Just weeks after 9/11, Charles Krauthammer declared in these pages that our holiday from history—the 1990s—had come “to an abrupt end.” And the United States did get back to work—briefly. But it turns out that President George W. Bush’s exhortation in the aftermath of 9/11 that we should keep on shopping—though understandable and perhaps defensible in context—captured the broader truth: We were still on holiday. We still very much wanted to be on holiday.

So 9/11 turned out not to mark the end of the holiday. The 9/11 generation—those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those who still fight for us in defense of liberty and civilization—is the one group that really reported to duty. But the rest of us mostly drifted on, carried by the current, occasionally steering away from rocks and whirlpools, but mostly going nowhere fast and nowhere purposefully. Conservatives were preoccupied with yearning for a tantalizingly restorable past. Progressives made themselves busy proclaiming an imminent glorious future. Most of the country felt vaguely discontented but remained quiescent.