Political science, hindsight, and a contrarian take on the 20th anniversary of 9/11
Do I remember where I was and what I was doing when I learned what was happening on 9/11? Of course. Am I going to regale you, the reader, with such remembrances? No. They don't matter. At the time, I was a grad student at Berkeley, and I spent the day with some other grad students and faculty. Among other things, we were uncertain. We were political scientists and soon-to-be political scientists, uncertain about the future of politics. What would happen? What had changed?
The conventional claim at the time was that "everything changed," or some such, and as an analyst looks back, one is supposed to claim that the world transformed.
I'm going to claim otherwise.
The counterfactual. Counter to fact. What if the world had been otherwise? This is how social science addresses the question of causation. We propose a hypothetical counterfactual world in which something is otherwise, examine our hypothetical, examine what is different, and in doing so, assess causation. Usually, we do so through comparisons of multiple cases, observation, experimentation, and so forth, but sometimes through thought experiments.
What if 9/11 had not happened? What if the intelligence agencies had successfully connected the dots, caught the terrorists, stopped it, and that Tuesday had been just another day that ends in -y, as the saying goes?
For a set of people, the world would have been very different. The thousands who died, obviously. Yet I'm a numbers person. We see more deaths from COVID every few days than on 9/11, and that's not counting all of the conventional mortality figures.
Right now, I'm not sympathetic to the current deaths. They should have gotten their shots. I am sympathetic to the people who aren't getting needed treatment because these suckers, fools and belligerently self-destructive ideologues in the negative sense of the term are taking up hospital resources. Should we kick the unvaccinated out of hospitals? Have vaccine passports for hospitals, and apply the rule to patients? As I noted a while back, it's "rationing" either way. Let's just let that question sit there, keeping in mind that I have less than zero sympathy for any unvaccinated person getting COVID right now.
The people who died before they had a chance at a vaccine? Different story, and there were a lot of them. And there still are, in countries who don't have access to vaccines.
The people who died on 9/11? Yeah, thousands died, but it was about the scale of the event as one event, combined with the uncertainty it induced. And... the fear. "Terrorism" is about fear. Not about empathy, fear.
The fight-or-flight response, though, is mostly short-lived.
Consequences? The war in Afghanistan will jump to the forefront. That would not have happened. Did that impact your daily life? If you weren't in the military, probably not, and with an all-volunteer military, the impact on the daily lives of Americans was quite minimal.
Iraq. Yeah, so, um... Saddam Hussein had what we call, in technical, political science terms, "fuck-all" to do with 9/11, but Bush and Cheney just kinda wanted a new war there, so some crazy shit happened and we invaded again, and oopsies! That old intelligence about chemical and biological weapons? Yeah, those stockpiles had all degraded, and Sade was playing a shell game. Act all shifty, and make it look like there are stockpiles, so that the Shiites don't revolt out of fear of gas attacks 'n stuff, but without any physical evidence of stockpiles, he wouldn't get toppled by us, right? Right?! Oops. Yeahno.
But that wouldn't have happened without 9/11, and the dumbshits of the American public thought that little Hussy in Iraq was the guy behind 9/11 because they can't tell one Middle Easterner from another. Racist fuckwits.
Anyway, that wouldn't have happened.
Did that affect you? Same issue as Afghanistan. If you didn't serve, probably not. Just being blunt here, because that's what I do.
Let's turn things homeward-bound. The 2002 midterm election was weird. There's a thing in electoral politics called the rally 'round the flag effect. In times of crisis and disaster, conditional on elite consensus, the president's approval rating goes up. That happened for George W. Bush. Twice. He got a big, ole' bump on 9/11, and his approval rating soared up past the 90% mark. Then, he got a lesser bump after invading Iraq, but the post-9/11 bump had an impact on the 2002 midterm election. Midterm elections are normally subject to something like a surge-and-decline thing. There is actually a lot of back-and-forth in political science about the nature of this, but the short version is that usually, whichever party wins the presidential election picks up seats in Congress, and then loses seats in the next midterm. Winning seats in a midterm? Um... no. To do that, you need something really fuckin' weird. The Democrats picked up some seats in '98 when the GOP was stupid enough to impeach Clinton over Lewinsky, which was not considered to be appropriate grounds for impeachment. And in 2002, when Bush's approval was still sky-high, so to speak, the GOP picked up seats. That wouldn't have happened without 9/11.
Lasting effects? Um... Uh...
OK, so if I ask you about how 9/11 has changed the fabric of society, or something, maybe you'll say something about air travel. How often do you fly? 13% have never even been on a plane. Flying, for most people, is a rare thing. What is the real effect of the post-9/11 rules? Well, kids used to be allowed in the cockpit to see the gizmos and all that. That was before the barricading of the door. Um... you used to be able to wait at the gate to pick up your loved ones and friends, instead of at the baggage claim, before they required a boarding pass to go through security. The real hassles-- stupid as they are-- are the shoes and liquids. The shoe thing comes from Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. That dumbass who tried, and failed to stick explosives into his shoes and light them on fire on the plane. Related to 9/11 in a way, but a separate thing. He was just an understudy, stumbling onto the stage, and now we all have to take off our shoes. The liquid thing? Someone got wind, in broken form, of a "plan" to smuggle liquid explosives onto the plane, in binary form. Now this is really stupid. Talk to a chemist about what it actually takes to combine the components of liquid explosives outside a lab. This would not work. But now we can't take regular sized toothpaste, much less water bottles, through security.
