Category: Culture

I am only speaking here of profound failures of the church streams and independent churches that claim to believe the Bible as fully true and confess the classic biblical confessions.  I ask one question. How is it that the United States counts so many Evangelicals (all stripes), has been key in electing the present President and yet the culture is in step decline to very destructive directions?  This culture decline is noted by very profound commentators like Dennis Prager, Victor David Hanson, Jordan Peterson. I could name so many others. The universities, entertainment media, the pre-university educational establishment, and the news media all embrace the most destructive causes.  I won’t describe them. My readers can well describe them. Why is the Church quiescent as a minority fosters discrimination against believers, undercutting religious liberty, and requiring believers to endorse sinful lifestyles? Those who speak out are banned from social media! And why is the Church losing its next generation massively?  I note three among many reasons all based in spiritual dullness and lack of discernment.  

 

• The first major indication of the bankrupt condition of most Christians is that most send their children to the public schools and to secular colleges.  In such schools they will be indoctrinated to the LGBTQ etc. agenda and the rejection of the traditional binary ideas of the sexes and the centrality of marriage.  Inclusiveness excludes those with traditional morals. 40 years ago, we started a school and realized that we needed to take our children out. Children will be taught naturalistic evolution and prepared for unbelief.  Jonny will become Joan. Parents are responsible to see their children see all through a Biblical world view. This cannot be done today in the secular schools. A few years ago, I read the biography of Rabbi Schneerson, the late leader of the Orthodox Chabad Jewish movement.  I don’t agree with many of their views, but through his leadership they disciple their children and lose almost none! We simply do not disciple our children with depth and in a biblical world view. This is a profound manifestation of taking the easy way out among believers. 

 

• The second failure is the lack of mass mobilization to push back.  The gays bring out masses to promote their agendas. We bring out none or almost none.  Where are those protesting the removal of Christian organizations form our universities because they do not allow members who reject their beliefs?  Where is the massive protest against those promoting the legality of abortion to the ninth month of pregnancy. We are glad for 30,000 in the annual protest in Washington and there should be a million every year.  Where is the massive protest against requiring Christians to give themselves to promote through their businesses lifestyles that they consider sinful? Where is the protest against the attempt of marginalization? We are largely with few exceptions quiescent.

 

• The third failure is to address systematic poverty.  The emphasis of the New Covenant Scripture is on first preaching the Good News to the poor.  The key to the poor is not just financial support, enterprise zones and other government programs.  The real answer to the poor, restoring marriage and family among the poor and more is the Gospel which is the most powerful answer to poverty.  Where is the Church members that should be walking on-masse in the ghettos of drug dealing and murder and making it impossible? Some could be martyred, but the price should be paid.  Winning the masses of poor to the Lord and then discipling them is the one program that can really work. Yes, some are involved, but it is too few. The failure of the Church to be involved and effectively deal with systematic poverty is one of the greatest blots on the credibility of the American Church.

Some of what we are going through in the terrible moral struggles of the Western world is due to the abandonment of the historic approaches to truth and culture.  Though this is a simplistic summary, I think it is basically a true understanding. I was a student of the history of philosophy and a serious philosophy major in college and graduate school.  So this is my approach to what is happening. Western Society as formed by the cultural elite throughout history can be divided into three eras. The first is what I call the faith/reason period, second, the enlightenment empirical era, and finally the Irrational emotive preference era.  The three are the basic understandings of the nature of Truth and how Truth is accessed.  

The faith/reason era basically was dominant from the time of Constantine to the Reformation and included some of the reformers in the 17th century.  In the faith/reason era there was a joining of Biblical revelation with reason based on Greek philosophy, first with the influence of Platonic philosophies (stemming from philosophers who followed Plato) to Aristotle and the philosophers that followed him.  Knowledge and truth could be discovered both by natural reason its reflections and deductions about reality, or natural knowledge and by revelation. The conclusions of reason and revelation were compatible and sometimes asserted the same truth. The teaching of the Bible and the received wisdom of Greek philosophy were understood as both sources of objective Truth.  Sometimes faith (revelation) was more dominant then reason (Augustine) and sometimes they were in greater equal balance (Thomas Aquinas). Thomas provides us with the height of this synthesis of Greek norms and Biblical Revelation. For Thomas and even for Thomists today, Biblical revelation has the dominant final authority, except that for Catholics that authority has to be meditated by the teaching magisterium of the Church.  This orientation really on faith/reason began in the 2nd century Church Fathers, but really became strong after Constantine and then up to the Reformation which emphasized revelation in a stronger way, but not to the total rejection of reason. 

