In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, commentators from then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to UBC academic Sunera Thobani urged Americans to examine “root causes” to the event before reacting indiscriminately. “Search for root causes” was a cry picked up and echoed throughout the intellectual community around the world.

American proponents of war strongly countered that all calls for a search for root causes were merely covers for cowardice in the face of a challenge.

Throughout that debate, which continues in intellectual back-eddies to this day, both sides have never questioned which terrorism we were talking about. Now that we know that the perpetrators of the crime were agents of the American government, the call for a search for root causes needs to be restated.

Too simplistic, again

Those who believe September 11 was in some way an inside job have been guilty of the same knee-jerk indiscriminate reaction to the event as the war-mongers have been. That is, those who see agents of the American government as the ultimate source of the attack have avoided analyzing the attack’s root causes, choosing instead to characterize the perpetrators as simply evil.

But just as “evil” fails to suffice as an explanation for those who see Arab suicide bombers behind the act, it also fails to suffice for those who see agents of the American government behind it. A valid and popular critique of all theories that locate the source of the attack inside America itself is that it is unlikely Americans would kill Americans. Only crazed fundamentalist Arabs would be capable of wreaking such horrifying carnage, goes the critique, and though Americans might shoot fellow Americans more than any other people in the world shoot themselves, and though agencies of the American government have in the past intentionally exposed American citizens to great risk and death, and though Americans have perpetrated similar carnage in the recent past as in Oklahoma, it is admittedly difficult to imagine that sane, rational agents of the American government would plan and carry out this kind of attack at this kind of level.

But since we know they did, we must now restart the whole search for root causes from the beginning again to try to understand how and why sane and rational people in the American government might in complete sobriety choose to plot and execute such an act. In the same way intellectuals called for a calm and reasoned search for root causes when everyone believed it was Arab fundamentalists who perpetrated the crime, we must now call for a similarly calm and reasoned search for root causes now that we know it was agents of the American government who perpetrated the crime.

In the same way, also, that root causes were subsequently identified in the complex matrix of social and economic history of Arab nations, so too are the root causes of the real form of the attack to be found in the complex matrix of social and economic history of America.

Back to the 1960s

The big forces at play in recent American social history in the years leading up to September 11 were generated in the social revolution of the 1960s and the subsequent launch of a counter-revolution by conservatives in a battle that went down in the books as The Culture Wars. The point of view of the side that brought the revolution is well known and sufficiently documented in the annals of feminism, the Civil Rights movement and the Woodstock generation. What hasn’t been so widely considered or documented is the point of view of the side that brought the counterrevolution, a counter-revolution that reached its apotheosis on September 11.

However, the Reagan presidency, the rise of the Christian fundamentalist political movement, and the appearance of the neocons—stalwarts of the counter-revolution—are, like Abby Hoffman, rock and roll, and the appearance of the environmentalists, only symptoms or manifestations of the underlying social tumult. Naming the perpetrators does not answer the question of root causes, just as naming 19 Arabs as the hijackers didn’t.

The root causes of the real September 11 go deeper than that. To find the strand that leads to that disastrous day, we need to go back to the 1960s revolution, and even further back to the demographic trend that gave rise to it, the baby boom, a phenomenon that gave the boomer generation freedoms unavailable to earlier generations. Likewise, the key to the subsequent counterrevolution is also to be found in demographics. It is the post-1965 sustained decline in birthrates that, a generation after 1965, brought the social counter-revolution to America.

That is the one demographic trend that all the leaders of the counterrevolution explicitly point to over and over again when accounting for the urgency of their cause. And that demographic trend is directly related to the key aspect of the 1960s social revolution: feminism. Feminism in the eyes of the counterrevolutionaries led American-born women away from child-birthing and into careers. The birthrate among American-born women remains today just barely above the rate necessary to replace deaths, but it has declined steadily over the decades and may well go the way of Japanese, Italian, Canadian and other Western birthrates, which are already below the rate necessary to replace deaths, if trends continue unchecked.

Must grow

Western economies have for centuries been constructed entirely around constant growth to such an extent that there are no available zero or negative-growth economic models out there. So far as anyone knows, without growth, there can be no capitalist economy. And economic growth occurs over the long term only as long as there is constant population growth. As the economy is the source of all national power, and as the modern Western economies, such as America’s, are exclusively based on growth models, and as economic growth is almost entirely dependent on population growth, the imminent failure of American-born women to produce babies at a rate necessary to grow the population faster than death lowers it, metastasizes into a threat to American power itself, and America without predominant power in the world is no longer America at all. Liberated American women are truly a genuine and sobering existential threat to America in this point of view.

National existential threats, once perceived, call forth any level of response by the national government necessary. In fact, agents of a national government that perceive an existential threat to the nation are required as a top priority to mount a defence of any kind to thwart it. The last time America perceived an existential threat was in the 1860s, when the southern states attempted to secede from the union. In speeches by the president, Abraham Lincoln, and in the actions of the Union Army, which led to the biggest rate of death of Americans of any period in the nation’s history, it is clear that when it comes to the protection of the existence of the state, no holds are barred. In that context, how unbelievable is it really that, perceiving another existential threat to America, agents of the US government would think up a plan such as September 11?

You can see their point

The theory is certainly plausible and for those who see it, no level of action necessary to thwart it can ever be evil or insane. The declining natural-born birthrate in America is a true phenomenon and a reasonable person could certainly conclude it ultimately threatens American power if not the nation’s very existence. It is also certainly true that the declining birthrate is a direct product of the women’s liberation movement which was a key feature of the 1960s social revolution. To safeguard America’s very existence, therefore, a reasonable person who feels responsible to thwart the risk would conclude that to set American power back on a sustainable footing would require a guaranteed growing economy, and a growing economy requires a growing American-born natural birthrate. To achieve that, it would appear perfectly rational to seek to overturn key tenets of feminism, a project that would require a counter-revolution of the cultural changes wrought by the 1960s.

Freedom, liberation and peace were, in addition to feminism, hallmarks of the 1960s social revolution and are necessary counterparts to it. Therefore, freedom, liberation, and peace, in addition to feminism, are also threats to America’s existence in the minds of the counterrevolutionaries. To portray these products of the social revolution as threats instead of the good things they generally have been understood to be, counterrevolutionaries have redefined them as promiscuity, licentiousness, moral relativism, cowardice and naivité.

Abortion, the flashpoint between women’s liberation and the counterrevolutionaries’ aims, is by no surprise a perennial key issue in American politics, being as it is the literal culling of new, very necessary, babies. It is also no surprise that, given the momentum September 11 handed the counterrevolution, the actions of the American government in the resulting milieu have been very focused on retracting freedom, liberation and peace, feminism’s supporting pillars in the 1960s social revolution, all under the guise of preventing the kind of terrorism the counterrevolutionaries themselves produced.