redblueamerica.com

Every election is about "the future," to the point that candidates intoning about their "vision" for America is little more than a cliché of electoral politics. So what should the 2008 presidential election be "about"? Should it be about the candidates' biographies, their records of achievement, their character? Should it be about the failures, real and imagined, of the Bush administration? Should it be about the economy? How about the war?

Stephen Flynn, whose essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs I discussed the other day, argues that the election should be about American resilience. Flynn also published a book last year, The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation, which I ordered over the weekend. Although the book is about a year old, it seems highly relevant to the debate we should be having today. I'll try to review it soon. But I think Flynn is correct. Self-government is meaningless if the people cannot care for themselves or their families without thinking first, second or third about what big government can do for them.

The key is to understand the role of government in fostering that resilience.

How does an abstraction translate into policy? For starters, the United States has a critical infrastructure problem. Last year's bridge collapse in Minneapolis was but a symptom. In Southern California, where I live, the regional association of county governments estimates the cost of upgrading highways and railways to accomodate a growing population and expanding international commerce will top $560 billion over the next 25 years. Again, that's just in Southern California. Imagine another disaster -- natural or manmade -- requiring a whole city or a region to evacuate en masse. Take an image like this and multiply it by 1,000.

Maintaining and improving interstate highways and railways needs to be a national priority, not another deferred obligation. But there is no way taxpayers can foot the bill entirely. The private sector can and should play a role. For-profit toll roads are one option that policymakers should embrace.

But our challenge is greater than repairing crumbling roads and bridges. Toll roads aren't a cure-all. Rather, Flynn argues -- persuasively, in my view -- that the models for reinvigorating American resilience are the heroes of United 93.

"In retrospect," Flynn writes,

it is remarkable that the events of September 11 have been used to elevate the role of professional warriors, spies, and cops at the expense of enlisting citizens to assist in securing the nation. Unfortunately, the prevailing interpretation of that day focuses almost entirely on the three airliners that struck the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. President George W. Bush has concluded from those attacks that the U.S. government needs to do whatever it takes to hunt down its enemies before they kill innocent civilians again.

But it is the story of United Airlines flight 93, the thwarted fourth plane, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field, that ought to be the dominant 9/11 narrative. That plane's passengers foiled al Qaeda without any help from -- and in spite of the inaction of -- the U.S. government. There were no federal air marshals aboard the aircraft. The North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, could not intercept it; it did not even know that the plane had been hijacked. Yet United 93 was stopped 140 miles from its likely destination -- the U.S. Capitol or the White House -- because of the actions of the passengers who stormed the cockpit. Of all the passengers on the four 9/11 planes, only those aboard United 93 knew their hijackers' intention. ... Americans should celebrate -- and ponder -- the reality that the legislative and executive centers of the U.S. federal government, whose constitutional duty is to "provide for the common defense," were themselves defended that day by one thing alone: an alert and heroic citizenry.

The story of United 93 also raises a serious question that the 9/11 Commission failed to examine: might the passengers on the other three planes have reacted, too, if they had known the hijackers' plans? The 9/11 Commission documents that in the years leading up to the attacks on New York and Washington, a number of people inside the U.S. government had collected intelligence suggesting that terrorists were interested in using passenger airliners as weapons. But because that information was viewed as sensitive, the government never shared it with the public. What if it had been widely publicized? How would the passengers aboard the first three jets have behaved?

What should the next president should do? Flynn suggests: "The next president needs to embrace the United 93 story ... in order to reawaken the spirit of community and volunteerism witnessed throughout the nation in the months immediately following 9/11. If U.S. history is a guide, people will respond to the call to service. They only need to be asked."