The next Normandy

There has been much talk this past week of the real causes and
meaning of American involvement in the Second World War. Pat Buchanan’s
suggestion that America should not have entered the war against Hitler
has evoked a predictable — certainly to Buchanan — howl of outrage
from politicians who are lining up to instruct Pat in the true meaning
of the “Crusade in Europe.” I agree that Buchanan misses the point with
his revision of the edifying story of that crusade. But I think it is
more than a little ironic that so many of the same “leaders” who avoid
today’s moral challenges like the plague are leaping to defend the “good
fight” of half a century ago.

The debate, particularly over the decisions and circumstances of our
entering the war, will go on as long as historians consider the matter.
But high purpose informing our involvement is no more debatable now than
it ever was. It was indeed a crusade, and it was a uniquely American
one. This is the truth about World War II.

Americans like to think of themselves as pragmatic, and this is
nonsense. This country is, in its very heart and soul, about moral
ideas. World War II was a war fought on the basis of those moral ideas
— par excellence. It represented, in a way, the natural outcome of our
commitment to human justice and dignity. It was the greatest test of the
proposition that we are not a people dedicated to empire and power.
Instead, even when we had the opportunity, we showed more respect for
ideas of justice and human liberty than we did the hunger for glory or
power.

We freed Europe, and walked away — and it was a glorious moment.

The revisionist temptation is to see only what is material, sensible
and calculable in the great chapters of American history. Beginning with
the Revolution that gave us our national birth, through the Civil War
that brought us to national maturity, and on through our astonishing act
of world leadership in World War II and the era of global peril that
followed, the real American struggle has been our striving to put flesh
and bones to the vision of justice under God that is our national soul.
Those who lack the eyes to see this struggle will indeed see only
calculation and selfish manipulation. They will think that the Founders
cared chiefly about the machinery of government and taxation, that
Lincoln was an instrument of northern commercial interests, that the
American engagement of Hitler was a chess move by Roosevelt in the
service of questionable great power machinations that continued through
the Cold War. But those who cannot see the moral soul informing the
astonishing course of American history are like strangers who walk the
streets and inhabit the homes of America, but who have never met the
people that are the Republic.

So why is it ironic that the current crop of politicians is piling
onto Buchanan? Because American history has moved on, and the American
Republic faces a crisis today that is, in its way, no less direct a
threat to everything America stands for than Hitler, slavery or King
George. The irony is that Pat’s critics are, by and large, AWOL from
this great battle.

The abortion issue in particular goes to the heart of our principles.
Do our rights come from the Creator God, or do they come from a human
choice? The principle this Republic was founded on — and the banner
under which we battled slavery and fought for civil rights — is that
human law must be judged against a transcendent law beyond human power.
It is a founding article of American civic faith that constitutions and
laws that trample on the rights of individuals are no more valid or
legitimate than jackboots or tanks that do the same.

If we acquiesce as a people in the spurious doctrine that life in the
womb is entitled to respect for its rights merely because of the
mother’s choice, we will have vitiated and destroyed the fundamental
principle on which our entire regime is based. If we thus turn our back
on the Declaration, we destroy the heart of our Republic. However
vaguely or unwillingly some of us see this, it is a fact that our
co-existence in ordered and lawful liberty will have ended in principle
the moment we decide, as a people, to accept the doctrine that human
equality is a myth, and that respect for the dignity of our fellow man
may be granted or withheld literally at will.

Our struggle is to protect, in principle, the right of ALL human
beings to life. We can offer that protection, in my view, only by
leading our fellow citizens to recognize once again that our rights do
not come from human choice, but antedate and transcend all the
constitutions and choices that human beings make. The equal dignity of
each human person comes, as our Declaration says, from the Creator and
not from us. If we intend to keep the “body and soul” of this Republic
together, we must protect the life of the child in the womb from
invasion by the practice of abortion, because abortion kills in
principle the peace among us all.

That is why the battle to turn the soul of the American people away
from abortion is not a struggle we undertake just for the sake of the
child in the womb. If we grant to one another the right to do what is
wrong, in the end we will grant to government the right to take away all
the rights we have. For government will quickly become merely rule by
the strongest group among us, once we have decisively accepted the view
that human dignity comes from the choice of whoever happens to have
physical control of another person.

For these reasons, I think it is clear that those with eyes to see
the moral form that illuminates all of American history will recognize
that we live in a time of great and decisive struggle. True citizens of
this Republic will realize that the enemy has breached the wall, and has
entered the city. The abortion doctrine epitomizes the danger that the
flickering light of American principle will go out, and we will be left
a passionate and quarrelsome rabble, with a dim memory of something
better once possessed, and now lost.

It is a time for heroes — many, many heroes. It is a time to fight
the good fight again, in the form Providence has put before us in our
day. This is more important than rebuking Pat Buchanan for his book on
World War II, and it is something that most of his detractors devote
great energy and cleverness to avoiding at all costs. This is the irony
of their self-righteous invocations of Normandy.

True political ambition — American political ambition — should
animate our leaders to seek high office in order to help direct this
critical battle. We need a moral conservative president, elected at the
head of a renewed and reinvigorated Republican Party — the Party of
Lincoln and of American principle. His top priority must be to restore
the protections for the life of the unborn that existed in the Reagan
era, and to pursue, through the passage of a Human Life Amendment,
protection for the life of the unborn. From the first day that he takes
office, these goals should be his public, clear and unequivocal
commitment. He must pursue them not only as theoretical policy goals,
but by standing before the American people and eagerly inviting the
debate, before the whole nation, that is required in order to get
Americans to understand why this issue is fundamental.

Those with eyes to see the real plot of American history understand
that a full, clear, open national debate on the abortion question — how
it relates to our principles, how it relates to our practical problems,
and how it relates, in fact, to our decent sentiments as a civilized
people — is necessary for national survival. It’s time we had
leadership that will not run away from that debate, but will move
forward into it with eagerness, in order to help the American people
understand what’s at stake.

Meanwhile, most of our leading politicians, including those heckling
Pat, seem to think of this issue as a terrible bother that they wish
would just go away. And this is tragic, because the great issues of
principle and the challenges that arise from them are also the great
moments of statesmanship and education, when this country can make more
profound its understanding of what we are supposed to be. They offer
great moments for the ennobling and uplifting of our whole people, so
that we can understand once again how America transcends dollars and
cents, the grubby materialism that is always on offer, and reaches
instead to the highest goals and principles, the best aspirations of
humanity.

Why do we run from such issues? They may be difficult, but in them
also lie the greatest inspirations, the greatest motivations, the
greatest sense of challenge for a great people. We remain such a great
people, and we deserve a leadership that does not shrink from the
moments of opportunity for our greatness, but grasps them, so we can
understand our future with the wisdom necessary to make it real.

It is indeed a dark time in the life of the Republic. But things were
dark for Britain, and for the world, in 1940. Churchill, from whom we
could learn much about the power of moral will, spoke to the Commons
words we should take to heart now:

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear
ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a
thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour.'”

Let us indeed brace ourselves to our duties, so that fifty and more
years hence the people of America will remember the successful
restoration of the principles of the Declaration at the dawn of the new
millennium with the same veneration that even our weak-kneed politicians
today reserve for Normandy.