The second age was the Age of Enlightenment Empiricism.  This period overlapped the first during the Renaissance. The idea is that truth is the conclusion of reasoning about empirical evidence.  This orientation was given expression in Francis Bacon, the father of the modern scientific method. The 18th century established Enlightenment Empiricism in the West.  For Christians it produced the kind of evidential apologetic as seen in John Locke (the British philosopher whose writings were the primary influence of the framers of the U. S. Constitution).  Locke also wrote a text on Christian apologetics and argued for the Resurrection of Yeshua on the basis of the empirical evidence of history. Intelligent design from nature was also important to those of this orientation.  We think of the apologetics of William Paley and his argument form design and Joseph Butler’s The Analogy of Religion, a primary apologetic textbook for 150 years.  Enlightenment Christians produced an individualistic Christian faith.  However, there was the skeptical side of the enlightenment. Only with the enlightenment did the problem of evil seem to undercut faith (see the writings of Voltaire).  Empirical argument also produced doubt about the resurrection and the idea that God was good and loved us. Revelation would then take second place to empirical reason, though the Bible as authority was something that was argued for as a conclusion of empirical reason.  One sees this inheritance in Evangelicalism today. 

Both these approaches have aspects of truth and have merit, but as I have argued, in the Bible,the intuitive, and the work of the Spirit that brings inner certainty though his very own presence needed to be more credited.  We see this understanding in Pascal’s great description of his experience of the fire of God and his reasons of the heart. But this is not to discard reason or the evidence of the truth of the revelation. My one view does try to carefully join aspects of both ages but with a more critical eye focusing on the work of the Spirit in revelation. 

Today’s age is a new and never before seen departure from the very ideas of objective truth as argued both in the Enlightenment and the classic Faith/Reason synthesis.  Today the idea of objective truth to be discovered is rejected. Either from an existential or post modern perspective it is asserted that truth is subjective. This view has become dominant in many taken over many of the leaders in the cultural formation elite.  “Truth is what is true for me.” It is a matter of “my truth.” Therefore, I am entitled to choose my own orientation to life, my morals, my sexual ethics, my own view of what is of value. Today the idea of equality among people dominates, but there is nothing objective to ground this equality orientation.  In this view, one has the right to self-define, and any assertion of tradition or morals against personal self-definition is considered hateful and is to be rejected and called out as hateful to the other who in radical freedom to define oneself. God does not define me, nor his revelation, nor the history of cultural norms, neither in the West or in China or India for that matter (which had very strong definitions too).  In this view the great art, cultural works, literature and more of the West is not valued as superior to the ghetto scrawl on the subway station wall. The banal sound of rap music is equal to Beethoven. It leads to people whose capability of perception of truth and beauty is truncated. This orientation produces distortions and dangers both to politics, culture and personal life. Here are some examples. 

In sexuality, one must be affirmed to self-define according to the proclivities of the moment.  Heterosexual, monogamous, polygamous, promiscuous, transgender, homosexual, and polyamorous all must be affirmed by a new definition of love and tolerance.  Any who disagree are to be shamed and vilified. 

In politics, the norm is socialism.  The idea that evidence shows that socialism always leads to massive poverty is overwhelming, but the evidence is damned.  The post-modern socialists want a world of economic equality, and socialism must work and be enforced despite the overwhelming evidence against it.  Those functioning still in an enlightenment empiricism orientation are aghast at the stupidity of the power assertions of the socialist left, but without addressing the philosophical roots in existentialism and postmodernism, no headway is made.  The socialist politically correct elite see themselves as “woke” not as I see them as indoctrinated in a dangerous subjectivism.

We see the same in the Climate Change power assertions on the left.  The minority of qualified scientists must be tarred and feathered and run out of town since the climate change dangers are too overwhelming, and the subjective left wants to save the world.  Why save the world? There is no answer. The subjectivist could want to destroy the world and forever save a human race from future suffering. One writer desired an end of the human race to save the planet.  The goal is that we are to produce no carbon footprint within ten years. The science is not there to accomplish this. The science be damned because we want to believe this can be done so if we imagine it can be done, and want it, it can be done.  But the science is important. It tells us that a radical end to using fossil fuels will plunge hundreds of millions into poverty and many deaths. The windmills require steel, which is made with coal-fired steel mills! The solar panels require huge levels of mining which itself is carbon polluting.  Then again there is the pollution from the manufacture of the panels. Nuclear power is the best way to reduce carbon emissions, but the socialist left does not like nuclear. Natural gas is a great reducer of carbon emissions through replacing the other more polluting fossil fuels, but no interim solution can be accepted.   That we even think of balancing carbon reduction with the claim to lift people out of poverty or to not plunge people back into poverty is not even an acceptable discussion. For Russia, China, and India, there is no question that they will not go this route, but then the West must do it anyway. It is religious. In all of this, power assertion takes the place of reason and evidence.   Yet, it has no basis in TRUTH. It is a chosen orientation that is given religious zeal as if there was such a thing as absolute truth. So the subjectivist must have an important cause though it is incoherent with his world view.  

