV-2 had killed 1,123,836 Americans.
As America staggered under the pandemic, the electorate ejected Trump. On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying President-elect Biden’s victory. The thwarted insurrection “led to at least seven deaths and caused about $2.7 billion in estimated costs,” according to the Government Accountability Office.
In his interregnum, Biden promised a recovery from COVID-19 at home and renewed U.S. statesmanship abroad. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Biden rallied the democratic world to help Ukraine fight Putin’s imperial aggression. But inflation and foreign upheavals shook Biden’s presidency — including Afghanistan’s swift fall to the Taliban after the U.S. pullout, the October 2023 Hamas terrorist assault on Israel, and the Gaza war.
Four years after 57 senators acquitted Trump for his second impeachment — for “inciting violence” against the government he led — 77,303,569 American voters returned him to the White House. During his first year in office, the federal workforce shrank by more than 10%.
In his second term, Trump was bolder, more unilateral and more interventionist than in his first. His administration declared sweeping tariffs, rattled NATO, scorned the besieged Ukrainians, backed Europe’s rightist populists, hammered Iran’s nuclear facilities, captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and demanded that U.S. ally Denmark surrender its Greenland territory to Trump.
Perhaps most consequential was Trump and tech tycoon Elon Musk’s demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development: A study in the British medical journal The Lancet projected that excess deaths from their USAID cuts could “be 9.4 million” people by 2030, including 2.5 million “children younger than 5 years.”
As America nears the 250th anniversary of its independence, Trump has launched his biggest foreign policy gamble yet, joining Israel in an air war to topple Iran’s theocracy and prevent it from ever acquiring nuclear weapons. But Iran’s increasingly oppressive regime — knowing its back was against the wall — went for broke, closing the vital Strait of Hormuz to spur a global economic crisis and drive up U.S. gas prices. Trump’s botched war of choice proved deeply unpopular, and he settled for a narrow, shaky deal to reopen the now-Iran-dominated strait.
Americans followed these upheavals on their smartphones and tablets, watching the global crisis of democracy and the specter of renewed great-power competition on technological marvels out of “2001.” The arc of the quarter-century might make many divided and demoralized Americans agree with the wry Australian band the Lucksmiths, who sang, “I suppose that I’ll get used to it eventually / But so far, I prefer the 20th century.” Americans could be forgiven for thinking that the first 26 years of the new century had felt like a hundred.
Yet the republic’s founders had forged a constitutional engine brilliantly designed for renewal. In Bill Clinton’s first inaugural, the last president of the 20th century offered an echoing note of hope for the 21st: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”
Warren Bass, a former member of the professional staff of the 9/11 Commission, is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- The article argues that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 shattered a “holiday from history,” ushering in an era of expansive executive power, controversial surveillance and torture practices, and deepening public mistrust of national security institutions.
- The article contends that the Iraq War, launched as a war of choice on faulty claims about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, inflicted lasting damage on government credibility and intensified partisan division over U.S. foreign policy.
- The article argues that the 2007–08 financial crisis, driven by risky subprime mortgage bets, collapsing home values and surging unemployment, reinforced a sense that economic elites and regulators had failed ordinary Americans, further corroding faith in institutions.
- The article notes that Barack Obama’s election and the Affordable Care Act symbolized historic progress on race and healthcare, yet also provoked fierce backlash, including efforts to delegitimize the presidency and bitter fights over the Iran nuclear deal, revealing how reforms could magnify polarization.
- The article contends that Donald Trump harnessed anxieties over migration, identity and inequality, pushed an “America First” agenda that disparaged allies and multilateralism, courted figures such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, restricted immigration, attacked civil rights protesters, and faced impeachment over pressuring Ukraine for political gain.
- The article argues that rapid technological change, especially social media, created echo chambers, empowered reckless corporate behavior and contributed to an “Anxious Generation” suffering high rates of depression, illustrating how innovation can quickly trigger backlash and mental health crises.
- The article describes the COVID-19 pandemic—with more than a million American deaths, economic shutdowns and politicized public health battles—as another seismic shock that weakened trust and helped unseat Trump, culminating in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as a dramatic test of constitutional resilience.
