The cold civil war we are fighting is not just going well.  Contrary to what was once expected, this war right now is in a stage of overwhelming success.  Not that we have won anything permanent, but one has to be amazed at how positively things are going.

Consumer confidence is close to an all-time high.

Our economic growth is over 3%.  After nearly a decade, our economy is clearly coming out of the doldrums, and the U.S. population is becoming optimistic about its future.

Trump is remaking the judiciary, an extraordinary achievement.

Illegal immigration is down, eventually to be controlled.  A real border for a real country.

The military is strong, confident, and doing its job.  ISIS and radical Islam are genuinely being defeated.

Our alliances overseas are strengthening, and our leadership is successfully realigning friends from the Obama-Clinton years of destruction.  Other countries respect and fear us once again.

America is becoming great again.

Domestically, embittered adversaries on the left are melting down, in multiple ways.  Their elites are being shown as irrational, immoral, hypocritical, rudderless, and foolish in an overwhelming wave of self-induced negativity.  Their illusion of cultural greatness is falling apart, from Hollywood to the media to the educrats to the Democratic Party itself.  They are failing miserably.

The Clinton crime family is going under for the third time, dragging others with it.

Yes, it's wonderful to watch the left disintegrate, but don't forget: they still own the education system and have won too many hearts and minds to their own party.  It ain't over 'til it's over.  We may be winning, but we haven't won yet.

So let's talk about really winning this thing.  In order to really win, there are a few things we need to remember.  And never forget: the things we must remember are those qualities that made us a great nation.  Those unique strengths that define humanity at its best, corporately and individually.  They include the freedoms to excel and improve.

We are between the great holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and as the song says, it's the most wonderful time of the year.  It's a time to recall and reflect on what are the best things this life has to offer.

Reagan said this in 1986:

Perhaps no custom reveals our character as a nation so clearly as our celebration of Thanksgiving Day. Rooted deeply in our Judeo-Christian heritage, the practice of offering thanksgiving underscores our unshakable belief in God as the foundation of our nation and our firm reliance upon Him from Whom all blessings flow.

Succinct.  And this quote was taken in the middle of the Cold War, when the winner was in doubt.  Reagan was reminding us of how to be thankful in the midst of a time of great strife and difficulty.  He wanted us to know that "winning" was not enough.  We needed to know that winning was tied up with high character and purpose, for our nation and for each of us as individuals.

Giving thanks for what we have and have been given.  To God.  With our families and friends.  Hoping, by faith, to achieve higher character.

Yes, we are in a cold civil war.  We cannot truly win that war if we devolve.  We cannot win that war if we become like those we have been fighting.  Stooping to their level will not fly.  We cannot become like the Jacobins of the left.  That is a construct we have to follow.  We cannot allow hate or bitterness to succeed in gaining a foothold in us.

We can hate what they've done without hating them personally.  We can be confident when we come against hate, but we must not let ourselves take on the character of those we have fought so hard against.

George Washington said the following about division:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

As much as we need to despise what the left has done and ofttimes has stood for, we cannot let ourselves become despots.  We can't exact revenge on individuals or groups that have wished us ill or even have done wrong things to us.  Instead, we need to remember the importance of forgiveness.  And please, I am not confusing forgiveness with approval, consent, or seeking justice for criminality.  We need to look forward to convincing as many as possible on the left to move toward a reconciliation and a reunification.  Gloating, dominating, excluding, and belittling those who would move toward betterment should not be done.

Yep, that may be a pipe dream with many we know and see on the left, but it has been done before.  And yes, it will take a long time.

The Civil War was not yet over when Lincoln said it this way:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Once again, the calling onward of a citizenry to high character and not revenge.

Without this we cannot become great again.  Make America Great Again.  What an amazing slogan.  It's simple and powerful, and it calls us upward to better things.  Those things are not simply material, meaning rising economic fortune; they're the deep improvement of virtue that brings on and fulfills a strong economic well-being.  This would be virtue in the classic sense, in its finest and fullest sense.

No, perfection isn't possible, so get that out of mind.  Betterment, however, is.  We cannot confuse virtue with church lady-like pronouncements, nor take a sourpuss attitude of clucking at things we deem unclean.  Humor, building families, building businesses, building friendships and communities.  So much to do, so little time.

"Character is destiny" is a saying attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.  This is a truth that should be remembered, a truth once upon a time embedded in our culture, a truth we must renew.  With malice toward none, with charity for all.

How do we develop character?  To what do we aspire?  I'll leave it to the real expert, who was asked what the most important things are.  He replied that virtually everything else hung on us following these two instructions freely:

"'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the first and great commandment. 

 And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

The faith to build character for now and for future generations.

The way to truly make America great again.