The horrors of September 11 have had some healthy aftereffects: A newfound patriotism and community spirit. A deeper respect for the heroism of people who do dangerous jobs to protect the rest of us. A fuller appreciation of how much more free, more diverse, more tolerant, and more civilized our much-disparaged society is than the societies that wallow in anti-American hatred and barbarism.

"The category `American’ suddenly seems spacious and lofty, transcending the petty divisions that so preoccupied the politically active and the ideologically obsessed," federal appellate Judge Richard A. Posner writes in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The sudden intrusions of great evil, great loss, and great danger have pushed to the margins the trivia and nonsense that preoccupied public discourse before September 11-when prosperity and the illusion of security allowed imaginations and prejudices to float free from reality.

But even as most people, in Posner’s words, "respond to a shock to our belief system by trying to reweave our beliefs into a new coherence," some of the ideologically obsessed and politically partisan seem stubbornly unwilling to re-examine presuppositions unsuited to our current needs. Examples abound from both the Left and the Right:

Liberal Nonsense: Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has imported into a conservative Administration’s approach to airline-security profiling a politically correct dogmatism, rooted in liberal ideology, that exposes us all to unnecessary danger of being slaughtered every time we board an airliner.

Mineta got undeserved flak from Congress for confirming the obvious last month when he said that the congressionally mandated January 18 deadline for screening all checked bags for bombs was impossible to meet. He has not gotten the flak he deserves for refusing to face the fact that the only effective protection against bombs for the time being is to ensure that the small fraction of bags that are searched include those of (among others) men from the regions that supply most of Al Qaeda’s recruits.

In a revealing exchange with Steve Kroft of CBS’s 60 Minutes, aired on December 2, Mineta asserted that 70-year-old white women should get the same scrutiny as young Muslim men and ruled out any consideration of religion, ethnicity-or, he implied, national origin-in choosing whose bags to search. Security profiling, Mineta said, should be based on such things as, "Did you pay cash for this ticket or charge it on a credit card? Do you have a one-way ticket or a round-trip?"

"Did the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center have one-way tickets?" asked Kroft. "No," admitted Mineta. "They had round-trip tickets. Same thing with … cash. They used credit cards. [The profile] did not work." Perhaps the Secretary should try something that might work.

Mineta has good reason to abhor racial profiling: In 1942, at the age of 11, he was one of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps. But we need a Transportation Secretary who understands that searching a person’s luggage is not the same as sending him to a concentration camp, that the only mass movement bent on slaughtering Americans emanates from the Middle East, and that searching people who fly while Middle Eastern-unlike searching people who drive while black-is a matter of life and death.

Anti-American ideologues of the academic and cultural Left, who have for years turned many of our nation’s campuses into hostile environments for those faculty and students challenging their dogmas, seem less dominant but even more perverse since September 11. Examples are legion. My personal rogues’ gallery includes historian Eric Foner of Columbia University, who wrote on October 4: "I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." And University of Texas (Austin) professor Robert Jensen, who called the September 11 mass murders "no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism … that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime." And Katha Pollitt of The Nation, who said the American flag "stands for jingoism and vengeance."

Conservative Nonsense: Attorney General John D. Ashcroft-aggressive in expanding his own powers to wiretap, search, question, arrest, and detain on immigration charges foreigners suspected of possible terrorist links-has been conspicuously uninterested in checking whether they have bought assault rifles. When the FBI sought permission to check its records of federally approved gun purchases under the Brady gun control law, Ashcroft said no: Under his (disputed) interpretation of the statute, that would violate suspected terrorists’ privacy rights.

Fair enough. But we now know, from a manual captured in Kabul, that Al Qaeda has instructed America-bound terrorists to "obtain an assault weapon legally-prefer[ably] AK-47 or variations." Such new information makes it very obvious that we should amend the law to facilitate terrorism investigations. But under questioning by Senate Democrats on December 6, Ashcroft stubbornly refused to concede the need for any change at all. He came across as either a blinkered ideologue or a National Rifle Association lackey.

Earlier in the same hearing, Ashcroft came across as a smear artist by veering from the legitimate complaint that some critics had mischaracterized Administration actions and venturing into an inflammatory assertion that their "tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity [and] give ammunition to America’s enemies." This reckless rhetoric, which came all too close to mimicking the Constitution’s definition of treason, has taken a greater toll on national unity than anything said by his critics.

So persistent are President Bush and many other Republicans in prescribing tax cuts for corporations and rich people as the panacea for all maladies (although Bush retreated a bit this week) that they have ignored the consensus among reputable economists that such tax-cutting would be of little value as an economic stimulus. "When countering a recession is the top priority," as my colleague Clive Crook-who loves a good tax cut most of the time-wrote last week, "cutting taxes has to give way to more-effective measures" to stimulate consumer spending, and Republicans should join Democrats in increasing temporary support for the unemployed.

Similarly pigheaded has been the Republicans’ utter lack of interest in energy conservation even as they stress the need to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil by drilling in the Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To be sure, Republicans’ neglect of the conservation option is mirrored by Democrats’ stubborn opposition to more drilling in Alaska, the environmental risks of which they exaggerate. But conservation measures such as a higher gasoline tax could save a lot more energy, a lot sooner, than new drilling. So the Republicans take the prize in the energy irresponsibility derby.

Religious Right leader Jerry Falwell famously said in the wake of September 11-and Pat Robertson agreed, in a joint television appearance on the Christian Broadcasting Network-that "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way-all of them who have tried to secularize America-I point the finger in their face and say, `You helped this happen.’ " A spokesman for the President called these remarks "inappropriate." He should have called them what they were: vile.

Amid such nonsense, I’ll close with someone who makes more sense all the time: New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman:

"There is a deep hunger in America post-Sept. 11 in many people who feel this is their war in their backyard, and they would like to be summoned by the President to do something more than go shopping…. One senses that President Bush is intent on stapling his narrow, hard-right Sept. 10 agenda onto the Sept. 12 world, and that is his and our loss. Imagine if tomorrow President Bush asked all Americans to turn down their home thermostats to 65 degrees so America would not be so much of a hostage to Middle East oil?…

Imagine if the President called on every young person to consider enlisting in some form of service-the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, Peace Corps, Teach For America, AmeriCorps, the FBI, the CIA? People would enlist in droves. Imagine if the President called on every corporate chieftain to take a 10 percent pay cut, starting with himself, so fewer employees would have to be laid off? Plenty would do it.

[And] if we are going to be stomping around the world wiping out terrorist cells from Kabul to Manila, we’d better make sure that we are the best country, and the best global citizens, we can be. Otherwise, we are going to lose the rest of the world."

Amen.