- The article portrays Joe Biden as attempting to restore domestic stability and traditional alliance-based diplomacy, rallying democracies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while being buffeted by inflation, the chaotic fall of Kabul, and new conflict in Israel and Gaza, underscoring a volatile global landscape.
- The article claims that Trump’s return to the White House produced a more unilateral and interventionist second term marked by sweeping tariffs, pressure on NATO, support for European right-wing populists, military actions against Iran and Venezuela, and even demands that Denmark surrender Greenland, projecting an aggressive vision of U.S. power.
- The article criticizes Trump and Elon Musk’s dismantling of USAID, highlighting projections of millions of excess deaths, including young children, as emblematic of a retreat from American-led development that deepens global suffering and moral division.
- The article views Trump’s joint air war with Israel to topple Iran’s theocracy, and Iran’s retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as a high-risk war of choice that fueled economic pain and public opposition, ending only in a fragile deal that left U.S. influence contested.
- The article ultimately suggests that although the first quarter-century of the 21st century has felt like “a hundred” turbulent years, the constitutional system remains a powerful engine for renewal, echoing Bill Clinton’s assertion that what is right with America can still cure what is wrong.
Different views on the topic
- In contrast to the article’s heavy emphasis on recent shocks and technology, a Brookings analysis argues that U.S. polarization has roots that long predate social media, noting that platforms like Facebook and Twitter primarily exacerbate existing divisions rather than cause them outright[8][13].
- Educational materials from Facing History and Ourselves and research summaries from EBSCO stress election rules, campaign finance, gerrymandering, primaries and in-group bias as central drivers of polarization, suggesting that institutional design and psychological dynamics—rather than only 21st-century crises—have pushed politics toward the extremes[9][13][12].
- A University of California, Davis overview and work by a Michigan State University political scientist highlight income inequality, winner-take-all electoral systems, cultural conflicts over immigration and LGBTQ rights, and an emerging “diploma divide” between college-educated Democrats and non–college-educated Republicans as key sources of today’s anger and partisan hostility[10][11][14].
- A Syracuse University analysis contends that many Americans remain closer to the ideological center than the article implies, arguing that misperceptions about how extreme “ordinary” partisans are—combined with media incentives to spotlight the most confrontational voices—play a major role in inflaming animosity across party lines[12][15].
- In contrast to the article’s largely critical portrayal of “America First,” policy papers from the America First Policy Institute and official directives describe the doctrine as a way to prioritize U.S. safety and prosperity, reduce costly nation-building, realign foreign assistance with concrete benefits for Americans, and press allies to contribute more fairly to collective defense[2][4][6].
- A Council on Foreign Relations review of Trump’s foreign-policy milestones presents the doctrine as aiming to rebalance trade, highlight sovereignty and unite partners against terrorism, arguing that these moves reflect a strategic vision focused on burden-sharing and economic security rather than disruption alone[3][7].
- At the same time, commentary from Kenyon College and Brookings warns that “America First” risks undermining the post-1945 liberal international order, eroding trust among allies, privileging transactional deals over shared norms and edging the world toward a system governed more by fear and raw power than by rules[1][5].
- On youth mental health, a widely noted debate between experts such as Jonathan Haidt and Candice Odgers underscores disagreement about the role of social media, with one side arguing that platforms directly harm teens on an “industrial scale” through harassment and exploitation, and the other emphasizing correlation and the importance of preexisting vulnerabilities and offline stresses[16][17][22].
- Public health guidance from the U.S. Surgeon General, Johns Hopkins Medicine and the American Academy of Family Physicians frames social media as a “double-edged sword,” acknowledging benefits such as connection and information access while warning that excessive use, harmful content and algorithm-driven social comparison can contribute to depression, anxiety, sleep disruption and suicidal ideation among adolescents[19][20][21].
- Pew Research Center surveys show that many parents now view social media as the single biggest negative influence on teen mental health, whereas teens themselves cite a mix of factors—including platforms, bullying and broader social pressures—indicating a more multifaceted crisis than the article’s focus on “reckless” tech firms alone[18][20].
- Legal and policy responses, including New York City’s lawsuit against major platforms and calls from federal health officials for stronger safety standards, reflect a growing view that regulatory reform and corporate accountability—rather than cultural renewal alone—will be necessary to address both political division and the youth mental health emergency[17][21][19].
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