From my Journal:August 18 2010

The US today faces a crisis of purpose the like of which it has not faced since 1860. This is no crisis of confidence in the country per se. There is an over-confidence on Right and Left in the purpose of our political agendas, deeming them to be essential to pursue the purpose we believe in for the country. The crisis is rooted in the sharp disagreements over the purpose of the United States in the present and the future. The disagreements are not only between Left and Right but within them as well.

The differences in purpose are rooted in the different ideas we hold on the Right and Left regarding the Identity of the United States. How do we see ourselves?? The Left identifies America with the idea of the struggle for Justice. This largely centered around the Civil War and Civil Rights Eras. It is primarily emphasizing the equal treatment both legally and socially of different indentifiable groups. The Right identifies America with the struggle for Liberty. This view emphasizes the Revolution, the Declaration, and increasing World War II as the time when the struggle for Liberty and America as "the most powerful nation on Earth" came together.

So we see contradiction and dichotomies in both poles of American politics. Starting on the Right, we'll then examine the American Left.

The Right has melded the struggle to be "the most powerful nation on Earth" into one unified purpose for the nation that it views as self-supporting. To the Right, it is self-evident that being and struggling to stay the most powerful nation on Earth supports the struggle for Liberty. The Right, to move forward, must disabuse itself of this vision. We must recognize that it is often the struggle to become and then stay the most powerful nation on earth that subverts, not supports, the struggle for Liberty. It is at once parodoxical and tragic that those nations at the pinnacle of the protection of Liberty often blindly move toward the pinnacle of world power. It is the desperate struggle to succeed in the latter that ultimately saboutages and hampers the struggle in the former. Ultimately a nation must choose between freedom at home or empire abroad, it cannot have both because the efforts to secure the later neccessarily threaten the former.

We must have the vision of our Fathers. Our greatness is not built upon power, either military or economic. Greatness is built upon a divided and gentle government, limited in scope, whose purpose is the protection of the Liberty of the individual person. Power flows into this kind of nation from the trust that it engenders within and among the people between themselves and their government. It is this trust that unifies the nation. It is this unity that over time fosters national greatness. It is this trust that we are losing, this unity that seems in danger and this greatness that one can only whisper about now as it becomes a memory.

The process of rebuilding trust is slow and must begin from with a nation, not from ephemeral successes outside of of it. Goodness and Greatness are perilous partners. Any identity that seeks to combine the two into one national purpose is a journey with no happy endings, fraught with danger laced in sorrow.

(more soon on the contradictions of the Left)