Earlier this year, West Point's superintendent announced that West Point would modify its mission statement to drop “Duty, Honor, and Country” in favor of "the Army Values," a reference to a broader set of seven attributes that serve as the Army's ethos.  This shift has rightly raised concerns about the woke — i.e., unpatriotic — direction being taken throughout our military and throughout many of our educational institutions.

The elimination of these three transcendent values is a reminder that we have begun to take steps beyond “liberalism” into a new universe of social and political disintegration.  The disintegration of male/female identity as a sine qua non for a healthy society, the ethnic balkanization of our society that has gone on for a few decades, and “green” obsession with overpopulation and with getting rid of fossil fuels and natural gas are the backdrop of the decline of transcendent values.  The transcendent values are the values that bring us together, and those values are undergirded by English-speaking legal values and Protestant theological values (which include Old Testament moral values to some degree).

It can be a little hard to get a sense of this slipping away because it is a slippage that starts at the level of one’s general values.  It’s part of the conceptual basis of our lives that is slipping away, which, though of utmost importance, is not typically part of our everyday consciousness or discourse because of the demands and pressures of more practical matters.

I saw this clearly in the recent presidential debate between former president Trump and Cackmala, the Democommie candidate (I have no bias!).  She is so upset that some states have enacted abortion laws that are too strict that she advances the need for a federal law that will not hamstring pregnant women or their doctors as those new laws presently do.  Yearning for a one-size-fits-all federal abortion law or abortion policy shows that she cannot grasp the central premise of the Supreme Court’s elimination of Roe v. Wade.  The basic point is that abortion, like driver’s licenses, speed limits, and education and all matters governed by state and local law, does not come under the purview of federal law.  It is not, even indirectly implied as a subject suitable for federal legislation or national policy.

In short, Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional because of the transcendent principle of federalism (checks and balances obtained between the states and federal government as well as among the specific three branches), which is crucial in our system of government.  If you are obsessed with one-size-fits-all policies as the proper basis for unity and responsible government, as the socialists and the communists are, then you can’t appreciate the freedom and hope engendered by a more open, decentralized system.

The rigid leftist mindset finds itself thinking that some people living in some states will not be treated as well as they believe other people in other states are being treated.  Then they ask themselves, “Is that right?  Is that fair?” and then answer, “No — we need one size fits all!”  But the founders understood that freedom to accommodate different views is essential.  They understood that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  If you feel that in some important respect(s) you are living in a state that is a despotism, you can move.  We see that as Jim Crow laws corrupted the harmony and hope of the blacks living in the South at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a great migration of approximately six million blacks from the South to northern, midwestern, and western states during the period 1910–1970.  Freedom was the key to hope for millions, not one-size-fits-all fiats from top-down political hornets’ nests.

The left with its one-size-fits-all mindset presses forward with its totalitarian ways, pressing and insisting that one health care system is best, one energy (maybe two or three, like battery or windmill) is best, and one way of requiting wrongs is always being put forward — not law and order, but therapy.  Crime for the left is increasingly not crime, but merely a misplaced sense of frustration and confusion.  Universal values such as there being two genders or marriage between a man and a woman or drag queens as perverts (not entertainers) are rejected by the godless left as too simplistic despite almost worldwide assent and thousands of years of agreement among varying cultures or all continents with the conservative vision.

On 9/11/2001, I was teaching at one of the better academic high schools in NYC.  After seeing from my department’s sixth-floor office the first WTC tower pancake down, I seriously considered transferring to teaching at a high school on a Marine or Army base as part of a commitment to directly support our efforts against terrorism.  The enemy was obvious!  However, when I researched the social studies curricula being taught in the military schools, I saw that there were separate required courses in African-American history in the U.S. and Hispanic-American history in the U.S. as well as regular U.S. history!  Yet our Pledge of Allegiance declares that we are “one nation, indivisible.”  The disconnect between the Pledge and the military curricula was obvious.  Even the liberal-left NYC public high schools had not yet taken this path.  The term “woke” was not in fashion then, but clearly our military was on a path of multicultural fragmentation — tribalism detracting from a struggle for greater unity with diversity.

Eliminating “Duty, Honor, Country” is another giant step away from an intense, patriotic unity, which we need.  The left completely misunderstands the relationship between and among unchanging values, the role of freedom in a context of unchanging values, the brilliant formulation of American constitutional structure and principles, faith in God as a powerful motivation in the establishment of our country, and the importance of a legal system based on natural law and not upon critical theory or Marxist principles.

Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.