On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was helping movers pack a truck in Lenexa, Kansas. I was leaving the Midwest for the first time, moving to New York for my first professional job. My law firm was paying to move me into a junior one-bedroom apartment in lower Manhattan.

And it had a view. The World Trade Center. I never got that view.

Twenty-five years later, September 11 looks like something else to me. A dividing line — not because America changed that morning, but because another change was already underway, one that became clearer in the years that followed.

The rest of the essay looks at what America actually got right in the fights that mattered most — fascism, Soviet communism, extremist Islamism — and what we're at risk of forgetting about ourselves in the process.