As the 23rd anniversary of 9/11 approaches and a crucial election looms, historian Matthew Warshauer offers a provocative perspective on how the attacks of 9/11 continue to shape American politics and the nation’s youth — and may significantly impact the coming election.

In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Warshauer — a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and the author of Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation — argues that those who came of age in the shadow of the attacks harbor a deep distrust in government and a pervasive sense of chaos that profoundly influences today’s political landscape.

Warshauer traces the evolution of this trauma from the initial unity following 9/11 to the fractured society we see today, exploring how the Bush administration’s “good versus evil” narrative and subsequent foreign policy decisions eroded public trust.

Young voters are emerging as a potential deciding factor in the upcoming election, so understanding their worldview is crucial. 

Warshauer discusses how events like the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and ongoing issues such as climate change and gun violence have shaped this generation’s perception.

Warshauer’s insights on how historical events mold generational attitudes offer a compelling lens through which to view current political dynamics.

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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Sometimes the echoes of history are heard today. In just six days, we’ll mark the 23rd anniversary of the September 11th attacks, a somber milestone that this year falls squarely in the runup to a crucial election only nine weeks away. This proximity invites us to consider how these two events won a traumatic memory. The other, a pivotal moment for our future, might be interconnected.

As the nation prepares to both remember and look ahead, we’re going to examine how the long shadow of 9/11 may be influencing the political landscape today, particularly for young voters who have a very limited direct memory of that fateful day but whose memory in today’s choices could significantly shape the outcome of this election. The impact of 9/11 on American society continues to be a subject of intense debate. While some contend that its effects have waned, others believe that the repercussions are still profoundly shaping the worldview of an entire generation.

This ongoing discussion raises vital questions about how historical events influence youth, politics, and our nation’s trajectory. At a time when young voters could potentially determine the outcome of the upcoming election, understanding the roots of their apparent alienation and negativity becomes paramount. To what extent can we trace these attitudes back to the aftermath of 9/11? How much of today’s political landscape has been molded by those events?

To explore these questions, I’m joined by Matthew Warshauer, a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, and the author of the provocative new book, Creating and Failing The 9/11 Generation. Warshauer presents a compelling case that the attacks and their aftermath have profoundly influenced what he calls the 9/11 generation, potentially instilling in them a deep-seated distrust of government and a pervasive sense of chaos. As we grapple with an increasingly polarized political climate and the looming election, Warshauer’s insights offer a crucial perspective on how we got here and where we might be headed.

His analysis traces the roots of 9/11 through decades of US foreign policy, examines the disastrous aftermath of the Iraq war, and offers a nuanced look at how these events continue to shape our domestic politics and international relations. Matthew Warshauer is the author of numerous books, book chapters, and essays, and his most recent is Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation. It is my pleasure to welcome Matthew Warshauer here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Matt, thanks so much for joining us.

Matthew Warshauer: Thank you, Jeff. Wow, I got to say that was the best intro ever. I need to make you my publicist.

Jeff: [chuckles] Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I want to go back 23 years and think about the events of 9/11. And one thing that was so profoundly different, and I want to put it in the context of what you talk about in terms of generational change. After 9/11, we looked at a country that was deeply, deeply united, perhaps more than at any time since the Second World War. And yet 23 years later, we couldn’t be more fractured. Talk about that first.

Matthew: That’s a great place to start, and so many people who remember that day remember the unity that came afterward. America turned into a sea of fluttering American flags. I know that I went home that day and pulled my flag out of the basement, the one that I put up on the 4th of July and on Memorial Day. And it was actually an instinctual thing to do, and many Americans felt the same way. So much so that stores ran out of American flags. That’s the level of patriotism.

We had members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, collect on the steps of the congressional building the evening of September 11th, and hold one another and commiserate, saying, “God bless America.” So yes, amazing unity. And then we can point to the dysfunction that comes later, and I can give you the exact date in which things changed. And that date was January 29th, 2002. That was the date of George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, his first date of the June Union address after 9/11. That address has become known as the axis of evil speech.

And not only internally within the United States, but externally. The many nations that have looked to the United States and expressed really profound and heartfelt sorrow for what had happened, now recognize that the United States was going to attack Iran and that’s when everything changed.

