If the beginning of my political initiation was the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, the highlight of which was “the speech” delivered by Ronald Reagan to a Los Angeles audience, the maturity of my political thought began in 1980 with Reagan’s election as President. He was, along with Margaret Thatcher, my largest hero in public life, one who more than anyone else convinced me that ideas really do have consequences and that conservative values, properly understood and communicated, have strong underlying resonance in America.As I soaked up the commentary immediately following the announcement of Reagan’s death last month, I was struck by the weight of the emphasis on his style over his substance. By this I mean that for most of the commentators, even many of those who were very close to him over a long period, the focus was more on his affability, his communication skills, his temperamental capacity for disagreeing without being disagreeable, his optimism, his charm, and his essential humanity, rather than the substance of his policy initiatives and his convictions. Peggy Noonan was one early exception. She went to great lengths to explain the degree to which underlying philosophical and intellectual points were very carefully woven (by him, to be sure) into most of his memorable speeches and pronouncements, and that this intended substance of them transcended even the quality of their delivery. To me, this is the core of the genius of Ronald Reagan, much of the reason he was so widely underestimated by his opponents, and why he will ultimately be grouped among the handful of great Presidents. There is here also a big reason why the mainstream punditry doesn’t like the idea of acknowledging this fact, because they know that Reagan, beyond his leadership that produced victory in the Cold War, which most of them now begrudgingly admit, presided over the most significant American political transformation since the early 1930’s, and it was mainly about the substance of his ideas, not simply about style.

One of my big disappointments is that his immediate Republican successors were unable and/or unwilling to aggressively defend major elements of this substance and the revolution it spawned, particularly as to the success of supply-side fiscal policy, which failure to defend provided an opening for eight years of Bill Clinton. And then there are many on the left like Carl Bernstein who seem to believe that the policy of “containment” of Soviet communism, as devised by George Kennan in the Truman years, and its derivative strategy of “mutually assured destruction”, was simply brought to maturity and completed by Ronald Reagan in the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union! Really? Who do these people think they are fooling? I don’t seem to remember any period of time between the early 1950’s and the election of 1980 in which the Cold War and our principal adversary in it were considered by the media and intellectual class as anything less than permanent fixtures on the geopolitical landscape, if not morally equivalent opponents. In this, as in so much else, Reagan completely changed the mindset.

Fred Barnes reminds us of Sidney Hook’s distinction between an eventful man and an event-making man, the key difference being that while both may arrive at a fork in the historical road, the event-making man helped create the fork. The event-making man also “leaves the positive imprint of his personality upon history—an imprint that is still observable after he has disappeared from the scene.” That’s Reagan. Worthy of Mount Rushmore? You bet.

What unfortunate timing for Bill Clinton—the release of his long-awaited book just after the Reagan ceremony and eulogies, the content of which made Clinton’s legacy seem even less consequential and, in fact, pretty small by comparison, a smallness that I believe history will remember about him and his Presidency. I have no interest in reading it, but comments from the reviews I have read in The Houston Chronicle and The New York Times offer no surprises. It appears to be stereotypically Clinton: “a very large canvas with an exceedingly small brush”, “sloppy”, “under-edited”, “self-indulgent”, “narcissistic”, etc.—the consummate 1990’s guy with an ego bordering on the pathological.

The use of the word “evil” continues to surface, in remembering Ronald Reagan’s pronouncements on the Soviet Union and in characterizing our current enemies in the war on terror, particularly in the tactics they employ, such as beheadings of innocents. New Yorker columnist Hendrik Hertzberg would like us to believe that this term as Reagan used it is a political one, meaning simply “bad” behavior subject to correction, and not a true description of the condition of fallen human nature. He is misguided. Evil is a religious distinction, and the concept of evil is one wing of the age-old Manichean struggle within the human soul, which happens to be playing out in extremely violent ways in the Middle East. If we can’t talk about evil in this context, we will never have the moral clarity to win this war on global terrorism. Ronald Reagan understood this, notwithstanding his son Ron’s comment that he never wore “religion on his sleeve”. George Bush understands this. And so does Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who said that Reagan would understand the parallels between the Cold War and the war on terror because he would have recognized the parallels of evil involved and that our adversaries in both conflicts did not respect the God-given right to human freedom. Anyone who has any pretensions about leading this country had better understand this. Yes, there is much to do in getting at the psychological roots of the hatred that drove 9-11, but this is a fight to the death between two irreconcilable forces, and one of them is evil. The capacity and willingness to understand and to make this moral distinction are as much the battlegrounds of this war as those of actual combat, as well as critical points of contention in this election year, which is fast becoming a referendum on the nature of radical Islam. No victory, no peace.

From The American Enterprise we have the following items of interest:

*A survey by Rasmussen Reports found that 62% of American voters believe the world would be a better place if other countries were more like the U. S. The number was 81% among Bush voters, but fell to 48% among Kerry voters.

*The children’s section of the Sunday Seattle Times featured an online poll with the question, “Who do you blame for 9-11?” Three choices were offered: “Bush”, “Clinton”, and “the CIA”.

*Finally, a quote from the left’s favorite propagandist film producer, Michael Moore: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘the enemy’. They are the revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow, and they will win.”

These anecdotes are emblematic of the drivel and nonsense with which we are besieged on a daily basis, partly driven by our apathy and partly by our gullibility. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so instructive, because the tragedy of it all is that it represents an actual worldview that has at least some currency in America, not least among what passes for our intellectual leadership. To paraphrase and with apologies to Patrick Moynihan, we have significantly defined downward the once respectable political heritage of American liberalism.

Before reading Samuel P. Huntington’s book, Who Are We? The Cultural Core of American National Identity, I read several reviews of it, some of which were highly critical of what they characterized as his tones of racism, xenophobia, and cultural elitism. These focused almost entirely on the aspects of the book that describe the massive wave of post-1965 U. S. immigration from Hispanic, primarily Mexican, sources. And it is the case that Huntington spends a lot of space describing his concern with the very different nature of this most recent phase of immigration to this country and what it means for our values, our culture, and our future national identity. But the book is much more than that. In fact, it is a grand survey of American cultural roots, the exceptionalism of its founding as an Anglo-Protestant settlement, and the tangled relationship of these attributes with what Huntington calls the American Creed. I have long been interested in the question of whether America is primarily a “culture” or an “idea”, and this book speaks to this issue as well as anything I have read. It is also cautionary in many ways. Huntington (who, incidentally, identifies himself as a liberal Democrat) outlines in great detail the powerful forces among American elites that have mounted a sustained effort over the past several decades to “deconstruct” American national identity, he makes it very clear that the overwhelming bulk of the American people do not support this effort, and he offers the alternatives we have in shaping our future. Although he doesn’t say it, the strong suggestion is that we had better decide soon if the deconstructed vision of our future is the one we want before we find ourselves strangers in a country we don’t recognize.