The danger of the domination of the anti-reason, anti-Biblical revelation, and anti-empirical subjectivist left is an almost apocalyptic challenge. 

The weekend Jerusalem Post featured an article with the headline asking if the Orthodox Jewish Community could accept LGBT people and especially young people.  It is interesting to note the phrasing. What does acceptance mean? Does it mean tolerance in spite of disagreement with the lifestyles of LGBT people? Or does it mean supporting their basic civil rights?  Or does it mean endorsing the moral and religious legitimacy of their lifestyle? I think the modern Orthodox Jewish community will support the first two meanings of the term, but acceptance does not mean endorsing the lifestyle.  The Modern Orthodox, for the most part, reject these lifestyles as immoral. The ultra-Orthodox is made up of many different streams which will for the most part not accept LGBT people. The ultra-Orthodox do not spend time on the issues of civil rights and are mostly concerned to perpetuate a ghetto of ultra-Orthodox practice, and they will reject openly LGBT people in their communities. 

 

In the United States, civil rights are probably supported by most modern Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Orthodox Christians.  However, that right ends when it would force artists to do creative expressions that would message fostering the LGBT lifestyles.  The larger question today is if the LGBT community will accept the traditional Jews, Christians, and Muslims who want to proclaim that human sexual expression is reserved for those who are in committed heterosexual marriages and that all other sexual involvements are immoral.   It is possible that both the LGBT and traditional religious communities could support one another in civil rights and mutual tolerance. But tolerance does not mean forced agreement. If you are an observer of the West and America in particular, the question now is if the civil rights of traditional religious people will be respected by the LGBT community or will they seek to get such people fired, shut down their businesses, and picket their homes!   It seems as if anything less than endorsement is considered hate by the LGBT community. Traditional believers say they love the LGBT people but want to promote traditional morality and encourage the LGBT people to give up the LGBT lifestyle and become committed to traditional morality. This will probably only take place by a religious conversion experience.  

Many responded with great alarm to a recent survey commissioned by the Wall Street Journal and NBC news.  Among people aged 55 and older, nearly 80 percent said that patriotism was very important compared with 42 percent of those aged 18-38.  The number that says religion is very important fell by more than 50 percent. Two-thirds of the older group cited religion as very important compared to fewer than one-third of the younger group.  Among the older group, 54 percent said that having children is very important compared to only 32 percent of the younger generation. Hence the American fertility rate is at an all-time low: 1,764.5 births per 1000 women; the replacement rate is 2.1.

 

One commentator noted that this is the result of leftist indoctrination on the college campus where religious faith, especially Christianity, is discredited and disdained, and where the United States is not explained as a great nation founded on great principles but flawed and making progress.  Instead, students are presented with a nation born in racism, sexism and homophobia. (Of course, one has to ask which cultures before modernity practiced women’s equality and treated women better than the Christian West, or which cultures embraced homosexual relationships.  Did Islamic cultures do so? Do they now? Of course, that is not the point. The point is to discredit the Christian West for the most part and America in particular).

 

Young adults are the product of an educational system that is destroying the historic national consensus on these three values.  This is a far cry from historic education in America when teachers believed they were the transmitters of the important cultural values that were the national consensus.  These values produced a coherent national identity.  These values made progress possible, for progress is measured by the fulfilling these values or ideals.  The loss of these values is destructive in the extreme. However, we are not without hope. In such a vacuum of meaning, there is potential for great revival.  People can begin to feel the emptiness of it all.

 

The religious consensus of the United States was Judeo-Christian.  Will Herberg, many decades ago, wrote well about this in his book Protestant, Christian and Jew. He noted that these three agreed on values making up a national consensus.  First that there is a God who holds all accountable. This is reflected in the movie The Ten Commandments and the intermission comments by Cecil B. Demille.  Such values as treating every person as an end in themselves, valued as created in the image of God, and revering marriage and family as the building block of the society.  The Church and Synagogue were respected as foundational in reinforcing values that were necessary to a good society. Patriotism arose from the belief that the country was worthy of the sacrifice of its citizens because it was birthed in unique values of human worth, justice and freedom.