Jeff: And talk about the way it changed for young people in particular. How did they perceive it as you’ve gone back and talked to these young people, and how they perceived the world changing at that point?

Matthew: Well, it’s interesting the way that you place it, how the world changed. For most of the young people, what I call the direct half, the front half of the 9/11 generation, those who were 8 or 10 or 12 years old, who witnessed this event both through seeing that second plane fly into the South Tower in a never-ending loop of destruction for the next 10 years of their lives, and watching the adults around them break down. For them, for those kids, the world didn’t change. It was the world. They didn’t have a context from which to judge the world.

Suddenly the world was in their face, and it was more terrifying than they could have ever imagined. So that’s one component. But then the other component is the emotional, cultural, structural, governmental chaos that follows. They are the recipients of their parents and other adults’ vicarious trauma of the event. And that’s the thing that defines this generation. They are a generation born of chaos.

Jeff: And how did they perceive that chaos? Certainly, most of them weren’t sophisticated enough to see it in the context of the government. What was the 30,000-foot view of how they saw that chaos?

Matthew: Fear, and seeing that the adults around them, from teachers to parents to other family members who were attempting to cope with this tragedy that had just befell the United States. And then where do we move into? Economic collapse in the immediate and the absolute immediate aftermath of 9/11. There’s economic collapse which impacts American families in yet another way, and then never-ending war, and the continued fear. And it really never abates for these kids.

And one of the things is that I’ve been working on this subject for quite a number of years, and I’ve taught a lot of classes on it. And I received an email from one of my students about four or five years ago. And it was a message on Twitter, now today, X. And the question was why do the millennials or 9/11– Why do the millennials complain so much?

And this kid responded by saying, “IDK, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because we saw 2000 people die on live TV, and literally nothing has ever gotten better.” That defines the generation right there.

Jeff: What did they understand as the causes of 9/11? And what questions did they ask about it?

Matthew: What they understand about the causes of 9/11 come directly from the Bush administration. George W. Bush right away after 9/11 and in speech, after speech after speech, said that this was about good versus evil. That the reason they attacked us is because they hate democracy. And that is an argument that he and his administration put out repeatedly. And so that’s what much of the generation came away with. They also came away with a lot of anger for the attack on the United States.

Not just the generation, but Americans overall are very angry, and they want revenge. And that is the mood that really pushes the United States in the aftermath of this event. We of course now know, and this is fascinating for me, is when I get into these topics with students and others, and really engage in the why of 9/11. In fact, chapter 3 of the book is titled simply, Why, why did this happen? We have to conclude that it’s not simply about hating democracy as a form of government or a philosophical idea. It’s most distinctly about American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Jeff: Did the good versus evil scenario provide a certain clarity to at least some of this younger population?

Matthew: I wouldn’t call it clarity. It’s an attempted clarity by the Bush administration. But trying to chalk this up in good versus evil is anything but clear. It clouds our understanding. And you began your introduction by wondering how this influences us today in our politics, in our culture. And I think this is one of the big things, right? This idea that there are clearly defined notions of good and evil. And that’s what this generation has been raised on. So much of what they consume is in social media and in our television and movie world.

I don’t think it’s a mystery that Marvel movies become so popular in the aftermath of all this because it’s a clearly defined good versus evil that is presented to people. And now, it’s become such a component of our culture and our lexicon. We have a major candidate and his followers for the presidency, who are constantly talking about evil, good versus evil.

And now that lexicon has been used against who they perceive as their domestic foes, it’s not even about foreign terrorism anymore. It’s that, somehow, political opponents are evil. And thus, we can discard them.

Jeff: But what’s developed almost as a corollary to this is, and you talk about this tremendous distrust, distrust in general and distrust of government in particular, that this younger generation has developed.

Matthew: Absolutely. They don’t have faith in the government. Our classes here at Central Connecticut State University just began last week. And one of the things I asked was two different classes– I teach political and constitutional history, and obviously, we talk a lot about the politics in the constitution and the nature of America. And I asked both classes, “How many of you have confidence in the American government?” And 40 kids in each class, not one kid raised their hand. They do not have faith in this government.

