Paul Croce teaches History and American Studies at Stetson University.  An earlier version of this essay appeared in The Orlando Sentinel, September 11, 2012.  With all the suffering and destruction of 9/11 in 2001, when the United States was brutally attacked, the results also produced a peaceable possibility.  There was a palpable spirit of solidarity around the country and around the world.  Even the French Le Monde newspaper gushed with a sympathetic headline, “We are all Americans.”  Then-president George W. Bush liked to talk of “political capital,” and the US had it in abundance, a potential resource for tackling the Read more