End of Year Politics
by James Atticus Bowden

Here are some end of the year thoughts you might actually ponder before celebrating Christ Jesus' birth amongst the crush of the annual cycle of shopping, family gatherings and social events.

First, I'm filled with gratitude, still, from the election victory. I'm grateful that our nation understands the significance of the Iraq War. We will stay the course, painful that it is, for the greater World War IV against Islamist terrorism. Also, I'm gratified that everywhere homosexual marriage was on the ballot, the people rejected it. I'm confident also that other social issues, like partial-birth abortion, would fail in fair votes. The American people are wiser than politicians, pundits and tyrannical judges.

Their wisdom is that most Americans do not like or even listen much to politics. They live their lives and want to be left alone, in freedom, to do as they please. The overwhelming majority of Americans, and my own Virginians are prime examples, only pay attention when it's really important -- during wars, recessions, and at elections. The people speak in simple terms for candidates or constitutional issues at the ballot box. The people didn't mumble in 2004.

The vote supporting the Iraq War, I believe, was an encouragement to press on with WW IV for greater stability and security. It wasn't an endorsement of President Bush's Wilsonian rhetoric about promoting democracy. Nor was it approval of the many mistakes made at the strategic and operational levels of war. Frankly, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld should be fired. The three reasons Iraq isn't Vietnam, yet, are geography, no Soviet Union, and that Gen. John Abizaid is the Commander.

Iraq can collapse into a long, brutal civil war -- today, tomorrow and ten years from now. The U.S. will kill Islamists who flock there and impose a heavy booted stability for as long as America has the will to do so. WWIV will last for decades, maybe centuries.

Our will to win WWIV will be determined by who, liberals or conservatives, wins the Culture War -- which is our second American Civil War (ACW II).

The irony of ACW II is how liberals and conservatives agree on the biggest words – peace, freedom, prosperity, etc. Yet, we rapidly diverge along clear cutting lines of worldview, Weltanschauung, on the ideas of how to achieve those words. The further irony, perhaps tripping into tragedy, is how liberals and conservatives see each other in mirror images of totalitarianism. Each sees the other side as a genuine threat to truth, liberty and the American way of life.

Naturally, I think many good-willed, kind-hearted, caring liberals are clueless that they serve a humanist secular totalitarianism that manifests itself in liberal Puritanism. Meanwhile, the liberals who compare Christians to the Taliban forget, among many other things, how fractionalized Evangelical Christians are -- by definition. Evangelicals are the antithesis of monolithic churches, let alone states. Evangelicals can't impose one set of beliefs on their own membership, let alone a nation. Just visit one church business meeting to watch the intramural fussin' and fightin'.

There will be challenges to all of us on the right over the next few years. Where candidates of courage and convictions can be found, we will confront the political problems in our back yard. But, in the meantime, Americans are neither Democrat nor Republican by DNA. Americans and especially my fellow Virginians are bone-deep dedicated to traditional values, family, freedom and fun in life. For now, the majority will think little of politics and focus, appropriately, on CHRISTmas and a New Year. Then, next year, we can face the new choices.

James Atticus Bowden has specialized in inter-disciplinary long range 'futures' studies for over a decade. He is employed by a Defense Department contractor. He is a retired United States Army Infantry Officer. He is a 1972 graduate of the United States Military Academy and earned graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University. He holds three elected Republican Party offices in Virginia.

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