Our Cold War enemy was totalitarian
godless communism ... for forty-five years.
At the beginning of the Cold War we didn't know what America was. Our initial effort was to get rid of the Communists in America. That effort didn't get far and finally we acceded to just trying to get rid of spies and scare the remaining communists into the woodwork. We created an anti-communist loyalty oath for teachers and government employees.
Early in the Cold War we put under God in the pledge of allegiance. About twenty years later we replaced centralized-social-action mainstream Protestant churches with decentralized-charismatic and evangelical churches.
To be a better democracy we got rid of
Jim Crow and made sure blacks had the right to vote.
Most importantly by the time of Ronald Reagan we knew we had to be a country that loved commerce. We started lowering taxes, getting rid of progressive taxation, deregulating, spinning off and outsourcing government agencies and promoting free trade.
Today our enemy is Islamic Wahabism.
We are already beginning to be defined by our new enemy. Our enemy considers us to be lacking in wisdom, sacrilegious and immoral.
First we are promoting public intellectuals to make clear to the rest of the world the deep intellectual roots of American society. Second we are recognizing the close relationship of democracy and our form of industrial commerce. We are promoting the value of both. In a few decades we will better understand both democracy and commerce.
Third, and I thank Janet Jackson,
Congress and Terry Schiavo for this, we are examining and debating
the moral underpinnings of our society. We got one part of the
debate started with Janet Jackson's nipple and now we have started
another part of the debate over Schiavo's feeding tube. There is much
more ahead. Get used to moral debates.
One hero of our time could well be Dr. Laura, the radio moralist, who has struggled with hundreds of moral issues and is very confident of her moral code. She is on national radio to a large audience three hours a day every weekday.
This is the era of moral debate. In a few decades we will have a much clearer national moral identity. The minority that loses in this moral debate will end up sidelined much like the Lefty Fundamentalists are sidelined today. The Lefties are out of the game, sitting on a pile of pro-Soviet pre-Cold War values that the mainstream has discarded. A similar group will be left with our discarded moral values in a few decades.