How a Republic Uses Its Wounds

In your time, the republic marks a quarter century since the day two planes shattered the towers of the World Trade Center and killed at least 2,977 people. A study counts another 7,000 Americans dead in consequence. That is not an incident; it is a strategic defeat. I read that a reporter, based in Jerusalem, saw the second impact and at once suspected al‑Qaida. This tells me the threat was known, the hand recognizable. When the enemy is legible in the moment of disaster, I infer not fortune alone but a failure of virtù, of those dykes and barriers that ought to be raised in fair weather against an already swollen river.

When I wrote in The Prince, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, that fortune rules half our actions like a raging river, I did not absolve princes for floods that could have been canalized. To maintain the state, they must assume men will act from ambition and hatred, and that known enemies will try again until they are broken or transformed. So I look at 9/11 as the kind of blow that reveals more than it creates: it exposes what preparations were neglected, what habits of complacency had taken root, what intelligence was gathered but not armed with authority. The effectual truth is that thousands died on one day because foresight did not fully match a danger that at least some already feared.

Yet disaster is also occasione, the occasion. A wound that deep either kills a republic or forces it to become more itself. I see New York City firefighters marching near the 9/11 Memorial & Museum on the twenty‑fifth anniversary. That procession is not mere piety. It is an act of statecraft. Public mourning, when disciplined and repeated, binds a people to one another and to their institutions; it reminds them that security is purchased in blood, not in sermons. The Romans did this with their tribunes and their funeral orations. You do it with uniforms, flags, stone, and the slow cadence of a march through Lower Manhattan.

In the Discourses on Livy, translated by Ninian Hill Thomson, I argued that the tumults between the great and the people gave Rome her liberty. Conflict, if channeled, is medicine. These anniversaries of 9/11 perform something similar: they recall a time when Americans feared together, mourned together, and briefly set aside their ordinary hatreds. That is powerful capital for any leader. The question is always whether he spends it on good laws and good arms, or squanders it flattering his own side while poisoning half the republic as enemies. Memory is a sharp instrument; in a steady hand it cuts away corruption, in a reckless one it opens new wounds.

You tell me that, on this anniversary, political figures call on voters to back Republicans in the midterm elections. I do not pretend shock. No reform survives without arms of its own, and in a republic the first arms are parties, coalitions, and the revenues and offices that follow victory. If one faction believes itself more trusted on security, it will naturally yoke its appeal to the most searing image of danger in living memory. The princes of my day did the same with foreign invasions and the sackings of cities. The effectual truth is that 9/11 is now both a tragedy and a resource, and every ambitious man will try to mine it.

But here I must distinguish what is necessary from what is merely convenient. After a blow that kills thousands and drags thousands more to death over years, severity in security measures is not in itself corruption; ill‑used mercy that leaves citizens exposed is worse. Yet severity must be total in its design and limited in its scope. If leaders use the fear of another 9/11 only to win elections, while leaving the real defenses tangled in faction and half‑measures, they choose the middle course I most despise: they pay the price of alarm without purchasing safety. A people frightened often will eventually either submit to a strong hand or grow cynical and deaf to real danger.

The better path for a free state is harder. It is to treat every 9/11 commemoration as a ritorno ai principii, a return to first principles: what enemies threaten, what preparations truly reduce risk, what liberties must be guarded even in anger, and how to balance the ambitions of the great with the safety of the many. This demands that leaders sometimes resist the temptation to turn every march, every name read at a memorial, into a weapon for one party. Fear is a poor foundation for lasting authority; respect, born from visible competence and shared sacrifice, endures. A republic that remembers its wounds only to reopen them will sooner or later discover that fortune favors those who heal.