For all the talk of how 9/11 brought Americans together, it's hard to think of a more politically divisive event. Conflicts over the meaning of the attacks and the U.S. response remain just as intense today as they were a decade ago, if not more. Here's how liberal, conservative, and libertarian magazines are covering the 10th anniversary.

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The 9/11 Reader, Part One
We sift through the anniversary coverage, so you don't have to

From the left:

THE NATION

In the lead editorial for their 9/11-themed issue, the Nation's editors lament America's missed opportunity to take advantage of the national solidarity that followed the attacks:

Lost, too, was the chance for a politics built around the kind of social solidarity embodied by those first responders and expressed by the society so moved by their sacrifice. Instead, thanks largely to the administration of George W. Bush, we got a politics of fear that helped launch a long "war on terror," which in turn gave us a lost decade of American life.

Following on the editorial, the pieces in the issue mainly focus on critiquing U.S. overreach in the years following the attacks. Jonathan Schell writes that during the years of George W. Bush's administration, "the foreign policy as well as the domestic politics of the United States were revolving like a pinwheel around Al Qaeda and the global threat it allegedly posed." David K. Shipler calls attention to the loss of civil liberties in the United States over the last decade. David Cole worries that justice has still not been done for victims of torture in the war on terror. Ariel Dorfman remembers another 9/11, the 1973 coup against Chile's left-wing government.

An interesting counterpoint to the Nation's coverage is Christopher Hitchens's latest column in Slate. On Sept. 11, 2001, Hitchens was a columnist at the Nation. But over the next few years, disillusioned by what he perceived as the left's inability to challenge radical Islam, Hitchens broke with the Nation and its fellow-travelers more generally. His new piece, which argues that the defining aspect of the attacks was their evil nature and that "attempts to introduce 'complexity' into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions" shows how deep that divide remains.

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

The editors of the Prospect, which has emerged as something of a house journal for D.C.'s liberal policy wonks, also argues that post-9/11 America suffers from self-inflicted wounds:

Ten years after the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, the United States is in bad shape, but our problems have little to do with what al-Qaeda did to us. America's troubles stem from what the country has done to itself-or rather, from what our political leaders have done with the nation's power and resources.

David K. Shipler turns up again with a piece on civil liberties, Kim Lane Scheppele looks at 9/11's impact on international law, Beenish Ahmed reflects on what the last 10 years have meant for Muslim Americans, and historian Rick Perlstein turns in yet another piece about squandered solidarity.

Soon-to-be-departing staff writer Adam Serwer manages to find a rare original angle, looking at how the post-9/11 security state contributed to Washington, D.C.'s growing economic inequality.

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