It’s 9/11 again – and almost nobody is commemorating the anniversary. It didn’t even occur to me to use my print column space for the purpose, given all the ongoing current horrors. But since I have a bit of time before my 14-hour flight, I thought I’d take a few minutes to talk about what was supposed to happen after 9/11, but didn’t.

In the weeks and months after the atrocity, news media had a narrative about what it meant – basically, that it was a Pearl Harbor moment that brought America together with a new seriousness and resolve. This was comforting and reassuring. It was also totally false, literally from the first minutes.

The truth, as we now know, is that Bush administration officials rejoiced, even as the fires were still burning, at the opportunity they now had to fight the unrelated war they always wanted. But that wasn’t all: Republicans in Congress also saw opportunity for partisan gain from the start. Within less than two days Congressional staffers were telling me about GOP efforts to exploit the atrocity to ram through a cut in capital gains taxes.

The thing was, people just didn’t want to hear about this reality. When I wrote a column relaying what was happening in Congress, I was flooded with angry mail from readers – readers angry not at Republicans for exploiting the event, but at me for reporting it. “How can I tell that to my young son?” wrote one furious correspondent.

It took years for people to accept the shameful truth. And it took even longer for the news media: a plurality of voters had concluded that the Iraq war was sold with lies long before it was considered acceptable to say this in polite company.

Why didn’t 9/11 change anything? Partly because unlike Pearl Harbor, terrorism wasn’t and isn’t an existential threat. Yes, it’s scary; but you had to be an idiot to think that there was any risk of an Islamic takeover of the West. This meant that domestic political villains felt free both to continue their villainy and to treat terror just as another thing to exploit.

Beyond that, by 2001 we were already deep into extreme polarization driven by the radicalization of the GOP. (No, it’s not “both sides.”) Anyone who says that Trump has made the Republican Party unrecognizable has forgotten about Tom DeLay.

In fact, you have to wonder what the response to Pearl Harbor would have been if the GOP of 1941 had been what it was in 2001. I suspect Republicans would have declared that it was FDR’s fault and opposed government borrowing to pay for World War II, not to mention price controls and rationing.

In any case, at this point we can see that 9/11’s place in the American story ended up being almost the opposite of Pearl Harbor’s. The first day of infamy brought the country together and showed our fundamental strength. The second tore us further apart, and highlighted our political decay.