I think a lot has changed since 2001 and if 9/11 happened now, I highly doubt you’d see a United nation. The social and political split we see covered in the US transfers to so many topics.
It's hard for me to sort that out to a firm opinion, I suppose because of the hindsight we've all acquired. But if a strike anything like that of September 11 could or did occur again right now, seems to me first impulse here would be "how the F do you think you can get away with that... we're coming for ya, whoever you are."
BUT: so many people I know in the USA (on both right and left) do either question or regret the degree to which we Americans have allowed powerful interest groups and Congress to sell in "homeland security" as worth loss of some important civil liberties. Some of those losses persist to this day. And there's no stuffing back into a toothpaste tube all the subsequent gains in surveillance tech and the related usage and lawmaking.
OK, It's hard to say how much of at least surveillance technology advances might have happened without the impetus of the 9/11 attacks. We were already into a mode of "better mousetrap, better mice" evolution of snooping on each other electronically, even if only for the sake of corporate bottom lines in a consumerist economy.
I saw a terrifying stat on the news the other day that said America is losing 1500 people every 24 hours to Covid. That’s unbelievable.
It's horrendous and shameful, the worst stats of any of the "developed" nations.
What's unbelievable to me though is that there are so many millions on millions of unthinking [expletives deleted] in the USA. Really. I'm old so I've observed plenty of stupidity (and cruelty) committed by people not really thinking things through. Spitting at Vietnam Vets deplaning from their tours of duty comes to mind... and so does sending in young untrained members of the National Guard to quell an anti-war demonstration on a college campus.
What does the phrase "lessons learned" mean, anyway? All it takes is one idiot with the will and means to do violence, and after that fact then millions of people may quickly decide that millions of other people are to blame and equally likely to be violent idiots. (And if there are any people left who think choice of language itself doesn't break any bones, they really haven't been paying attention. Good diplomacy doesn't break any bones... but then one must have the will not to regard bone-breaking as desirable).
Still, this stuff ---the anti-masking, anti-vaxxing, anti-guidelines attitudes in the USA, all ginned up through extreme politicization by the GOP of a global pandemic, and all so clearly and up-in-your-facedly for the sake of power-lusting gotcha politics alone, is orders of magnitude beyond my previous ability to imagine the degree to which Americans could depart pretty basic education, common sense and moral values... and stay there for so long.
The speed with which this has occurred is pretty alarming. I understand populism expresses itself in waves, but this is not actually populist, and it certainly goes beyond what we saw in 2016, when truly populist impulses were tugging at us from both ends of our two-party political spectrum. The politicization now of everything covid-19 or otherwise in the USA is more about an ongoing hangover from 2020, a set of sore loser grudges, and it's really poisonous, really contagious and a really absurd drive to make everything on the planet into binary options: thumbs up or down, yes or no, with us or against us. There is no room for flexibility. Yet the coronavirus thrives on its own flexibility... and is playing us into our graves while we argue over waxing and waning needs for masks and guidelines on remote or in-person commerce.
Few things on earth are truly binary, including decisions on how to respond to a next terrorist attack. If we haven't learned that in 20 years then I do really fear for the Republic. Looking at how we respond to covid-19 in the USA, I feel entitled to at least some alarm.