Opinion

Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, America Is More Divided Than United

The September 11 attacks briefly reminded Americans that citizenship was stronger than party identity. Twenty-five years later, too many of us see fellow citizens as enemies.

By Jeff Beck
September 11, 2026

For Americans old enough to remember September 11, 2001, the images remain painfully clear: smoke pouring from the World Trade Center, frightened workers fleeing Lower Manhattan, first responders running toward danger and ordinary people searching desperately for loved ones.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks on New York City, the Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

What followed was an extraordinary, although imperfect, moment of national unity.

Americans donated blood, volunteered, attended vigils and displayed flags outside their homes. Political leaders who had spent months arguing over a bitterly contested presidential election appeared together. People thanked firefighters, police officers, paramedics and members of the military.

For a brief period, we were not primarily Republicans, Democrats, liberals or conservatives. We were Americans.

Twenty-five years later, the contrast is painful. The terrorists who attacked the United States failed to destroy the country, but Americans have gradually allowed political tribalism, institutional distrust and cultural resentment to pull us apart.

The evidence strongly suggests that America is more divided now than it was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

The unity after 9/11 was real—but incomplete

It would be dishonest to romanticize the months after September 11.

Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, Sikhs and others endured threats, discrimination and violence. Fear helped produce policies that infringed upon civil liberties. National unity also created political pressure to support military actions that would later become deeply controversial.

Unity did not mean universal agreement, equal treatment or consistently wise decision-making.

Nevertheless, the change in the national mood was measurable. President George W. Bush’s Gallup approval rating reached 90 percent shortly after the attacks. Congressional approval also rose to historic territory.

Americans had not suddenly reached a consensus on every political issue. They had temporarily recognized that the people around them were fellow citizens before they were political opponents.

That distinction has largely disappeared.

Political disagreement has become personal hatred

Americans have always argued over politics. Political conflict existed long before cable television, social media or September 11.

What has changed is the intensity and personal nature of the hostility.

A 2022 Pew Research Center study found that 72 percent of Republicans considered Democrats more immoral than other Americans. Among Democrats, 63 percent said the same about Republicans. In 2016, those numbers had been 47 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Reference to Study

This is no longer a disagreement over tax rates, foreign policy or the size of government. Millions of people now believe that members of the opposing party are not simply mistaken but fundamentally bad.

That attitude makes compromise feel immoral. If the other side is evil, working with it becomes betrayal. Losing an election feels less like a democratic setback and more like surrendering the country to an enemy.

The situation may be even worse than party-to-party polling suggests. A 2026 Pew survey found that 53 percent of Americans described their fellow citizens negatively when asked about their morality and ethics. The United States was the only one of 25 countries surveyed in which a majority characterized its own people that way, according to The Washington Post’s report on the findings.

A society cannot remain healthy when a majority questions the basic decency of the people with whom they share it.

Trust in American institutions has collapsed

Division is not confined to political parties. Americans increasingly distrust nearly every institution expected to provide stability and shared information.

Gallup reported in 2026 that average confidence in 14 major American institutions stood at just 27 percent. It was the fifth consecutive year in which the average remained below 30 percent, keeping institutional confidence near the lowest level measured in more than four decades. Gallup’s institutional-confidence findings show that distrust has become part of everyday American life.

Trust in the news media has also deteriorated. In 2025, only 28 percent of Americans told Gallup that they trusted newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. That was a record low, down from 40 percent only five years earlier. Gallup’s media-trust survey also revealed enormous partisan differences in whom Americans believe.

According to Pew Research Center’s historical data, public trust in the federal government remains near historic lows.

Distrust by itself is not always unhealthy. Journalists, elected officials, corporations and other powerful institutions should be scrutinized. Blind loyalty can produce terrible decisions, as some of America’s post-9/11 policies demonstrated.

But skepticism becomes destructive when Americans no longer accept any common source of information. We increasingly choose separate news organizations, social-media accounts, experts and sometimes entirely different versions of reality.

Without an agreed set of facts, even constructive disagreement becomes almost impossible.

