Recently, I was struck by reports that graduating seniors from Christian high schools in California are having difficulty getting accepted by some University of California system affiliates because some of their high school courses are deemed to be biased in favor of Christianity. According to the journal First Things, one university said that “religion and ethics courses are acceptable as long as they do not include among their primary goals the personal religious growth of their students”. Previously I have mentioned new Air Force Academy regulations that ban anything that might be perceived as favoring “the idea of religion over non-religion”. These anecdotes occur to me as directly analogous to the prevailing attitude among our elite institutions that references to and symbols of our nation’s religious founding and heritage—“in God we trust”, “under God”, the Ten Commandments, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence (“endowed by our Creator”, etc.)—are acceptable as long as they are merely manifestations of “ceremonial deism” and do not in any way represent beliefs genuinely held.

In response to this growing phenomenon, I submit an excerpt from remarks made by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict: “Even a secular state may—indeed must—find its support in the formative roots from which it grew; it may and must acknowledge the foundational values without which it would not have come to be, and without which it cannot survive. Upon an abstract, an ahistorical reason, a state cannot endure.” As I have said before, on some things we cannot be neutral.

One of my heroes, Peter Drucker, died last November, just in time to produce highlights of his work and ideas at the peak of the transformation from the old social contract to his “new realities”, as illustrated by the demise of the poster child of the old contract, General Motors. GM was the model of the contract that was the post-World War II ideal—the collaboration of big business, big labor, and big government in providing sustainable dominance of American industrial leadership and steady employment for a growing workforce with collectively bargained and ever-increasing wages and benefits, supported and subsidized by Keynesian fiscal, monetary, and trade policies. This worked well during a long period of stasis in the world order, and, in “the great society” mentality, seemed to be a permanent fixture of economic life in America. But it ran head-on into Drucker’s new realities of dynamism, a deregulated and market based world of low-cost global competition, the knowledge revolution, Adam Smith’s principle of comparative advantage, and the free flow of investment capital and the resulting employment to venues where it is well treated.

There are wake up calls everywhere one looks, most prominently in the demise of the defined benefit pension plans, both in the public and private sectors, including Social Security, that no longer make sense in the new environment. Many of our larger U. S.-based companies, such as GM and its spin off Delphi, look more like bureaucratic health care and retirement benefits providers than producers of quality products, with many more beneficiaries of these plans than current employees. There is a crisis brewing here in the resolution of the unfunded liabilities of these plans that will make the savings and loan bailout of the 1980’s look mild by comparison.

Fierce efforts at protection of the old social contract abound in our public discourse among policy wonks and the political class that is so heavily vested in it. And there is no better evidence of the attitude of these elites about the painful transformation to the new realities than the comparison of the mainstream media coverage of the fortunes of GM and Wal-Mart, wherein the former is often portrayed as the loyal comrade in the preservation of the benevolence of the old contract, while the latter, the most successful model of the new contract, is portrayed as the maverick, the villain that is destroying small town America and pursuing creative destruction on the backs of exploited, under-compensated workers here and abroad.

No doubt, this transformation will be painful, but the worst we can do is attempt to protect ourselves from it, and we had best urgently move on with public policies that adapt to the new realities and advance the transformation while recognizing the human transition costs. Peter Drucker has been saying as much for many years.

Alexis de Tocqueville, that most astute analyst of American society, said “there are two things that will always be difficult for a democratic people to do: to start a war and to finish it”, and that such people also have “an excessive love of tranquility”. Probably true, and we have had ample proof of these maxims in our experiences since World War II. So we find ourselves in a difficult spot, with a war that spites the nature of democracies and a domestic political opposition that is so obsessed with restoring its power and with its hatred of the incumbent President that it is open to almost any method of undermining the success of the mission.

Take the issue of “a timetable for withdrawal” from Iraq. Any reasonable observer knows that to openly talk of such timetables in wartime, even tentative ones, is to send all the wrong messages to all the important constituents—our enemies, our allies, and most of all, our troops—and it is the height of irresponsibility to use this tool, which is an obviously demagogic ploy on the emotions of democratic people, as a weapon to gain political advantage. It is also threatening to the security of the American people, because it fails to acknowledge the open-ended nature of this conflict and the necessity to sustain fidelity to the long term mission of defeating Islamofacism. Example: If we really believe in the Bush Doctrine and the power of freedom to reshape the Arab Muslim world into a safer place, which are the keys to victory, there are additional considerations that dictate that we not only suspend any talk of withdrawal, but prepare the American people for the very real possibility of deployment on other fronts, namely Syria and Iran, in both of which it has become increasingly clear that regime change, by one method or another, is the only viable option.

Intuitively, I believe the American people know this. In a November poll by RT Strategies, 70% of them overall said that criticism of the war hurts troop morale and 55% of self-identified Democrats agreed with this. And in a Pew Research Center poll, the general public, by wide margins, was much more optimistic than other constituencies, including the news media, think tanks, and other opinion leaders, about the chances for establishing a successful democracy in Iraq. This disconnect points to the resiliency of President Bush’s core strength, but also reinforces his need to continue to go over the heads of the demagogues and their fellow travelers in the media to insure that this base of support is fully aware of the unfinished business of the mission.

In a Wall Street Journal essay last fall, in advance of President Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Robert George wrote this: “Here is my proposal: To fill the seat….Bush should nominate an intellectually distinguished and articulate judge willing to set forth and defend a sound understanding of the constitutional limits of judicial power in the confirmation hearings. Give up the stealth strategy………Let the nominee make the case for true constitutional government to the American people. Let us have a national debate…”

Well, President Bush complied with the first part of this proposal; now, he and Judge Alito’s handlers should let the nominee get on with the second part, a long overdue confrontation with the proponents of the “living constitution”. Let’s have the “teaching moment” the country deserved and was so frustratingly deprived with the Harriet Miers mistake, the debate that will take to the people the real issues underlying the corruption this process has endured since the Bork fiasco in 1987, which was probably the low point of reasoned debate in the proud history of this country. Properly understood, this is a process that is so essential to self-governance, when we get to hear the competing philosophies of constitutional jurisprudence discussed openly and when nomination and confirmation is about not only who is appointed, but why their judicial philosophy was preferred and was decisive.

In such a scenario, how many Democrats will want to stake out the ground of the hard left that could care less about the rule of constitutional law or which judicial philosophy prevails as long as they get their desired results? My guess is, not many, at least explicitly, but many will do so duplicitly, which is the height of intellectual dishonesty, and should be exposed as such to the American people. Let the debate begin.