9/11 changed everything, especially the Republican Party

By Matthew Gagnon

Twenty-three years ago, I woke up early.

This was unusual. At the time, I was a college student at the University of Maine and an unrepentant night owl. I intentionally built my class schedule in such a way that my day would start late, and I would sleep as long as possible.

But for some reason that I still don’t really understand, on Sept. 11, 2001, I woke up around 8 a.m. I got up, showered, made myself breakfast — something else I almost never did — and settled in to watch morning news shows before I drove to campus. 

Just before 9 a.m., as I was finishing a waffle, the anchors broke in with a special report to announce that an explosion had taken place at the World Trade Center. At the time, no one believed it was anything other than an accident, but obviously it was shocking enough that the news stuck with the story. 

At 9:03 a.m., along with millions of other Americans, I watched live as the second plane hit the second tower, immediately making clear that it was a terrorist attack. 

I had no idea what to do. I had a friend who lived in New York and worked in Manhattan, but the city is so large that I didn’t know where they were — it turned out just a few blocks away — in relation to the burning buildings. I tried calling and didn’t get through. (My friend was fine, fortunately.)

Stunned, I actually got in my car and drove to the university. I had a class, and for whatever reason I felt like I really wanted to be around people. I parked my car and went to my class, though admittedly I don’t remember whether classes had been canceled. They certainly were later in the morning, but it may have been early enough that the school hadn’t called them off yet. If they did, we ended up gathering for class anyway, not knowing what else to do. I remember the lesson being thrown entirely out the window, and the students just talking. 

Afterward I left and had no intention of going to any other classes that day, not that there were any. I walked into the student union, where I found a crush of students standing in the hallway, all gathered around a large projection television that had been wheeled in. I stayed there, just watching the coverage, for a long time. 

At the time, I worked at the Best Buy in Bangor and had a shift that afternoon. Eventually, I gave up at school and just decided to go in early to work. When I drove into the parking lot, I found that it was entirely abandoned. There was a sign on the front of the building informing me that the store was closed for the day. I still didn’t know what to do. 

In the aftermath, America changed forever. The nation’s innocence was shattered, and the good-feeling times of the 1990s were replaced by the fear and cynicism of the war on terror. Politics was initially unified, and then turned bitterly divided, something we still haven’t recovered from. Old arguments about flat taxes and budget surpluses were replaced by debates over war and government abuse of civil liberties. 

In some ways, this feels like it happened 50 years ago. So much has happened since then, and things have changed so much, that the event fades from our memories. Who we were, what we argued about, what we wanted, and what we did feel at this point like they happened to other people. 

And politics has become incomprehensible, when compared with the post-9/11 era. To be a Republican in late 2001 was to support a muscular foreign policy that sought to remake the world to be safe for democracy. Democrats, in contrast, were “peaceniks,” accusing Republicans of being warmongers and opposing any foreign intervention. Barack Obama swept to power in 2008 largely due to his anti-war rhetoric, promising that he and his party would turn the page on the foreign policy of the George W. Bush years.

Today the Republicans are borderline non-interventionists, opposing in retrospect the very wars they supported 20 years ago. The Democrats, for their part, have been the chief boosters of American involvement in the war in Ukraine, and their nominee, Kamala Harris, has been endorsed by Dick Cheney of all people. 

In other words, things have changed. A lot.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.