O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
No author’s reputation has fallen farther faster during my lifetime than that of Thomas Wolfe. A staple of high school reading lists in the mid-60s to completely unknown today. Not unread and scorned like many white, male titans of post-war, pre-21st century American literature — Bellow, Roth, Styron et al — whose work is made to carry the civilizational crimes of patriarchy, misogyny, and racial supremacy. No Wolfe is just forgotten.
But for me and my fellow sensitive adolescents in Mrs. Murphy’s Honors English class in 1966/67 he was the third member of the Holy Trinity of modern American literature along with Hemingway and his fellow southerner, Faulkner.
And when I started thinking about the theme for this week’s anniversary essay, his words jumped off the inside of my skull and straight into my fingers and so I typed,
“O lost.”
This week marks the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. That day and the weeks after were the last time you could say there was a UNITED States of America. There is no greater proof that we are in a new historical epoch than this hypothetical:
If a similar attack took place today, would the country unite in the same way behind Trump and MAGA?
The squandering of the unity on 9/11 began fairly quickly. On the 10th anniversary of the event I noted the fact in this BBC radio piece, which ran in the interval at a BBC Prom. It’s about the experience of being live on air, hosting an NPR program while the event unfolded, and the search after the show for new theme music that was appropriate to play during the coming days of grief and mourning. Give it a listen (preferably now, or after you’ve read the rest of this essay, or on the anniversary itself)
The rhetorical question above about the country uniting is asked because on 9/11 had just come through a divisive political moment: the 2000 election had been decided in favor of Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore not by America’s voters but by the Supreme Court in its notorious decision in Bush v. Gore to halt a recount of the vote in Florida.
The election that year — between two princes of the political establishment, bred for the presidency — was close. Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes but the electoral college was a different story. With all the other states’ electoral votes decided there was still no winner. Florida with 25 electoral votes still in play would decide the outcome.
In the initial count, Bush had won the state by 1784 votes, less 0.5% of the votes cast. This triggered a mandatory recount of votes cast by machine. At the end of that process Bush’s margin of victory was down to 327. Gore, under Florida’s election laws was entitled to ask for a hand recount, this he did in several counties that traditionally were Democratic strongholds including Miami-Dade county
On November 22nd 2000, an organized mob of Republican operatives staged what is known as the Brooks Brothers riot. At a signal from Republican congressman John Sweeney to “shut it down”, verbally and physically intimidated the election board as it attempted to count the ballots. The recount was abandoned.
You could make the case that the slow strangulation of American democracy began that day which, ironically, was the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.
And if it wasn’t that day, it was three weeks later when the five “conservative” justices decided that there should be no more recounting of ballots anywhere in Florida. Bush had won the state and with it the presidency. He needed 270 electoral votes to win, with Florida he had 271. The legal basis for the decision was so flimsy that unlike most SCOTUS decisions it was not meant to set a precedent. The 5-4 decision was limited to the “present circumstances.”
Gore did not fight the judgment,
“ … for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy.”
He added,
“This is America, and we put country before party. We stand together behind our new president.”
And the country moved on. Democratic partisans were disgruntled, certainly, but normal life resumed. It is a moot point now whether 9/11 would have happened if a full recount of Florida without SCOTUS interference had shown Gore was the winner. (he probably was, as I found out when reporting from the state in 2004. Illegally suppressed Black votes were enough to win him the state as well as votes from other places that should have been but weren’t recounted). But it is hard to imagine the conscientious Gore ignoring a CIA daily presidential brief headlined: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" noting, "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for a hijacking" of U.S. aircraft. Bush was on vacation at the time and, along with his top team, slept on the warning.
When the attack came, the country’s united response of anger and grief gave the Bush administration a solid foundation to go to war to find Osama and destroy al-Qaeda and their Afghan hosts, the Taliban. That unity would be squandered by Bush in Iraq, but only after it became clear that the war was a failure.
Rancorous partisanship returned to American life: deepening division and disunity becoming the defining characteristic of the society.
The tampering with a full vote count in Florida in 2000 symbolized by the Brooks Brothers riot and Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v Gore became not quite a blue-print for the events of January 6th, 2021. Many of those who were involved in stopping the count in Miami-Dade were involved one way or another in January 6th, most notably Roger Stone, whose bizarre public persona has obscured his malevolent behind the scenes political activities going back to Richard Nixon, whose image is tattooed on his back.
Stone is a self-promoting clown but more seriously, three members of the current Supreme Court worked for George Bush’s legal team during the SCOTUS-halted Florida recount. John Roberts was elevated to the court as Chief Justice by Bush five years later. Trump appointed Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett during his first term. The Supreme Court did not get involved in the 2020 recount because the election wasn’t close. Joe Biden won by 7 million popular votes and 75 in the electoral college. But the three Bush lawyers on the court along with three other right-wing justices (really, they are not “conservative” they are radical-right jurists) continued to send the country on the path to disunity with the decision in Trump v United States on July 1, 2024:
Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.
Telling Donald Trump he has “presumptive immunity from prosecution” is like telling an axe murderer he won’t get arrested for splitting his wife’s skull open. You know what’s going to happen next.
In my lifetime there have been periods of struggle over what America should be. When I first read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel in the mid-60s was one of them. The country, the society recovered its equilibrium and, once the war in Vietnam was over, a sense of unity with the usual vigorously contested political differences. Partisanship in public discourse introduced a level of disharmony in the 90s. The challenge to unity that might have been caused by the 2000 election was avoided by Al Gore’s gracious acknowledgment that country goes above party.
The deaths of 2976 people on 9/11 forged a unity that for a short while seemed unbreakable. It wasn’t. Other historical forces were already at work and now the country is more divided than at any time since the Civil War, led by a wannabe dictator aided and abetted by the anti-democratic forces which first manifested themselves in Florida in 2000. Men like Kevin Roberts, 2020 election denier and President of the Heritage Foundation.
Two days after the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v United States, Roberts said,
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless … if the left allows it to be.”
He meant every word and in his wannabe way so does Trump.
Apocalyptic language was the Presidential style after 9/11, hunting down “evil-doers” and other enemies wherever they might try to hide. It turns out that the real enemies of American unity were closer to home.
And for more on how America got to Trump and Cold Civil War read History of a Calalmity
I posted the following online back on March 3rd, this year. The Trump/Putin connection is now more secure than ever. The theatre distracts us for a time, but that time is just that.
The oligarchs are way ahead of us.
They are in no way as stupid as the media & Hollywood makes them out to be.
They intend ill for ALL populations.
All wealth will be their own in time.
They will move in ways you cannot imagine.
We need millions in the streets and blood on the pavement RIGHTNOW! To Stop them.
Read Sarah Kendzior NOW!
This from Prof. Heather Cox Richardson right now:
"During the 2024 campaign, Trump said repeatedly that he would end the war in Ukraine. Shortly after the election, a newspaper reporter asked Nikolai Patrushev, who is close to Putin, if Trump’s election would mean “positive changes from Russia’s point of view.” Patrushev answered: “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.” "