They view it as dysfunctional, which is something that’s really scary because it’s not just about government, about the political parties in terms of government. It’s not just about legislating. It’s about the salience of democracy as an institution. It’s about the very nature of the American experiment in self-government. One of the things that I think Donald Trump has done very, very effectively is he has broken down many Americans’ confidence in the institution of government by attacking those institutions.

The attack on January 6th was an attack on our election process, telling Americans that they can’t trust the process, that it’s rigged. That’s not just a one-day simple act. That’s a fundamental issue that really harms our democracy. It’s the first time in the entire history of this nation in which there was not a peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Jeff: And bring that back around to 9/11, to the 9/11 generation, and the way in which those events that we were talking about earlier set this scenario up.

Matthew: Well, you see the chaos that occurs. And there are a lot of young people who are quoted in the book who say, “Yes. For the first time in my life, I saw that the adults weren’t in charge. I saw that they didn’t know what they were doing, that America couldn’t be protected.” This is one of the big things, is the sense that America can’t be protected. These are the kinds of things, terrorist attacks, that had always occurred elsewhere in the world. And I use a quote from the journalist Jack Beatty, and he says, “America on 9/11 was cast out of Disneyland.”

And what he meant by that was a metaphor that America had sort of lived in this bubble, in this perfect world where everything was magical and where the problems of the world, especially terrorism and war, did not come to American shores. And suddenly, they do. And the fear that that creates, and there’s a lot of writers who have talked about the before America and the after America. So that sense of fear and that sense of chaos, and the sense that, “Oh, wow, the American government can’t really protect us.” So that’s the initial impact, but that translates itself out.

It has ripple effects in so many other areas for these young people and about things they’re concerned about. Whether it is the issue of climate change, which if you cannot accept that our climate is changing today and that it is due to human action, I mean, you can’t dispute it any longer. And yet, the government doesn’t seem to be able to really address it and do anything. And the students look at this, and they go, “What are these adults doing?” Or the youth of America look at this and say, “What are our adults doing?” Gun violence, kids being hunted in our schools and in our public spaces?

And what has the government done about it? The problems of economics and funding for college? What has the government done about it? It has done very little. It’s dysfunctional, and that’s the way these kids see it.

Jeff: What happened to that patriotism that we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation in the post-9/11 period? And how did that dissipate? How did that get wasted?

Matthew: Well, I think it gets wasted with the decision to go into Iraq, right? There becomes real descent within the country. And then, you also have the creation of the Patriot Act, which, for some sections of America, creates real fear and concern about what the government is doing and what the government isn’t doing. The ease by which they’re able to engage in warrantless wiretaps or warrantless searches of people’s homes. You could talk about different segments of the 9/11 generation but certainly, for those who already had a suspicion of government, this causes that suspicion to really, in a lot of ways, metastasize.

But the overall sense of concern is that we engage in this war that just never ends. And then, ultimately, that war fails. We leave Iraq in a shambles. We leave Afghanistan in exactly the way that we left Vietnam 60 years earlier. It’s just a failure. And how can that not impact some level of patriotism? I mean, you could even take this a step further, and I have an entire chapter called Our Soldiers and Patriotism. What impact does it have on the US military when less than 1% serve? And they are deployed and redeployed multiple times, and when they come home after deployments, they see a country that doesn’t look like it’s at war.

9/11, a very common phrase, a well-known phrase, comes out in the military that says, “We went to war while America went to the mall.”

Jeff: How is this different in terms of generational response from the boomer generation that experienced Vietnam, that protested, that said, “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” that felt the government was dysfunctional, that brought down a president, how is it fundamentally different?

Matthew: You just answered the question yourself, and it’s really an important point. And I’ve had a variety of people ask, “Well, what about the Vietnam era? That was dysfunctional?” Yes, absolutely. There was tremendous dysfunction during the Vietnam era, but they took down a president. They ended a war. People gathered. They protested, young people. The center of the protests were on college campuses. Those protests grew out into other aspects of American society, and they were successful. They ended a war. They took down a president.

Congress, in the aftermath, passed the War Powers Act that said, “Presidents can’t just send troops overseas for lengthy periods of time without any congressional review.” We’ve got to push back against the power of the president’s ability to engage the military-industrial complex. So, while one could look at the Vietnam era, the ’60s, and the ’70s and go, “Oh, well, that was a time of real dysfunction,” the end result of all that dysfunction was actually democracy in action. Was success in protest and ending what people perceived as government largesse and government mistakes? That largely does not happen in the aftermath of 9/11, but there’s some interesting things that do occur that we can talk about.

