Comment by jeswin

>The Twin Towers sort of represented the height of American power and prestige, and their fall kicked off the decline

no. The twin towers opened in 1973 at a time when NYC was becoming a hollowed out urban core. "New York City never officially declared bankruptcy, but it came very close in 1975 due to severe financial distress. The city faced a fiscal crisis, and through negotiations involving unions and state assistance, it managed to avoid formal bankruptcy" [wikipedia] The buildings were not a commercial success and suffered vacanies and low rents. This is the reason that they were not rebuilt, but rather a smaller building was erected in their place. (one of the problems with tall commercial buildings is that they require a non-trivial amount of elevator square feet in the middle of each tower; this is sq footage that does not make money. if you look at tall buildings being built today, they are almost all residential structures. The require less elevator because the number of people in each apartment is far smaller than the number of people in offices)

New York City only bounced back financially during the Reagan revolution. The Democrat party was dead in the water at that time (similar to today) but it bounced back when Clinton came from out of nowhere (a place called Hope!) to win. but looking back today, Clinton was part of the "hollowing out the economy, sending it to China" (I'm not blaming nor absolving here, that type of idea was popular in economics. It didn't work because it turns out the world is not a nice place where opening up to China and Russia turns out not to open up in the other direction (and also because economic efficiency entails "in efficient markets, economic profits go to zero" and everybody except consumers doesn't like that, and consumers don't like it either on the other side of their ledger, their jobs))

>diverted critical funds from development... into conflict and war far away.

defense spending is not and was not a major factor wrt spending in the economy

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/pub...

I firmly believe that the 9/11 terrorists won. They got what they wanted, which is exactly what you describe. They also destroyed the optimism and energy of our culture. I lived through that time, and we have never recovered. The malaise of today started on 9/11/2001.

What we should have done is, as a symbolic act, rebuild the towers exactly as they were (with some structural improvements maybe) and go about our business. We should have gone after the terrorists as an international police action and not much more.

That would have been a symbol of true strength. "No, your little act of vandalism won't have any effect on us at all. We are above that." Be like the "wall" archetype in fiction, the huge guy someone punches as hard as they can and they barely notice.

Instead we showed stupidity and weakness disguised as strength, something we're now wallowing in with a whole culture revolving around fake strength and compensatory narcissism. Nothing says dying nation like gold plating everything.

The majority of development in the US is private. It hasn't been redirected to war. What's primarily happened is that Americans decided that the '90s were the perfect decade and if you build anything past that you are "ruining the" [community|environment|neighborhood].

Everything new is "gross" for the people who are on their fifth year of therapy with no end in sight. It's always someone else's fault but don't change anything because community character is the most important thing.

> and their fall kicked off the decline

My feeling is that the response was the thing that kicked off the decline. At the time of the attack, the US had quite a bit of goodwill around the world. The US could have surgically gone after the people responsible, with minimum civilian deaths, and most of the world would have backed them to the hilt, and the US would have come out stronger. Instead we had spurious claims of weapons of mass destruction, the coalition of the "willing" going into Iraq with jackboots on, over the widespread objections of their own populations, and abuses in Guantanamo Bay. That response burned an awful lot of goodwill around the world: which kicked off the decline.

The 1970s weren't exactly a prosperous time period. The total end of the gold standard marked the real decline.

China's rise wasn't "inevitable" it was underwritten when Nixon went to China and they subsequently got their most favored trading nation status.

I couldn’t help feel the same.

Looking at where America is right now. It seems to make a downfall.

It is - seriously - no wonder they got destroyed. NYC is a symbol, and the towers were a recognizable icon in the skyline.

There's a high number of coincidences about the towers getting destroyed. It's no conspiracy, it's because the towers and NYC meant something in the eyes of the world with regards to the USA.

Just rattling off a few of the wild ones:

The episode of The Lone Gunmen which predicted an attack with a plane on the towers.

The Sega Master System game (I forget the name, but I own it) where it depicts a missile hitting the towers on the opening screen. It's pixels with little wings, and super spooky in retrospect.

The Dream Theater live album released on 9/11 which showed the NYC skyline burning.

There's so much stuff, I almost don't blame the conspiracy theorists. But they have the causality backwards. They also really like to ignore the fact that 8 years earlier somebody tried to blow up the towers and killed 6 people...

Its fall showed, that cultural relativism and universal liberalism, where just western delusions. Socialism was a dead ideology by then, but this really attacked western values, insofar, that a dried husk of a imperialist religious ideology, revived with western demand for natural resources (oil) would rather engage in cultural warfare upon western values and society then trying to fix itself.

It was a ringing bell, bringing the attention back to the old ugly worldorder of great games, land-empires and bloody conquest and the inability to isolate from hostile ideologies, even if you are the usa and living on a giant island. Bush went to iraq and the failure to build any working state there- showed not only the failure of neoncons, but also of the whole "all cultures are equal" and academic impotence. There explanation models had nothing for this but tired rehashes of colonial/anti-colonial ideology, no predictions, no real help, just "belief in universal values and western culture, and righton" - and that was it. No help for the 2 billion stuck in religious ember, not real analysis to free the wasted geniuses trapped under burkas. Silence, ideology and absence, thats whats left.