Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today, Steve Melanga, the senior editor of

City Journal, a frequent guest on this show, and the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Steve is the author most recently of Wind Flags Waved. It's a piece that's up now as part of our

week-long series on the 20th anniversary of 9-11.

On today's episode, we'll talk about September 11th.

It's fallout and it's enduring significance.

Steve, as always, thanks for joining it.

Oh, my pleasure.

Now, your article really starts off by talking about how the attacks marked not just the start

of a kind of new American era, but the end of an old one, an America where bipartisanship

was still possible, where public servants, especially police, could be viewed as heroes, not villains,

and that the country was able during that period, as both of us remember well,

to rally together against a common enemy around a common cause.

So what has changed between now and then?

It seems a very different landscape today, and were the seeds of today's divisive country visible at all in the aftermath of 9-11?

Yes, they were actually visible if you looked closely, although I think they were marginalized.

I think the seeds were we could actually

see in the rise of a kind of far-left anti-Americanism in universities going back, especially

to the 90s in the late 1980s, which was almost a hangover from the 60s and 70s. But we saw it after 9-11, although it was very marginal and unpopular.

In fact, City Journal ran an article by Harry Stein and K. Heimowitz about the reaction on campus, which was very different from their reaction across much of America.

There were, I guess, maybe two components of this.

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