Jeff: Please do.

Matthew: Well, so when 9/11 occurs, and then Bush does the axis of evil speech, and there’s an 18-month ramp up towards war in Iraq, that war begins on March 20th, 2003. Many, many people know that it’s coming and anti-war protests develop all over the United States and all over the world. And in fact, the month before the war begins, you see the single largest day of anti-war protest in the history of the world. There’s a specific day that’s chosen where millions and millions of people throughout the world go out and protest the impending American invasion.

Well, that’s very interesting because it’s not happening on college campuses. I’ve described the 9/11 generation as being hit in the head with a mallet. They are just sitting there dumbfounded in the aftermath of 9/11, not acting, just looking around and seeing what’s going on with adults, as we already discussed. And what was really fascinating to me is I was a new professor at that time, and many of the professors who I knew at the university who were just about to retire, had started as professors 40 years earlier in the 1960s and 1970s.

And they witnessed the protests against Vietnam at the beginning of their careers, and they were all on college campuses. And these professors said to me, “What is going on with the youth of America? They are not engaged in this at all. They’re doing nothing.” And that’s true. And that continues for the next almost 20 years until the youth of America get to a point where they sort of wake up and go, “You know what, the adults haven’t been doing anything. And guess what? They’re not going to do anything.”

And where that youth movement begins is in Parkland, Florida, when the shooting occurs at Marjorie Stone in Douglas High School, 17 kids are killed and 17 are wounded. Those Parkland students come to the realization that the adults in the room aren’t going to do anything. The government isn’t going to do anything, and therefore they’re going to do it themselves. And so they organize the March for Our Lives rally and high school students and some middle school students all over the country walk out of classes. Some of them get in trouble for it, some of them get tension, some of them get suspended.

But this is the first example of the 9/11 generation waking up and going, “I got to do something”. And then what follows that? And this is the nature of democracy. This activism and this feeling that we must move forward and do something if the powers that be are not. So what follows Parkland? The Me Too Movement. What follows The Me Too Movement? Black Lives Matter. What follows Black Lives Matter? The recent push against Israel in regards to Gaza. And my point is not to make an argument over which side the students should be on, that they should be anti-Israel, or they should be anti-Palestine.

That’s not the point. That’s a different conversation. The point is that they’re acting and they haven’t acted for a long, long time. And this is one of the things that really, really gives me hope that they are rising. And I think the same group of youth have been very, very responsible for getting Joe Biden to step away. What’s going to win this election for the Democrats or for the Republicans is the number of young people who turn out. Those who are going to vote for Donald Trump or for Kamala Harris who are already going to vote for them, they’re going to vote in that way no matter what.

But there’s a huge middle, especially the youth of America, who can be influenced one way or another. And if those young people turn out in this election, that’s what’s going to decide the election. So we are now seeing the rise of a much more active generation, and I’m very excited by it.

Jeff: Why do you think that it took so long for that generation, one, to be activists? And two, even today, the amount of activists that are engaged is still relatively small, particularly if we put it in the context of activism in the boomer activism in the ’60s.

Matthew: Well, I think actually activism and even if you look at Boomer activism based on overall population, Boomer activism wasn’t massive. Activists are almost always a fairly small percentage of the population that is incredibly active, well organized, and to some extent decently funded. And they have an outsized impact for a small number of people. You could go all the way back to the American Revolution. And a third of Americans are in favor of independence. A third of Americans are opposed to independence. A third of Americans, eh, they don’t really know.

Go to the abolitionist period, the 19th century in the North. Maybe 10% of Americans were abolitionists. But look at the impact that they have in the larger society over the issue of slavery. So it’s not always about sheer numbers, it’s about the effectiveness of these sheer numbers. Now, to get to the question of why they came to this conclusion when they did, that’s an interesting question that I’m not sure is easily pinpointed. But we can certainly, again, look at what happened in Parkland, and there’s a group of students who just decided to stand up and go, “No, I’m not going to put up with this anymore.”

