A big problem in the war on terror, Michael Barone opines, is that we are not just fighting Islam. We are also at war with the usual suspects: the western left.
[I]n terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society... But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.
Then Barone writes, like a deconstructionist pro, about the notion of privileged ideas and narratives. There are people in our society who have made it their business to emphasize the bad parts of our history and ignore the good parts.
You might say that while they rail against the privileged dead white male narrative they have constructed their own privileged narrative, one that you dissent against at your peril.
But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.
The trouble is that necessary process of rooting out this covert enemy and refounding the American narrative of hope and optimism is going to be a long and divisive war.
And it hasn’t even got started yet.
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