Each year removed from the horrific jihadi attack against innocent civilians on September 11, 2001, fewer Americans take time to remember. Professor Alexander Riley reflects on this phenomenon.

I have written a lot about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 over the years, including a book on United Flight 93. … In much of that work, I argued for the importance of that day not only in its human and material cost but also in what it represented as a contribution to the American civil religion. Core aspects of traditional American national identity — masculine heroism, a democratic citizenry prepared to stand in its defense, the deeply spiritual values that were present at the country’s origin — were displayed that day. I believed our collective memory of the response to terror by our heroic co-citizens would be sustained in our culture and perhaps even point the way to a return to previous unity.

The truth is that the further we get from the date, the more evident it becomes that unifying this country is likely an impossible mission. In fact, the commonly claimed temporary unity produced in the wake of the attacks was itself, alas, illusory. It was not even fleeting. It was never real. The massive rift in this country, only too apparent now, was already visible then, but I and many others hoped our collective response to this national tragedy could bind up those old wounds and move us toward healing our broken culture.

Riley recalls where he was on 9/11 and what academia was like both then and now, including some of his colleagues heaping blame on America as early as the day after the attack. As a young, untenured professor, he pushed back carefully and was still thoroughly rebuked.

In the emotional fervor of the days to come, I put that exchange aside and tried to concentrate on the national effort to mourn the dead. But it should have been clear already that people with the views that had been expressed by my interlocutors were not interested in trying to figure out how to unify the country. In the moment of the country’s greatest tragedy in at least a half century, they leapt up not to defend but to denounce it.

Twenty-one years later, the divide has only widened and deepened.

Those like my campus interlocutors who saw the the moral culpability of the United States as the central meaning of 9/11 have quieted in recent years, but not because they have changed their minds. They simply go about their business of spreading that message in language and tone more evasive of our attention. Every year, at the anniversary, they publish articles on how hard it is to be Muslim in America. More will certainly appear this year. Often these accounts are connected to claims about “spikes” in hate crimes. What is never said is that the baseline for hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. is very low, and so even temporary “spikes” never raise it to a level a reasonable observer would see in the alarmist terms presented.

Muslim alienation and fear inside the U.S. has become the perennial 9/11 story, not the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and the costs associated with the attacks that have mounted into the trillions of dollars.

Riley concludes sadly:

9/11 has already reached a space of collective oblivion that it took Pearl Harbor many more decades to reach. This is because the force that ultimately pushed both of these hallowed days of our civil religion into the twisted narratives of the America-hating Woke elite is the same: the fracturing of our culture into two irreconcilable sides, and the vast and rapid increase of the cultural reach of those who want all narratives of traditional American heroism and national identity to disappear.

We will in these days around September 11 read a good number of claims of how “we must never forget.” I know what these claims look like, as I have made them myself. I have spent a good deal of the 21 years since the attacks doing work to keep alive the memory of the heroes of that day. I regrettably admit that my faith in this project is extinguished. Most of America has already forgotten, and at least half of it remembers the day as a sign of American fallenness and failure.

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