As with all terrorism, the lasting damage is self-inflicted by the overreacting victim.

Turning every airport into the thin end of the fascist wedge, all the rampant surveillance stuff, and perpetual war in the middle east did quite a lot of structural damage to American democracy. I’m not sure we’d have elected the current dipshit-in-chief without 9/11 fifteen years earlier. We’d have kept electing publicly mostly boring and privately kinda shitty people for another few decades.