On the morning of September 11, 2001, America’s prospects appeared as bright as the clear blue sky over Lower Manhattan. The price of Brent crude oil was $28 a barrel, the Federal government was running a budget surplus, the US economy was turning (albeit imperceptibly) after the dotcom crash. The most powerful nation on earth was at peace. - Lionel Barber writing in the Financial Times this month. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f6acf1a6-d54d-11e0-bd7e-00144feab49a.html#axzz1YO3YiwoT

The prevailing conditions on that crystalline morning were unfavorable. Politically, the country was entrenched in two bitterly opposed camps. A few moderate Republicans, like Senator Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island, and Southern Democrats, like Senator Max Cleland, of Georgia, still survived in Congress, but their extinction was foreseeable. In a two-year period, the House’s impeachment of Bill Clinton and the Florida recount that was stopped by a similarly divided Supreme Court, handing the Presidency to Bush, had suddenly made America’s great democratic institutions seem flimsy and entirely partisan. During the 2000 election campaign, the news media came up with a new, color-coded way of dividing the country—into red and blue. On the economic front, America was in a recession, the dot-com bubble having already burst. A culture of speculation and debt on Wall Street was beginning to suffer from its own lopsidedness, with unprecedented fortunes in technology and finance accumulating at the top, and incomes in the middle flattening out, as blue-collar jobs moved offshore. The problem of income inequality was worsening, thanks to enormous tax cuts that had been passed into law that spring. The budget surplus of the Clinton years was vanishing. Around Surry County, the smaller textile mills were closing down. - George Packer writing in the New Yorker this month. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/09/12/110912fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all