Oh, and remember that TSA fails between 70 and 95% of their tests in finding weapons. They'll stop you from carrying a water bottle onto a plane, but they won't find a weapon. This is called "security theater." They suck. They are worthless and stupid.
I keep expecting terrorists to "leak" a plan to smuggle explosives in suppositories just to see if they can make us subject ourselves to body cavity searches.
But anyway, how much any of this affects you depends on the frequency with which you fly. Which, for most people, is "rarely."
And really, comparatively, is it a bigger or smaller change than the changes to flying imposed by COVID?
Which is kind of where I'm going here. The question of comparison.
On 9/12/01, we did not know what the then-future-now-past would hold. We know now. We did not know then. In principle, it could have been the first attack in a series of attacks, fundamentally changing life in the world. Or... maybe they shot their wad. They shot their wad. Yeah, holy shit it was scary, but that was what they had. They were the one-hit-wonders of terrorism, and everything after that has been the Macarena band singing variations of the Macarena again, trying desperately for attention, and why the fuck do I remember the Macarena? Al Gore. Look it up. Anyway, this all means that everything that has changed since 9/11 has been a change we imposed on ourselves. And even then...
June 29, 2007.
Ring a bell? Introduction of the iPhone. The date will not go down in history in the same way because we record history in terms of wars and treaties and kings and presidents and that's just us.
Which has had a bigger effect on your life? Keeping in mind that even if the device you use is not an "iPhone," it's a fucking ripoff of an iPhone? I'm talkin' daily life here. Good, bad, ugly, the whole shebang. I have some Luddite tendencies, so I am happy to expound upon the damage done by the proliferation of such devices, but there was a time when the oldsters complained about how chess would corrupt the youth because it would promote antisocial thinking, obsession with war, and all that, so fuck me and people like me. We've been wrong about so much. Whatever.
Is the iPhone insufficient to make my case? What do I need to add? By posing that question, have you already filled in a few things to make the case for me?
So here's the thing. On 9/12/01, we did not know what effect the attacks would have. The drama of the moment made us ponder one tail. The "this changes everything" tail. Were there changes? Sure. We can see them. Hindsight is like that. Yet from the perspective of daily life in America, riddle me this. Alternate Universe 1) No 9/11, but the iPhone is introduced on schedule. Alternate Universe 2) 9/11 happens on schedule, but neither the iPhone, nor anything like it makes it to the market.
Which America is more different from America today?
Game this out. No smartphones. Not just your daily life. Think about the social structure. Think about what they have done to social media. Social media and politics. Think this through. Really think this through. Think about the last four years. Think about the proliferation of lies and bullshit when everyone is on their fucking phones, 24/7.
9/11 changed everything? No. Could it have? Yeah, but it didn't. Steve Jobs transformed America way more than Osama Bin Laden. I could argue that social media, and the social media addiction gave this country Trump. And Trump did more damage, killed more Americans than Bin Laden anyway. Honest, competent management of COVID? Yeah, that would have saved way more than a few thousand lives, but instead, we had a straight-up lying sociopath in the White House at the worst time possible.
9/11 changed everything? Nope. Steve Jobs did. For better? For worse?
Let's wait. I'll need some more hindsight on that. Gimme time for a proper, contrarian view.
Too busy to get something up yesterday. Jazz today, then. Thelonious Monk, "Remember," from Thelonious Alone In San Francisco.
Way less certain than you are about this.
ReplyDeleteIn 2001, the GOP was "officially" against nation-building. Absent 9/11, might the GOP have truly accepted the Fortress America approach that Pat Buchanan before and Trump afterwards pushed? I think it's at least plausible. The isolationist GOP might have lost in 2004 without the 9/11 effect to get them the W. (I know, you REALLY like your DD/RR pattern, but....) But, who would they have lost to? Kerry? Plausible. Dean? That's even a maybe---maybe 9/11 and Iraq forced Dem Party folks to want a strong defense person--Wesley Clark isn't a "Hillary stalking horse" in a What If? 2004; he wouldn't even get mentioned. If it's Dean, does that advance the Bernie/AOC wave a decade or more?
And, even forgetting the Dem side of the aisle, does the party going isolationist affect the future of the GOP? Do the neocons get frustrated and leave? If so, does an isolationist GOP in the aughts close off the window to Trump in 2016?
On the other hand, let's say that the neocons are playing a longer game, and just push within the Bush Admin for us to invade some other country---say, Libya or Syria. That path seems likely to lead right back to where we are.
I guess, the What If? question is "was invading some Middle East country an Absolute Point?" (though, the writer now wishes they'd used the term "Nexus Point", to be more consistent with the canon, and I can't believe Feige missed that part)
So, first, it isn't "my" DD/RR pattern. It is an extraordinarily strong empirical pattern, repeatedly published and replicated, see Alan Abramowitz, who deserves the credit, and everyone needs to include it as a control variable that sucks up a fuckload of the explanatory power. Your dislike of the variable does not detract from its explanatory power, and the universe is not under any obligation to make sense to you (see: Tyson, Neil deGrasse). That said, you're going way down the butterfly path, far enough that I'm honestly having trouble following this. Arguing that without 9/11, the "time for a change" model would have stopped working is without any empirical basis. That's speculation on top of speculation with no social science. As for the isolationist GOP... no. Trump is the apotheosis of the trend started under Gingrich, and the party isn't coherently isolationist. You still have a bunch who want to do more in Afghanistan or elsewhere. There isn't a coherent ideology. It is just a personality cult, and if you want to do a "no 9/11, no Trump" thing, you're back in butterfly territory.
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