KINDER'S COMMENTARY: CULTURE MAY BE ROOT OF NATION'S WOES

"What began to concern me more and more were the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society -- a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of contemporary liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. ... Sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other." -- From "My Cold War" by neoconservative author and critic Irving Kristol.

When a writer such as Kristol uses a word like "ethos," he is reaching for a fancy old Greek term imported to the English language, meaning, roughly, the habits and culture of a society. Writing last year in the June/July issue of the journal First Things, Judge Robert Bork offers a sobering critique of American societal decline ("Hard Truths About the Culture War") that begins with the above-excerpted Kristol quote.

The Bork piece is, at a mere five pages, among the most profound articles I've read recently. Bork observes, tellingly:

"The main features of these trends are vulgarity and a persistent left-wing bias, the latter being particularly evident among the semi-skilled intellectuals -- academics, bureaucrats, and the like -- that Kristol calls the New Class.

"What we are seeing in modern liberalism, is the ultimate triumph of the New Left of the 1960s -- the New Left that collapsed as a unified political movement and splintered into a multitude of intense, single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexuals, multiculturalists, People for the American Way, the American Civil Liberties Union and many more."

Who can doubt the wisdom of what Bork is saying? These are, after all, the folks -- to take just three issues -- who are today defending partial-birth abortions that quite simply kill full-term babies; they are the folks who now demand that states recognize same-sex "marriages;" they are the folks who demand taxpayer funding for vicious violations of democratic civility such as "Piss Christ" and denounce any outcries against such public funding as censorship by the bluenoses. To phrase the issue differently, these are the folks who've proudly taken God out of our schools and put condoms in.

The main liberal project is as always, according to Bork, the expansion of government power over us all. Liberalism preaches not the equality of opportunity of the American founding, but rather the redistribution of income and absolute equality of condition and of result. This is, of course, incompatible with freedom. It requires coercion, and "the coercers will be bureaucrats and politicians who will, and already do, form a new elite class. Political and governmental authority replace the authorities of family, church, profession and business. The project is to sap the strength of these latter institutions so that individuals stand bare before the state, which, liberals assume with considerable justification, they will administer. We will be coerced into virtue, as modern liberals define virtue."

A presidential campaign four years ago featured the slogan "It's the economy, stupid." Conventional wisdom has it, according to the old cliche, that voters always "vote their pocketbooks." Of course there's some truth in that. But a sense is growing in America that what ails us isn't so much economic, but rather cultural, societal, spiritual. We may have just arrived at a time when the saying will be, "It's the culture, stupid."

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.