American politics havent been the same since Sept. 11, 2001. Heres why.

Thirteen years ago today, two planes struck the World Trade Center towers. One smashed into the Pentagon. A fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.  While it's a cliche to suggest that everything changed that day, it's clear that American politics — the art (and science) of understanding and channeling public opinion into legislation and leadership — has been radically altered over the intervening years.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, there was a rally-around-the-flag effect the likes of which hadn't been seen in post-World War II America. President George W. Bush, who had struggled to move beyond his narrow and protracted victory over Al Gore in the 2000 election, became a massively popular figure overnight.

That chart above in many ways tracks with how the public dealt with the attacks of Sept. 11.  After the initial burst of patriotism came the long reckoning with what it meant that terrorists could reach us in our biggest cities and how, whether and how much the federal government should or could do about it. But, that broader conversation didn't happen immediately.

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The 2002 election was dominated by tough talk — and tough attacks — about how politicians should react to the emergent terrorist threat. The ad that, for better or worse, typified where we were as a country was this one run by then-Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R) against Georgia Sen. Max Cleland (D).

Democrats cried foul, insisting that the ad questioned the patriotism of a man who had lost three limbs while fighting in Vietnam. Chambliss won.

The following presidential election was, again, almost entirely dominated by what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 — and how to keep it from happening again. Bush's approval ratings were sliding — largely because of creeping doubts about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — but the message that he had kept the country safe since Sept. 11 was a powerful emotional appeal. This ad, titled "Safer, Stronger", drove home that message.

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By the middle of the last decade, however, the country had begun to examine the costs — economic and psychic — of our post-Sept. 11 approach. Suddenly, Bush's appeals to the country's common patriotism began to ring hollow for more and more people, and Democrats began to speak out more forcefully on national security  matters — including their concerns about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Worth noting: The plummet in Bush's approval ratings was due, yes, in part to the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (which had been cited as one of the factors justifying the war) but more so due to his handling of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005.)

The 2006 midterms were a pivot point in the debate over what Sept. 11 meant — and how we should react. The sound rejection of Bush and his party signaled the doubts among large swaths of the American public as to whether what had happened earlier in the decade was the right reaction — or an overreaction — to the attacks of September 2001.  (The rethinking included questions about the Patriot Act, which had been passed in 2001 and reauthorized in the summer of 2005.)

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Those doubts coalesced in the candidacy of then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who had come to national attention when he publicly opposed the war in Iraq — he described it as a "dumb war" in a speech in 2002.  Obama, more so than anyone else in the Democratic or Republican race, understood that American sentiment about how the country had reacted to Sept. 11, 2001, had changed in the seven years since the attacks. (Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose entire presidential campaign was premised on his role helping rebuild after the attacks, didn't win a single delegate.) Obama was attacked — first in the primary by Hillary Clinton in the famous/infamous "3 a.m." ad, then in the general election by John McCain — as insufficiently experienced or committed to keeping the country safe. It didn't work.  He won easily.

Think of those seven years as action and reaction. The country moved strongly in one direction between 2001 and 2004 and then snapped back strongly in the other direction between 2005 and 2008. The last six years have been less predictable than the seven that preceded; fears remain (as evidenced by the strong support for airstrikes against Islamic State militants) but they are leavened by serious doubts about the institutions that we once held dear — from government to the church to the media.

Gallup, which regularly polls how much faith people have in institutions, has found that  many have reached — or approached — all-time lows in trust of late. Of the 17 institutions Gallup tested in June, only three — the military, the police and small business — win a majority of people's trust.

That eroding trust in, well, everything, has become the defining political reality of our time. (It's tied closely to a growing pessimism in the public and a sense that, no, things won't always just keep getting better for future generations.) As we have written previously, that lack of trust — combined with a lingering-if-back-of-the-mind unease about just how safe we are — has led to a sense of a country adrift, unmoored from the realities that once governed it and our lives, but without a new set of principles on which to grab hold.

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President Obama addressed that unease in a speech — oddly enough — at a fundraiser in Seattle in late July. He said (bolding is mine):

The rise of libertarianism — and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — is a direct reaction to the growing distrust and doubt about whom we can trust and what it really means to be an American in 2014. Paul's push for a complete overhaul of American foreign policy toward one far more skeptical about foreign entanglements has found considerable support from a country deeply skeptical that America can or should play world cop. (Four in 10 Americans said in a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll that the United States should be "less active" in world affairs, compared with 27 percent who said the country should be more active.) That debate will be at the center of not only the 2016 Republican primary — where several of Paul's rivals have blasted his views — but also the general election fight against presumed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who spent four years as President Obama's top diplomat.

That means that 15 years on from the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that day — and what it meant — will continue to be at the forefront of the national conversation between politicians and the people they hope to represent. The truth is that politicians, like the rest of us, continue to grapple with how 9/11 changed us — in ways good and bad.  That process is ongoing.

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