Most of the families of the 9/11 victims, along with police and firefighters, begged to differ. So they organized to "take back the memorial." They feel that there are better places for political lessons than Ground Zero, where their family members and friends were incinerated by fascistic al-Qaida terrorists.

The obvious touchstone for the movie is 9/11, a mass murder in which airline employees did all they could to stop one of the four hijacked planes from crashing into the U.S. Capitol. Some had their throats slits by murderous terrorists from the Middle East — the birthplace of airplane hijacking in the 1970s. But Hollywood reversed historical reality, making the flight staff in the film either clueless or culpable as innocent Middle Easterners on board are unfairly put under suspicion.

Soldiers, on the other hand, responded that, in this war, more lurid photos beamed worldwide without context will only help the killers. Those in harm's way fighting the terrorists will find it even harder to win the hearts and minds of civilian populations.

On the one side of all these controversies seem to be architects, curators, academics, CEOs, journalists, script writers, actors, lawyers and judges. Their utopian views of what their fellow Americans should see, think and feel are at odds with those of grieving families, police, firefighters, flight attendants and soldiers.

Those on museum boards, in Hollywood studios and in the courtroom seek to fashion the intellectual landscape in which those who put out fires, arrest criminals, serve food and shoot terrorists are to operate. The latter fight back. They try to match elite influence with public outrage, and so appeal to their elected officials and unions, and to talk shows, the blogosphere and cable news.

The issue is not just one of class division, but rather also concerns theory when it translates into actual practice. A privileged group speculates about abstract issues, and then others must concretely bear the consequences of this contemplation.

The families of the 9/11 victims, with good cause, fear they will hear from tourists to a new WTC with an adjacent International Freedom Center that we deserved Sept. 11 due to America's treatment of Native Americans or African-Americans a century past. Airline attendants suspect that their future passengers may become a little more skeptical of their efforts to enforce FAA protocols, while troops in Iraq who dodge bullets know it could now be more difficult to convince civilians to provide intelligence.

In the worldview of billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a backer of the International Freedom Center, or the ACLU, to be good, America must be nearly perfect — broadcasting past sins even at Ground Zero, where its citizens were murdered by fascists, or replaying ad nauseam to the world the crimes of a few rogue soldiers of a million-man military.

But others in heavy boots and coats who carry hoses upstairs or soldiers sweltering in body armor in the desert seem happy enough to do the best they can. Or in the words of one of the organizers who stopped the Freedom Center, "We want a place that projects the goodness of people."

The irony of it all?

It used to be that liberalism was also populist. Yet lately the Left has often adopted a condescending attitude toward the so-called people, trivializing the folks in the trenches in assorted uniforms and camouflage who supposedly need guidance and moral enlightenment by their elite betters.

Maybe that's precisely what worries Democratic stalwarts like Hillary Clinton, who wisely came out against putting the so-called International Freedom Center at the epicenter of the Sept. 11 mass murder.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of the just-released "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."