And I think in some ways, some of the adults paid a bit more attention because it was children who were acting. Here in Connecticut, when the Sandy Hook shooting occurred 11 years ago, Americans were outraged that elementary school children would be killed. But it’s not the elementary school children who go and start protesting. It’s their parents and it’s other adults. And then it becomes just another issue in the larger political culture war. But when young people get involved and do something for whatever reason, we have a tendency to look more at what they’re doing.

Jeff: How much does leadership have to do with it? And has there been a lack of leadership? I know that there’s always talk among young people about the importance of grassroots leadership, but history tells us that charismatic leadership from the top is also important.

Matthew: Yeah. Of course, it is. And unlikely people can become leaders. The kids at Parkland, a few of them, weren’t planning on becoming leaders, but they became passionate about an issue. And they take it on and they move forward. And I don’t recall his name specifically, but one of these kids ended up going to Harvard. He just graduated last year. He did a variety of interviews, and he is still devoted to this issue of the problem of gun violence in America. So that’s a big example. You could look at other leaders who are unwitting leaders and leaders in the strangest of ways.

One could argue that George Floyd, the African American who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, ends up becoming a leader. Granted, it’s a symbolic leadership, but he becomes a name and a face around which people can rally. So yes, of course, leadership matters in all of this.

Jeff: And talk about the youngest generation that’s coming along now and how you see them, the ones that haven’t made it to your classroom yet. How are they going to be affected by this, and how different do you think they will be?

Matthew: That’s a tough one to answer, but the 9/11 generation came into adolescence with 9/11. The last part of the generation was moving through adolescence right as COVID hit. So this generation has been slammed on both ends. I believe that the kids who are in my classes right now, the 18, 19, really more the 20, 21-year-olds that they’re the tail end of the 9/11 generation. The generation that is coming up behind them, they’re called Generation Alpha, for lack of a better term. Surely another term will come up. Are they the COVID generation?

I don’t think that that title will stick. But certainly, they are heavily impacted by COVID. And they’ve been impacted educationally, they’ve been impacted socially. How will that play out over time? That’s a real question that a lot of people have been discussing and theorizing. For me, one of the things that I’ve been concerned about for a number of years, beyond the issue of 9/11, is what I refer to as the commodification of education. Meaning that these kids are the full-on recipients of smartphones, meaning they have this high-powered pocket computer that they carry around with them everywhere.

They can ask any question, either by using the keyboard or engaging the artificial intelligence function of their phone. Ask Siri if you have an iPhone. They can get any piece of information that they want. And the way that a lot of our education, what it has turned into, and partially, this is because corporations 20, 25 years ago, figured out that big, big money could be made in our educational system. And so they have started taking it over, much to the chagrin and stress and bureaucracy that teachers have to deal with.

There’s an umpteen number of studies related to teacher burnout, and that certainly preceded COVID in huge ways. COVID exacerbated it. So what these kids have been taught through high-stakes testing and through the availability of the Internet is that they can find any piece of information they want in 0.52 seconds. And the way that they’ve largely been taught is, “Yes, you take this piece of information and you put it in this box, and that answers the question, and you are now done.” A lot of the education hasn’t so much been about big ideas.

It’s been about names and dates and facts and information. They’ve been taught to commodify it. “I will consume this information, and I will utilize it, and I will never have to use it again. I have consumed it like I do a piece of food, and then I put what’s remaining in the garbage or in recycling.” That’s what education has become for a lot of students. So with that in mind, I have been very, very concerned that my students aren’t interested in ideas anymore. And ideas are what created this country and what has spurred this country to reinvent itself periodically.

Ideas matter. And so I had two classes this past summer with brand new freshmen coming into the university and every single student who had just recently graduated from high school. And I asked them this question: are they interested in ideas? And over the course of five weeks, I was incredibly surprised and pleased that these kids were super interested in ideas as long as you challenge them with ideas. If all you’re there to do as a teacher or professor is to provide information, if all you are is a purveyor of information, you’re not going to get the best out of these kids.

And I think that they have a lot to say. I think we’re going to be hearing a lot from them. And again, that excites me.

Jeff: Matthew Warshauer. His book is Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation. Matthew, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

Matthew: Thanks for taking the time, Jeff. I really appreciate it. Have a great day.

Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.

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