I woke up early this morning. Really early. 3:30 a.m. early. The kind of early where your brain decides sleep is overrated and would instead like to review the entire history of Western civilization. Then I noticed the date: 9/11. I knew September 11 was coming, of course, but somehow it arrived faster than I expected. Time does that as you get older. Childhood summers lasted approximately seventeen years. Now entire decades apparently go by between dentist appointments.

And yet, 25 years after that terrible morning, I can still remember it with uncomfortable clarity. I was getting ready for work with the television on when I saw smoke pouring from one of the Twin Towers. Like millions of Americans, I was trying to understand what I was seeing when the second plane hit. That was the moment confusion turned into horror. There are certain moments in life when the world seems to divide cleanly into before and after. September 11 was one of those moments for me, and I think for the country as a whole.

So those memories were running through my head at 3:30 this morning, because apparently my brain felt that was the perfect time for a cheerful little retrospective on terrorism, national trauma, civil liberties, propaganda, democracy, and the possible decline of the American republic. Thanks, brain.

What I remember most wasn’t only the terror we saw. It was the feeling underneath it, the thought that this doesn’t happen here. America was the place where we watched horrible things happen somewhere else on television. Wars happened somewhere else. Cities were bombed somewhere else. Mass-casualty terrorism belonged to distant places most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. Until it didn’t.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed that morning. Families were destroyed. First responders walked into buildings knowing they might never walk back out. An entire country watched human beings jump from skyscrapers because the alternative was burning alive. That kind of trauma doesn’t simply disappear when the smoke clears. But looking back now, September 11 seems like more than a terrible day in American history. It feels like a turning point. Not necessarily the cause of everything that followed. History is rarely that simple. But a turning point nonetheless.

After 9/11 came wars, heightened surveillance, new security agencies, and the Patriot Act. Some of those measures were understandable. A frightened country wanted protection. When people have just watched airplanes turned into weapons, “Do something” becomes an extremely powerful political argument. But history teaches us something uncomfortable… governments tend to accumulate power during emergencies, and they are rarely enthusiastic about giving all of it back afterward.

Then came the Edward Snowden revelations, and Americans learned just how enormous the government’s surveillance capabilities had become. Somewhere along the way, privacy began feeling less like a right and more like something we had apparently clicked “I Agree” to surrender without reading the terms and conditions. And that bothers me, because the damage inflicted on America on September 11 wasn’t limited to two towers, the Pentagon, Flight 93, and thousands of lives. Some of the damage was psychological. Some was political. Some was institutional. And some of it, I fear, we inflicted on ourselves afterward.

There is an old quote by Benjamin Franklin said in 1755 that kept floating around my head this morning: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Yeah, that one. Franklin understood something extraordinarily important: fear makes freedom negotiable. And once a society starts treating liberty as something that can be temporarily exchanged for safety, the word temporarily can become remarkably flexible.

What troubles me today is that I don’t think the erosion of American liberties ended with the post-9/11 security state. It has continued, and in recent years, accelerated. We’ve watched enormous fights over women’s control of their own bodies. We’ve seen disturbing cases involving immigration enforcement and questions of due process. We’ve watched minorities, religious groups, gay and transgender Americans, immigrants, and others become convenient political targets. And the language used worries me. Especially when entire groups of people begin being described not as fellow citizens or neighbors, but as threats, invaders, degenerates, enemies, or people who somehow don’t belong. That kind of rhetoric has a history. And history is the part that scares me.

When I was at Baylor, I studied Nazi Germany and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. I remember being fascinated and horrified by one question: How could ordinary people allow this to happen? Germany had universities. Scientists. Artists. Business owners. Churches. Newspapers. Educated people. Families raising children and worrying about mortgages and going to work every morning. They weren’t cartoon villains.

So how did a modern society surrender democracy to authoritarianism? How did people come to accept things that, years earlier, many of them would have considered unthinkable? When I was young, I understood the mechanics intellectually: economic instability, fear, national humiliation, scapegoating, political violence, propaganda, and a charismatic strongman promising simple solutions to complicated problems. I learned about Goebbels’ propaganda machine and how effectively it manipulated German public opinion. But understanding something in a textbook is very different from watching versions of those psychological mechanisms operate around you in real time. And that has taught me something I didn’t fully appreciate when I was twenty years old. And that is people are astonishingly easy to manipulate when they are afraid, angry, and convinced that everyone else is the one being manipulated.

That last part may be the most important. Effective propaganda does not announce itself: HELLO. I AM PROPAGANDA. I WILL NOW MANIPULATE YOUR WORLDVIEW. If only. Good propaganda feels like truth. It confirms what you already suspect. It tells you that your anger is justified. It gives you someone to blame. It tells you that you’re one of the smart people who sees what’s really happening. And then it convinces you that everyone watching the other television network is brainwashed. That’s the genius of it. The person being manipulated usually feels like the only person in the room who isn’t.

I want to be very clear about something. America is not Nazi Germany. Historical analogies can become ridiculous very quickly, especially when every politician someone dislikes becomes Hitler by lunchtime. But history doesn’t have to repeat itself perfectly for history to be useful.

Democracies rarely wake up one Tuesday morning and announce, “Good news, everyone. Democracy has been canceled“. Institutions weaken gradually. Norms get broken. Political opponents become enemies. Enemies become traitors. Minorities become scapegoats. Independent institutions become obstacles. The press becomes “the enemy.” Loyalty to a person begins replacing loyalty to institutions. Each individual step can seem survivable. It’s the direction of travel that matters. And when I studied authoritarianism in college, I always wondered what it would feel like to live during one of those periods when people didn’t yet know how the story ended. I think I understand that feeling better now. And I don’t particularly enjoy it.

Did September 11 cause all of this? No. That would be far too simple. America’s political problems have many causes: economic inequality, cultural change, social media, political polarization, declining trust in institutions, globalization, demographic change, partisan media, economic disruption, and a thousand other forces interacting with one another. The world itself is changing, too. The United States will not dominate the global economy forever in the same way it did after World War II. Other countries are rising. Technology is transforming work. Artificial intelligence may disrupt society on a scale we’re only beginning to understand. Periods of major transition make people anxious. Anxious people become politically vulnerable. And vulnerable societies sometimes make very bad decisions.

So no, September 11 didn’t create everything that followed. But I do wonder whether it opened a psychological door causing us to become more frightened, accept more surveillance, accept more government power, and thinking more about security before liberty. Perhaps, little by little, that changed what Americans were willing to tolerate. But what strikes me most this morning is how permanent that day turned out to be. On September 12, 2001, I assumed the trauma would eventually fade, the buildings would be rebuilt, the wars would end, life would return to normal, and America would heal. In many ways, it did. But in other ways, I don’t think we ever completely left that morning.

The fear changed us, the politics changed us, the government changed, the country changed, and maybe some of us changed without realizing it. Twenty-five years later, I still remember watching smoke rise from those towers and feeling that something enormous had just happened. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the real consequences would continue unfolding for decades. And that’s the part that still unsettles me.

Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives that morning. We should remember them. We should remember the firefighters running upstairs while everyone else was running down. We should remember the families who received phone calls that became final goodbyes. But I think honoring that day also means remembering what America claimed to stand for before it happened: liberty, pluralism, due process, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the idea that government power should have limits. Those aren’t inconveniences that get in the way of keeping us safe. They’re the things worth keeping safe. And 25 years later, at 3:30 in the morning, that’s what I find myself worrying about most.