Pride

The World Trade Center.

I never got that view.

Nearly everyone remembers where they were when the first plane hit. Twenty-five years later, September 11 looks like something else to me.

A dividing line.

America changed that morning. But another change was already underway and became clearer in the years that followed. There was an America before September 11 that could acknowledge its mistakes and still believe the country was, on balance, a force for good. Even exceptional.

That distinction now seems almost quaint.

Much of our politics begins from suspicion. The left and right tell different stories about what went wrong, but listen long enough and you hear the same refrain: the institutions are corrupt, the system is rigged, the elites sold us out, the country isn’t what we were told it was.

Different complaints. Same loss of confidence.

It is tempting to date the change to Trump, Obama, the financial crisis or the wars after September 11. But this week I came across something written only weeks after the attacks. It reads less like a reaction to September 11 than a preview of the next quarter-century.

Mary Beard is one of the world’s best-known classical historians. My daughters read and admired her in high school.

Then this week I discovered what Beard had written about September 11.

In the London Review of Books that October, Beard wrote that after the initial shock came the view that, however tactfully one expressed it, the United States “had it coming.” She called America a “world bully.”

That isn’t just criticism of American policy. It rests on a judgment about America.

Compared with what?

Consider the great powers and movements that have projected force beyond their own territory over the past century: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, extremist Islamism, today’s China and the United States.

They are not morally equivalent.

Nazi Germany sought racial empire and extermination. The Soviet Union imposed dictatorship across Eastern Europe and sent in tanks when countries tried to escape it. Extremist Islamist movements have slaughtered civilians in pursuit of theocratic rule. China is an authoritarian state that represses dissent, has subjected Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities to mass detention and other serious abuses, extends its economic influence abroad and is rapidly building the capacity to project military power far beyond its borders.

America’s record is not spotless. We have invaded countries, supported dictators and sometimes violated our own principles in the belief that doing so would advance them. Vietnam belongs in that story. So do some American interventions during the Cold War.

Judge them. But judge the alternatives too.

The United States crossed an ocean to help defeat Nazi Germany, then helped rebuild Germany and Japan rather than subjugate them. It spent four decades confronting the Soviet Union until an empire that had swallowed half of Europe collapsed. Countries sought American protection. Millions of people sought an American life.

That record is not perfect. It is different.

And in the great contests of the past century, America was on the right side.

We once seemed more comfortable saying that. Since September 11, we have become much less so.

Gallup has asked Americans about national pride since 2001. Before September 11, 87 percent said they were extremely or very proud to be American. Today it is 53 percent. Among Democrats, 27 percent.

The right has found its own way to the same problem. Republicans remain much more likely to express pride in America, but their confidence in many American institutions increasingly depends on who controls them. The presidency, the courts, intelligence agencies, universities: confidence rises and falls with whose side appears to be in charge.

If you only trust an institution when your side controls it, you don’t really trust the institution. You trust your side.

A republic cannot work for long when one side increasingly thinks the country unworthy and the other thinks its institutions legitimate only when its side is winning.

Pride matters because criticism requires confidence. You have to believe something is worth fixing before you bother to fix it.

For generations, America tolerated Jim Crow in direct contradiction of its promise of equality. Americans confronted that contradiction through protest, litigation, elections, courts and Congress. The same constitutional system that had failed to deliver its promise became the means of making that promise more real.

Nor has self-correction been America’s only strength. We helped defeat fascism, reached the moon, and built companies and universities that draw ambitious people from almost everywhere on earth.

And there is mobility.

Before my first professional job, I worked my way through school doing everything from construction to retail. One job paid $1.20 an hour plus commission. In the same working life, I became the managing partner of the London office of one of the world’s largest law firms and served on its management committee.

That proves no economic theorem. But I have lived outside America long enough, and read enough history, to know that a country where such a journey is possible is not ordinary.

Somewhere along the way, we allowed “exceptional” and “perfect” to become synonyms — and then, having proved America was not perfect, concluded it could not be exceptional.

The distinction matters more to me now because I have a 12-year-old son.

Thomas should learn about Jim Crow, Vietnam and the mistakes we made after September 11. He should know that governments fail and that Americans have sometimes violated the principles they professed, even while claiming to advance them.

I don’t want his patriotism to depend on hiding history from him. I want him to know enough history to judge America fairly — against its own ideals, but also against the world as it actually exists.

That is what I miss when I think about September 11 now. Not the flags or Congress singing on the Capitol steps. Not even the unity that followed the attacks.

I miss the confidence beneath it: that for all our arguments and mistakes, we had inherited something worth defending, improving and handing on.

The answer to naïve pride was never shame. It was mature pride: knowing what we inherited, judging where we fell short and having enough confidence to make it better.

A country that loses faith in its ability to correct itself eventually stops repairing its institutions and starts tearing them down.

We should be careful what we tear down.

Our children will inherit what remains.

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Josh Dambacher is a fifth-generation Kansan who attended public schools in Kansas, is on the Board of Literacy Partners, and writes The Plains Ledger.

— J.D.