"Angst, animosity, and contrarianism"

I'm old enough to remember November 22, 1963. September 11, 2001 was equally horrible, and a lot more people died. I read that 40% of the population has no memory of that day because they were not yet born. That means, among much else, they have no sense of the reaction—how unified the country felt in the immediate aftermath. We have lost that. Erick Erickson today:

We remember the unity that followed, too, but 25 years later, I wonder if we can admit the unity of late September 2001 was cheap. Everyone was frightened at the same time and grateful at the same time. Standing together when a building has just fallen on your neighbors requires no virtue at all. The unity worth something is the kind that survives disagreement, that holds when nothing is burning and we still can’t stand each other’s politics. We have always struggled with that one, and 25 years later we are further from it than we were on September 10th.

Unfortunately, we now have an algorithm in our lives and a class of people across party lines who make their living widening the gap between us because the algorithm rewards the clicks generated by angst, animosity, and contrarianism. You can find these malcontented souls driven by algorithmic profit in both parties, and inside every faction of both, and the only thing they reliably have in common is that peace between us would put them out of work. Every one of them is asking you to sort yourself into a smaller tribe, and then into a faction inside that tribe. ....

Erick Erickson, "Climbing the Stairs," Sept. 11, 2026.