Re: ‘The Future Still Belongs to America’ Column in Wall Street Journal

To the editor:

Re: The Future Still Belongs to America by Walter Russell Mead. Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday, July 2-3, 2011

Our world is changing fast. But fear nought! Change, says Walter Russell Mead, is Team America's strength—our “home field.” By comparison, “visiting teams” barely make the league. Thus our triumph is inevitable.

There. Feel better now? (Of course not.) Why? Because deep down we know that America's real crisis doesn’t concern the kinds of things that are even subject to change. This fact (though studiously ignored by academics like Mead) has led us to neglect what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things”—faith and morality—which, though they once mattered most to folks, have never meant less than they do in America today. Sadly, this has already placed us on the same path as our spiritually craven cultural forebearer: Europe.

In the end, America's fate will hinge not, as Mead argues, on the successful manipulation of technology and markets—on mere means—but, rather, on the ends we pursue, the way we answer the ultimate questions about who we are, why we are here and what we should do.

Nor is this truth lessened by the fact that our main ideological competitors—communism, fascism and radical Islam—are either dead or dying. The most dangerous enemy we have ever faced remains precisely where he has always been: within. If we are distracted from our highest ideals, from that which makes us most truly human, we will die. For where there is no vision, the people perish.

Craig S. Maxwell
Maxwell's House of Books
La Mesa