This Ideological World War is part of a world conflict that’s over three thousand years old, tracing its earliest events to the first battles fought under the strong light of the Middle Eastern skies with the concept of a single God and the idea that life and history were not cyclical but linear. As these ideas grew into the Judeo-Christian value system over time, other ideas about how to govern people and what an economic system should be, and ideas involving science and technology and other aspects of what is called an enlightened life grew together. Versions of these factors were gathered into philosophies of government, all about how humans are to live, and they carry with them the dreams and fears of billions of people.
Now, people can exist perfectly well without an official ideology, as can nations. France could be secular or Catholic and still be France. It could be a monarchy or a form of democracy and still be France. People can be led by monarchs, emperors, tyrants, sheiks, chiefs, elders, presidents, and so forth. They can have nationalities that survive over great changes in their political structures. Such people have both heritage and history, and can have a nexus of complex rules. Mostly, their governing structure is a happenstance of passing events.
There are several major religions, but throughout history there have been individual philosophers and religious leaders who have set up smaller official “utopias”, philosophies that are intended to be “the best way to live”. Some of the ideas remained ideas in books, such as Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia”. Few of them succeeded in anything more than influencing a small number of followers, gathered to make their belief systems real. These people separate themselves mentally out from their previous heritage and even sometimes travel to an area where they can install their ideology and their leadership, like the Quakers. Sometimes they form a revolution, like in Communist Cuba, or they take control of a country through elections, like with Communist Venezuela.
However they are formed, all Utopian or “How to Live Best” beliefs are ideologies that need people to believe in them, people who will work to make them true, people who carry it in their minds and in their actions. They must pull the ideology out of written philosophies and “place” it in Reality. Such a physical incarnation can be a group (e.g, Quakers or Amish). It can be in buildings lived in by a group (e.g., a monastery or nunnery). It can be in a country, or in an empire.
It is an accident of history or, as I believe, an Act of Providence, that the ideology called America should have come into being at the same moment that an actual, physical, landed country full of people was commandeered to make it real. It is almost as if the ideology of America “occupied” the land of the original 13 colonies that became The United States when it was created. As with any ideology, America exists as a physical country only so long as there are people living who choose to be Americans.
When you behave according to the values and traditions of America, you are re-creating America through your life. Your breath fills America’s lungs, your blood surges in its veins. Your hands are its hands, your actions carry it into Reality. You are keeping America alive; moreover, this is the only way that America can continue to exist. When America solidifies itself into an institution, when it extrudes itself into a process, when it stands before the world as haven, warrior, protector of rights, capitalist free marketer—whenever and however America informs and transforms our life it needs individual people to carry its values and methods. America becomes the whisper of courage in the darkness at noon, and the roaring power that proclaims before all mankind that human rights are inalienable.
If America was an ideological group that lived together in a region of land, like the Amish, or a monastery or Kibbutz, everyone involved in it would recognize immediately when it was under attack by alien ideologies. But America is embedded in the United States, and the United States has Anti-American inhabitants as well as Americans. Someone once said, that it is hard to fight an enemy that has outposts in your head. This is America’s biggest problem at this minute, because the enemies, with Anti-American outposts, are very definitely sharing the United States with America as well as being in other countries.
I believe it is useful to view the United States as a normal country. A normal country becomes what the people in the country become as they go about their lives, and it can change drastically over time. For instance, in the last 500 years, France has been at different times a monarchy, an empire, an occupied country, and a form of democracy. The United States has been a group of colonies that fought a revolution to win its freedom and a country that engulfed different territories.
One of my favorite bloggers, Paul Cella, wrote in February of 2004—and may as well be writing it again today—that:
John Edwards may or may not win the Democratic presidential nomination, but either way I want to record nonetheless how appalling his standard "two Americas" stump speech really is. Sen. Edwards, in his usual campaign speech, engages in a rambling, dulcified harangue about "two health care systems," "two governments," "two tax systems," etc. The point of this rhetoric, of course, is to present himself as a champion of the oppressed people against what amounts to an oligarchy. Edwards is hardly an innovator in this territory, but it is his very insouciance that appalls. Or rather, it is the insouciance of its reception by everyone else.[ . . . ]
Though it pains me to say it, there may indeed be the germ at least, of Two Americas: One which regards our founding consensus as something almost sacred, as the hinge on which everything political here turns, and one which admits of no consensus, which recoils from the very idea of a public philosophy signified by phrases such as "we hold these truths," which has put philosophy at the service of politics, and politics at the service of power, and thus hastens the day when both philosophy and politics will be destroyed. Sen. Edwards, then, does not decry the advent of Two Americas; he reveals and advances it.
The whole essay is well worth reading. I think that Senator Edwards is “revealing and advancing” part of the two Americas—but not quite the way that Cella reveals. Actually, at any given time, there is a mixture of the two entities existing in the same physical space: the eternal values of the ideal, America, and the national embodiment of the country at a given time, the United States, which is being removed further and further away from America by the Left.
It helps to separate them in our minds. It was America that forced the end to slavery and the end to segregation, and it was America that gave all citizens the vote. It was the United States that spread the ideas of America across the continent. It was America that drove the pioneers to settle that continent and beyond, and it’s the United States that had the riches of land, minerals, forests, streams and rivers, mountains and plains and shores that those settlers used. It is America who fights the wars for the liberty of ourselves and others. It is the United States as a haven for the Left that is the problem.
Without a tangible, concrete, real-world way to bring about positive results through human beings acting for it, America will start to decay. The trouble is, no matter how wonderful America is, without our active embodiment of America in vast numbers, our country will degenerate into just the United States. As examples, it could become a Collectivist Secular-Progressive realm devoid of the American Dream, or a Communist colony of China, or be made part of a giant Islamofacist Caliphate.
The next few decades will determine if America continues to exist at all, except as a memory.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, The Virtuous Republic, Right Truth, The Pet Haven Blog, Stuck On Stupid, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Pursuing Holiness, Rightlinx, third world county, Right Celebrity, Woman Honor Thyself, Wake Up America, Stageleft, stikNstein... has no mercy, The Uncooperative Blogger, Pirate's Cove, Nuke's news and views, The Right Nation, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, Church and State, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, DeMediacratic Nation, Adam's Blog, Maggie's Notebook, On the Horizon, Webloggin, The Bullwinkle Blog, Cao's Blog, Colloquium, The Florida Masochist, , Jo's Cafe, Conservative Cat, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Walls of the City, The World According to Carl, and Blue Star Chronicles, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
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