Twenty-five years after September 11th, has America finally understood what it was actually fighting?

A provocative new Daily Signal essay argues America spent decades fighting terrorism while failing to confront the ideology capable of producing it. At nearly the same moment, Victor Davis Hanson asks whether America’s socialist movement really transformed the Democratic Party—or whether the party had already changed enough to produce the movement itself.

Different subjects. Different stakes. One fascinating question:

Do radical movements transform institutions—or are radical movements produced by institutions that have already abandoned their foundations?

And buried inside the official 9/11 Commission Report is a warning issued more than two decades ago that makes today’s discussion considerably harder to dismiss.

This isn’t about blaming Muslims for terrorism or pretending every Democrat is a socialist. It’s about something much larger:

Ideas survive people.