The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in which I highlight how prominent left-wing intellectuals assessed 9/11.
—Jeremy Varon
For a swath of dissenting opinion, the 9/11 attacks were a prompt to think also about American violence. Their relation was the key to understanding 9/11 and how the United States might best respond. The uneven effort spanned whole orders of analysis, from geopolitics to philosophy. It yielded penetrating insights but also tenuously severe judgments.
For some on the political left, 9/11 delivered a blow to an illusory American innocence, rooted in the county’s myth of exceptionalism. That myth holds that America was established through its voluntary separation from a European world burdened by sectarian strife, persecution, and the dead weight of tradition. In that separation the country enjoyed the blessings of both safety and unequaled virtue, serving as a beacon to the world. (As the myth evolved, taints like slavery could be redeemed through episodes of moral regeneration within a steady arc of progress.) In more modern times, Pearl Harbor, participation in another world war, Cold War entanglements, and the schisms of the 1960s challenged American innocence. But it was substantially reborn in a post–Cold War world in which US security and supremacy, enhanced by a globally expanding capitalism, went largely unchallenged.
September 11 changed all that. Harper’s Magazine publisher John MacArthur wrote that “‘the City Upon The Hill’” imagined by the Puritans was “supposed to be an impregnable citadel of Christian morality, once protected by God and now by the atomic bomb. Thousands of innocent people died on Tuesday in part because of a naive belief in that moral impregnability.” “Our Puritan citadel,” he concluded, is “badly cracked. I hope our false belief in our own essential goodness has cracked as well.” The British novelist and essayist Martin Amis saw the message of September 11 as this: “America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. United Airlines Flight 175 was an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile aimed at her innocence.”
Both commentaries suggest that 9/11 should have led to a redemptive American reckoning. The country now knew something of the devastation felt in much of the world. Its conceit of virtue had suffered too in an act of payback for the military and economic domination underwriting its prestige. The evil that America must now fight was not only that of an alien enemy but also its own.