I was in New York City on September 11, 2001. I remember the event and its aftermath. I recall that the fear in the city was palpable. In the days after the attacks, I started to see this fear reflected at the national, political level, among lawmakers, and eventually in the laws they passed. The Patriot Act, passed with near-unanimous support in the Senate, emerged from this climate of fear.
There is much about the Patriot Act which has since been rethought. It has been seen as at best an overreach and at worst Constitutionally dubious, leading to no-fly lists and the discriminatory targeting of Muslims. Given how controversial it has become, it is important to remember how reasonable the Act seemed at the time it was passed, how, gripped as we were by fear, we were able to see its broad provisions for the pursuit of terrorists as a rational response to the threat we seemed to face.
Nearly two decades after September 11, 2001, March 2020 put us in a similar state of fear, with the emergence of a novel pathogen that would eventually reach a point where it would kill each day roughly as many Americans as 9/11 did. As the new coronavirus swept the world, the fear of it was amplified across a range of media. Headlines from that time reflect how quickly we came to see the virus as a threat:
“Experts worry about pandemic as coronavirus numbers increase: report,” in Fox News on February 3, 2020.
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