The Enemy At Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

defiled at home, what gives America the right to dump it on the rest of the world?
    The debate over popular culture points to a deeper issue. For the past quarter century we have been having a culture war in this country, which has, until now, been viewed as a debate with only domestic ramifications. I believe that it has momentous global consequences as well. When we debate hot-button issues like abortion, school prayer, divorce, and gay marriage, we are debating two radically different views of liberty and morality. Issues like divorce and family breakdown are important in themselves, yet they are ultimately symptoms of a great moral shift that has occurred in American society, one that continues to divide and polarize this country, and one that is at the root of the anti-Americanism of traditional cultures.
    The shift can be described in this way. Some years ago I read Tom Brokaw’s book
The Greatest Generation,
which describes the virtues of the World War II generation. I asked myself whether this was truly the “greatest” generation. Was it greater than the generation of the American founding? Greater than the Civil War generation? I don’t think so. The significant thing about the World War II generation is that it was the
last
generation. Last in what way? It was the last generation to embrace an external code of traditional morality. Indeed, this generation’s great failure is that it was unable to inculcate this moral code in its children. Thus the frugal, self-disciplined, deferred-gratification generation of World War II produced the spoiled children of the 1960s—the Clinton generation.
    From the American founding until World War II, there was a widespread belief in this country that there is a moral order in the universe that makes claims on us. This belief was not unique to Americans. It was shared by Europeans since the very beginning of Western civilization, and it is held even today by all the traditional cultures of the world. The basic notion is that morality is external to us and is binding on us. In the past, Americans and Europeans, being for the most part Christian, might disagree with Hindus and Muslims about the exact source of this moral order, its precise content, or how a society should convert its moral beliefs into legal and social practice. But there was little doubt across the civilizations of the world about the existence of such an order. Moreover, laws and social norms typically reflected this moral consensus. During the first half of the twentieth century, the moral order generated some clear American social norms:
Go to church. Be faithful to your wife. Support your children. Go when your country calls.
And so on. The point is not that everyone lived up to the dictates of the moral code, but that it supplied a standard, accepted virtually throughout society, for how one should act.
    What has changed in America since the 1960s is the erosion of belief in an external moral order. This is the most important political fact of the past half century. I am not saying that most Americans today reject morality. I am saying that there has been a great shift in the source of morality. Today there is no longer a moral consensus in American society. Many Americans locate morality not in a set of external commands but in the imperatives of their own heart. For them, morality is not “out there” but “in here.” While many Americans continue to believe in the old morality, there is now a new morality in America, which may be called the morality of the inner self, the morality of self-fulfillment.
    Here, at the deepest level, is the divide between conservatives and liberals, between Red America and Blue America. Conservatives believe in traditional morality. Liberals believe in personal autonomy and self-fulfillment. And liberals have been winning the culture war in the sense that they have been able to produce a massive transformation of American society and culture along the lines of their