UP FROM LIBERALISM

'It's the culture, stupid' (Spengler, Asia Times, November 5th, 2004)

Although Americans have difficulty articulating their response, few are so dim as to misunderstand the message. America's culture is in the judgment seat. Do they deserve the contempt, and even the violence, that the Islamists inflict on them? As they seethe with self-righteous anger against their attackers, do Americans take stock of themselves? The answer evident on November 2 is that many of them did. After September 11, a number of evangelical leaders, including the Reverend Jerry Falwell, claimed that the attacks constituted a divine punishment for America's sins. Silly as it sounded, Falwell's statement concealed an underlying truth. The US provokes the hatred of the Islamic world because the "freedoms" associated with the nether reaches of its entertainment industry are its most visible face to the rest of the world. The US, to most of the world, represents global mobility, but also the breakdown of the family, the collapse of hoary conventions of respect, the trampling of tradition.

First of all, America's tragic encounter with Islam is a confrontation between a modern and a traditional society, in which the traditional society only can lose. That it also is a confrontation between Christianity and Islam, two religions that respond in radically different ways to the fragility of traditional society, makes the confrontation all the more ferocious. Islam looks outward to defend the community, the ummah, against its enemies by conquering and transforming them in its own image. By its nature it is militant rather than self-critical. Christianity demands that the believer look inward to his own sin. Soul-searching after September 11 is what made the personal so political in the US.

The US is in danger of social decay - not as much danger as my Halloween apparition of bin Laden portrayed, but in danger nonetheless. When two-fifths of female university students suffer from anorexia or bulimia, and one-sixth suffer from depression, it is clear that the Witches' Sabbath of sexual experimentation that began during the 1960s has led to widespread misery. Parents cannot raise their children in isolation from violent pornography; young people cannot build their lives in a fraternity party.

It is the hard, grinding reality of American life in the liberal dystopia that makes the "moral issues" so important to voters. Partial-birth abortion and same-sex marriage became critical issues not because evangelical voters are bigots. On the contrary, parents become evangelicals precisely in order to draw a line between their families and the adversary culture. This far, and no more, a majority of Americans said on November 2 on the subject of social experimentation.

Unlike the Europeans, whose demoralization has led to depopulation, Americans still are fighting against the forces of decay that threaten - but do not yet ensure - the ultimate fall of American power. That is the message of November 2.

A few years ago, a perceptive psychologist noted that, until modern times, it was the duty of most parents to prepare their children for, and introduce them to, the society around them. Today, it is to protect them from it.