Our present civil cold war
Since the 2000 election, we have understood our country as divided between what we have called red states and blue states, that is, conservative and liberal regions. The division between them is not primarily one of geography as it is of moral and political principles.
by D.C. Innes at WORLDmag.com
Since the 2000 election, we have understood our country as divided between what we have called red states and blue states, that is, conservative and liberal regions. The division between them is not primarily one of geography as it is of moral and political principles. If this were simply a matter of party affiliation, however, it would be relatively uninteresting in the long run. But the country is becoming increasingly aware that the disagreement is fundamental, that our house is divided against itself to such an extent that it cannot stand without a vigorous reaffirmation and defense of its founding principles.
In a recent column, George Will drew national attention to the liberal establishment’s principled hostility toward our very form of government:
“Today, as it has been for a century, American politics is an argument between two Princetonians—James Madison, Class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879. Madison was the most profound thinker among the Founders. Wilson, avatar of ‘progressivism,’ was the first president critical of the nation’s founding. Barack Obama’s Wilsonian agenda reflects its namesake’s rejection of limited government.”
What Wilson began, the Great Depression interrupted, but Franklin Roosevelt took it up again with great energy in the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson carried it forward with the Great Society, and now Barack Obama has raised this war against limited, constitutional government to the level of mortal struggle.
Now we are engaged in a great civil cold war. It is a political war between the advocates of limited and unlimited government, between those who support the Founding and the Constitution as amended and the self-described progressives who, by definition, reject what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us in favor of what Chief Justice Earl Warren called “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
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