Nine years later, the main fact of our lives is the overwhelming force of unreason. Evidence, knowledge, argument, proportionality, nuance, complexity, and the other indispensable tools of the liberal mind don’t stand a chance these days against the actual image of a mob burning an effigy, or the imagined image of a man burning a mound of books. Reason tries in its patient, level-headed way to explain, to question, to weigh competing claims, but it can hardly make itself heard and soon gives up. A Florida preacher with a congregation barely twice the number of the September 11th hijackers can rivet the world—will he do it, or won’t he? Where will the first post-Koran-burning terror attack happen, and how many people will die? The media senses a big story and makes him an international figure, with the tautological self-defense that he had become a big story. Halfway around the globe, in Jalalabad, Afghans riot, someone is killed, and Obama is burned in effigy—Obama, whom twenty per cent of Americans believe to be a Muslim, who has used whatever moral authority he has to stop the Florida nut from doing it. One man in Gainesville who represents next to nobody triggers thousands of men around the globe who know next to nothing about it to turn violent, which triggers more violence, which Fox and Al Jazeera air relentlessly, which makes people in front of TVs around the world go crazy.

Nine years later, it’s so easy to get people to go crazy. If I wanted to, I could probably start another India-Pakistan war all by myself, or incite some quiet office worker in Reston, Virginia, to try to overthrow the United States government. Right after 9/11, a man named Frank Roque, from Mesa, Arizona, shot and killed an Indian-born gas-station owner, threatened a gas station attendant of Lebanese descent, and fired shots into the house of an Afghan family. It was a horrible story, somehow made worse by Roque’s ignorance and stupidity (the murdered man was a bearded, turban-wearing Sikh, not a Muslim). Under arrest, Roque yelled, infuriatingly, “I stand for America all the way!” President Bush made a point of denouncing him. It was a little remarkable that there weren’t more Frank Roques in those early days. We Americans congratulated ourselves for our tolerance and restraint. If an atrocity on the scale of 9/11 had been perpetrated in any number of other countries, people belonging to the religion of the perpetrators would have been hunted down and lynched by the score. Instead, the President joined an interfaith service, and the mayor of New York talked about equal citizenship, and Oprah devoted a show to Islam. We had a right to feel pretty good about ourselves.

Nine years later, no, Frank Roque has not won the day. Not even Terry Jones is Frank Roque. Crazy, murderous violence hasn’t spread across the land. But unreason, cheered on by cable news, has won the day. We have undeniably gone sour on interfaith tolerance. We have turned inward in sullen exhaustion. The staggering chain of consequences and characters that followed 9/11—Kabul, Tora Bora, Daniel Pearl, John Yoo, Bagram, Guantánamo, Baghdad, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Madrid, Falluja, Abu Ghraib, Nick Berg, London, Zarqawi, military commissions, Samarra, eavesdropping, Sean Hannity, the Taliban’s return, Benazir Bhutto, Mumbai, Hakimullah Mehsud—seems like a fever dream of can-you-top-this atrocities from which we can’t wake up. The bill is finally coming due at home. It turned out that the Bush rhetoric of religious understanding and freedom was a lot less potent and durable than the Bush policies. Our Wilsonian phase just took too much effort, required too much suspension of deeper, stronger feelings. And we are out of it now. In Wilsonian terms, we are around the year 1919 or 1920. The noble mission to make the world safe for democracy ended inconclusively, and its aftermath has curdled into an atmosphere more like that of the Palmer raids and the second coming of the Klan. This is why Obama seems less and less able to speak to and for our times. He’s the voice of reason incarnate, and maybe he’s too sane to be heard in either Jalalabad or Georgia. An epigraph for our times appears in Jonathan Franzen’s new novel “Freedom”: “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”