Most Americans learning history at a young age grow up believing three things:First, that America is on the side of the good guys.Second, that the bad guys often perceive all the arguing and disarray and indulgence that is interwoven with freedom as a form of weakness — and thereby dangerously underestimate American power and resolve.And third, that the good guys always win in the end.Yes, yes, of course — as one gets older and understands the path more deeply, it is clear how much the American story is filled with contradiction, complexity, contingency. Most honest people acknowledge that there have been plenty of occasions when American power was not on the side of the good guys, when this power did not achieve its aims, and that in a large and diverse planet the American perspective is not always going to prevail.Yet on a day — a quarter-century after the 9/11 attacks — when many people are reflecting on one of the most searing imprints on the American experience, it is worth acknowledging how much of the narrative we grew up believing in grade school and high school is grounded in genuine history.Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, released last year ahead of our 250th birthday, was a riveting reminder of how tenuous the country’s founding was. Even afterward, many European elites did not expect democratic self-governance to last — especially in a country riven by slavery — and at key junctures leading up to and culminating in the Civil War it looked likely the skeptics would be right. Marx thought capitalist societies would be destroyed by internal contradictions, and it took the modern social state — and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States — to prove him wrong. In the 20th century, leaders of totalitarian states from Germany to Japan to the Soviet Union thought the United States was too complacent, too disengaged from the world, too enthralled with material comforts and middle-brow consumer culture to fight and win a global clash of civilizations.In each instance, however, after a lumbering and uneven start, the good guys won in the end. Adversaries fatally misunderstood American character.How does this foundational American narrative hold up in the case of the violent pivot history took 25 years ago today?If 9/11 is the modern equivalent of Pearl Harbor, we are now living through the equivalent of 1966. By then, World War II was emphatically… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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