Remembering the Other 9/11

The 1945 surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri marked the end of formal combat in World War II but the rivalry between liberal democracy and totalitarianism which spawned the war barely paused. The 20^th century was an era of unrelenting global war.

That long and bloody ideological struggle ended, to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot, “not with a bang, but a whimper.” Over a series of years in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, the Chinese gradually abandoned Maoism. The Soviets retreated from Eastern Europe before crumpling into a rusty wad. Tinpot dictators from the Philippines to Latin America fled their palaces in terror abandoning gold-plated pistols, exotic animals, and vast collections of shoes.

By the early ‘90’s it was apparent that liberal democracy was alone in the world as a source of political legitimacy. There is no single date or event that officially marks the achievement. It just happened, like the way you wake up one morning and discover that somewhere along the line you got old.

As a nation and a culture, we have yet to move beyond the assumptions of the War Century. The incomplete nature of the Second World War and the anti-climactic end of the global struggle that followed helps explain the strange aimlessness that dominates our politics now.

On September 11 President George Bush gave one of the most insightful Presidential addresses of our lifetimes. That speech might have been our historical turning point, the marker we crave that says ‘before this moment the world worked this way, and afterward things were different.’ However, hardly anyone remembers his speech because it didn’t happen on that September 11th and it wasn’t delivered by that George Bush.

In 1990, as the nation braced for the campaign to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait, George Bush, Sr. described the remarkable global transformation we were experiencing.

We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment…A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak…how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.

From his vantage point on the edge of such a frightening conflict, President Bush recognized that the dynamics of global politics had changed. His speech was the bookend to an address given fifty years before as Britain stood alone in 1940 against the Nazis. Winston Churchill in that dark moment delivered a warning coupled with a promise:

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age…

President Bush’s speech on September 11, 1990, signaled our arrival on Churchill’s “sunlit uplands.” At long last, after so much blood sacrifice, we were standing on that promised ground, heirs to a world marked by rising freedom, prosperity, and rule of law that so many had dreamed of building.

Bush’s speech could have inspired us to rub our eyes and look around, recognizing the beautiful new opportunities and fresh problems that surrounded us. We could have seized the chance to emerge from our Cold War defensive crouch, embracing a new, post-war order at home that would bring the freedom and prosperity of this new world to more people than ever before.

That is not what happened.

Bush entered the ’92 next election cycle as the presumed winner. An SNL skit from late 1991 parodied the attitude among Democrats. Titled, The Race to Avoid Being the Guy Who Loses to George Bush, it featured all of the major figures in the Democratic Party explaining why none of them should be asked to challenge the President. All of the Democratic Party’s heavies declined to run, which should have cleared the field for Bush.

President Bush had guided the nation through a transformational victory and pointed the way to a new, freer, more prosperous global order. Domestically, under the influence of men like Jack Kemp he was initiating a transition away from the old social welfare system into something that would eventually be branded “the Ownership Society.”

Unprecedented new trade agreements were being forged to help us lead the way into a global economy based on expertise and commerce rather than raw toil. After years of pressure from a young Democratic Senator named Al Gore, George Bush in 1991 signed an act that converted a Cold War military computer network into a public “information superhighway.” New cooperation was opening with Asian and Eastern European countries that had once been closed to mass trade.

Unfortunately, a rebellion was underway inside the Republican Party fueled by angst over the implications of a new global capitalism. A vision of freedom that Republicans had barely dared to imagine was becoming a reality in the world. Yet a new Republican Party, animated by fresh energy from the South, was turning fiercely against that vision, embracing a religious-themed, identity-driven populism virulently hostile to global capitalism.

Bush survived the internal Republican resistance, but in the fall, the Bush campaign was further undermined by the candidacy of an eccentric billionaire. Ross Perot played on the unease of a nation on the edge of an unknown “New World Order.” His erratic campaign was enough to throw the election to the Democrats’ default candidate. Bush lost the election to a little known southern Governor named Bill Clinton who prevailed with only 43% of the vote.

Instead of embracing the new world order, the nation would begin a long drift into aimless malaise.

Few people in either party took seriously the dangers presented by the increasingly bizarre collection of people concentrating power in traditional Republican institutions. The public generally assumed that the extremists, if left alone, would simply burn themselves out. Besides, with all the major matters of interest more or less settled, there didn’t seem to be much harm these people could do.

The Republican Party, the pragmatic bastion of fiscally sound problem-solvers has devolved into a howling freakshow. There seems to be no conspiracy theory too outlandish, no fear too unrealistic to animate its rabid base.

Yet the fact remains that we won the long, bloody wars of the 20^th century. Despite the lost opportunities of the past few years, the world at large is vastly freer, wealthier, and friendlier to markets than it has ever been.

Obama, the President Republicans so love to hate, has governed in a manner more conservative than Nixon. No major national Democratic figure since Mondale has dared to endorse the 20^th century leftist vision that once gave America 70% top marginal tax rates and ubiquitous union membership.

Much work remains to build the next American Century, but the most intimidating battles have already been fought and won. Faced with the relief of victory, the toll of decades of trauma now seems to be bubbling out of us. Instead of seizing our new opportunities, we are breaking down into collective hysterics. On the “broad sunlit uplands” promised to us by Winston Churchill we are building bunkers stuffed with preserved food, ammo, and gold coins.

We are allowing ourselves to be defined by the wrong September 11^th. We could have been, and could still become the heirs of George H.W. Bush’s forward-looking declaration of victory, the fulfillment of Winston Churchill’s promise of a bright new age. To do so will require courage and vision we have yet to demonstrate.

Republicans can build a vision for the future based on freedom and prosperity, but not while we cling to the politics of fear. The battle between Marxism and Capitalism is over. Our challenge is preserving the relevance of public life in an environment far too dynamic for 20^th century “big government” to survive. Questions with no certain answers surround us. Ideological rigidity cannot guide us through these problems. We need a practical willingness to face facts and adapt solutions around our values.

It is time to move beyond the logic of the War Century and reckon with the challenges of our own time. We have to decide which September 11^th will define our future.

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Chris Ladd is a Texan who is now living in the Chicago area.  He is the founder of Building a Better GOP and has served for several years as a Republican Precinct Committeeman in DuPage County, IL, and was active in state and local Republican campaigns in Texas for many years. (Email: chrladd AT gmail DOT com)