Americans increasingly fear one another

Perhaps the most disturbing evidence comes from how Americans now perceive threats to the country.

Immediately after 9/11, the danger was clearly understood as an external terrorist organization attacking the United States. Today, many Americans are more concerned about violence originating within their own country.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released for the 25th anniversary found that 61 percent of Americans considered attacks by domestic extremists a greater danger than attacks originating abroad. Only 34 percent considered foreign attackers the greater threat.

When asked about the largest danger to average Americans, 33 percent selected domestic terrorism, compared with 20 percent who chose foreign terrorism. Another 42 percent selected random violence, including mass shootings. The Reuters/Ipsos anniversary poll illustrates how dramatically the public’s fears have turned inward.

This does not mean most Americans are extremists or violent. They are not. It means the national imagination has changed. We increasingly view danger as something that may come from fellow Americans rather than a distant enemy.

Reported hate crimes provide another warning. The Justice Department recorded 11,862 reported hate-crime incidents in 2024, compared with 11,679 in 2023. Those figures are affected by agency participation and underreporting, so comparisons require caution. Still, the persistently high totals demonstrate that hostility toward racial, religious and other communities remains a serious national problem. The Justice Department’s hate-crime statistics provide the latest national figures.

Technology made outrage profitable

Social media did not invent division, but it turned division into a business model.

Platforms learned that anger, fear and humiliation keep people engaged. A thoughtful explanation rarely travels as quickly as a furious accusation. Algorithms reward material that provokes an immediate emotional response, while political personalities and media organizations learn to supply more of it.

Americans are encouraged to build identities around what they oppose. A neighbor’s political sign, religious belief, vaccine decision, position on immigration or opinion about a war can become enough to classify that person as an enemy.

National tragedies once interrupted political conflict. Today, even tragedies are immediately sorted into partisan narratives. Before victims have been identified or investigators have established the facts, people race online to determine which political side can be blamed.

We no longer merely experience events together. We fight over what those events are allowed to mean.

Political leaders benefit from keeping us angry

The responsibility does not rest exclusively with technology companies or the media. Political leaders in both parties have discovered that resentment can be more effective than persuasion.

It is easier to raise money by warning that the country is about to be destroyed than by presenting a realistic policy proposal. It is easier to motivate voters through fear than through a complicated discussion about government.

Every election is advertised as the most important election of our lifetime. Each opponent supposedly represents an existential threat. Every compromise is framed as surrender.

Politicians benefit from this permanent state of emergency. The country does not.

Americans understandably hold strong beliefs about abortion, immigration, guns, race, religion, gender, economic inequality and the proper role of government. Those disagreements will not disappear, nor should they. Democracy requires argument.

But democracy cannot survive indefinitely if every argument becomes a test of whether the other side deserves to exist.

We should not need another tragedy to remember who we are

The lesson of September 11 should not be that Americans require a national catastrophe before they can recognize one another’s humanity.

The first responders who entered the towers did not ask the political affiliation of the people trapped inside. Passengers aboard Flight 93 did not divide themselves by ideology before acting together. Volunteers did not inspect voter-registration records before offering food, shelter or blood.

They responded to human need.

That spirit still exists. It appears after hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, building collapses and local tragedies. People help neighbors whose politics they may not know—and might not share.

America’s division is therefore not irreversible. Most citizens are more complicated and more compassionate than the political content placed in front of them. The loudest accounts online are not necessarily representative of the country.

Rebuilding unity does not require pretending that our differences are unimportant. It requires rejecting the belief that disagreement automatically makes another person immoral, stupid or dangerous.

It means consuming information that occasionally challenges us, refusing to share claims before checking them, supporting leaders willing to work across party lines and remembering that no political movement has a monopoly on patriotism or decency.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, America has become more divided, more suspicious and more willing to assume the worst about its own people.

That is the difficult conclusion supported by the data.

But division is not destiny. The most meaningful way to honor those who died on September 11 is not simply to remember the unity that followed. It is to practice it—voluntarily, consistently and before another tragedy forces us to do so.

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