 

As we have noted in the past, those in charge of culture formation, the educators, especially in the universities, but public schools as well, and in the media in both entertainment and information, have for many years been conveying a deconstruction of all three.  Why have a family if it is likely that the earth will not be able to sustain a worthwhile human life? Why have children since career and personal well-being is more important? Of course, the potential of a positive outcome in raising children is potentially one of the most fulfilling aspects of life.  There is now a self-centeredness and an orientation toward materialism that simply does not desire the personal sacrifice. Yet, relationships are the meaning of life. The loss of faith and hope for the future lead to increased suicide for those whose goals are thwarted. The famous columnist, Cal Thomas, wrote a piece on this survey that I reviewed while I was still in the process of writing this.  He emphasized the constant presence of media with young adults that does not give any sense that the good life is tied to these historic values and bemoaned that this will be a disaster for the nation. Who will be willing to sacrifice in war for a nation that is tribal and that does not have a common patriotism based on the worth of the nation?

 

As if this was not sufficient commentary, former Defense Secretary General James Mattis decried the state of the country as breaking up into a kind of tribalism with opposing identities that despise one another.  The survival of the nation is dependent on a common identity that was based on the historic values noted herein. And how does this apply in Israel? We as well struggle with the secular orientations of self, though less so.  The ultra-religious despise the secular and vice versa.  There is also a deconstructing narrative from the left that undercuts patriotism in Israel.  On the matter of patriotism, I have always argued for a guarded and more humble patriotism, not a chauvinistic one.  Yet respect for the nation’s values and ideals where they are right and believing in those values and ideals and seeking to form a more perfect nation is a valid motivation.  When a Messianic Jew looks at all this, it is clear that only a return to a biblical world view can reverse these terrible trends. 

 

In only a few days terrible news about our cultural drift cames into my purview.  I read an article by Daniel Henniger, a great article in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal on August 8, entitled The Deep Dangers of Life Online.  Then a study reported on in the N. Y. Post stated that 22-25 % of Millennials say they have no friends and some even no acquaintances (positive lesser relationships).  Then a sports writer complained that kids do not play sports “like we used to” and most kids give up sports at 11 years of age.  Then the co-founder of Facebook wrote about its dangers and he does not allow his kids to be on it.  It is habit-forming, numbing and dangerous! Other hi-tech leaders from Silicon Valley decry the effects of the internet and tell families to keep their kids away from it or at least to strictly limit it.  All of this in just two days!  

 

Henniger points to studies showing that the amount of internet time is strongly correlated to anxiety, depression, and suicide.  He writes, ”I don’t think the human brain was designed to endure the volume of relentless inner-directedness that is driven by these new screens.  It is not natural or normal. Anyone who spends that much time immersed inside their own psyche is headed for trouble.” He goes on to show how the internet foments anger and rage in lonely individuals.  

 

I well recall the joy of growing up playing sports.  Yes, I was fat and it was difficult, but it was a family value, so I plodded along.  Hours were spent on the field, stick ball, baseball, basketball and football from grade school to college.  We learned teamwork, unselfishness, effort, perseverance, discipline, and yes, friendship.  

 

In Seminary, I read two books that I often bring up.  Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and Vance Havners, A Nation of Nomads.  Both decried the fact that we were creating a nation of fleeting and shallow relationships.  Toffler noted that economics was driving moving and changing at such a rapid pace that marriages and friendships would be difficult and that many would just stop trying.  Marriages would not last. Havner called for putting the breaks on. Then I read Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart which recounts what he learned in the Holocaust.  A parallel book was Victor Frankl, also written from the Holocaust where he argued that human life had to find personal meaning to be sustained.   The meaning of life is in relationships. This indeed was a biblical emphasis. What would they think of our fleeting relationships today in the texting and internet culture?  The most important thing is intimate relationships among persons, beginning with our relationship with God. Texting and Facebook cannot replace personal “being there.” Then I think of the feminist movement.  So much of the argument is that women are not being paid equally (they really are for the same job and experience). But studies show that they are not being paid equal as a total sum of income because they take time off for their children and other enriching activities.  Would that feminism did not seek to find primary meeting in climbing the economic ladder to equality with men so they can live as empty a life as the men! Rather would that the protest had been for work for both men and women that enabled time for personal growth in relationships.  Loving and stable marriages and families is on the best level of what life has to offer. Building lasting communal intimacy in congregational life is difficult but when attained is a high value. 

 

The dystopia of modern life is primarily due to the breakdown of intimacy in lasting relationships, marriage, friendships, congregational community, and volunteer organizations of committed people working together!  The recent spate of mass murders, way before President Trump (he is not to blame for this despite the claims on the left) may be a symptom of the breakdown of relationships in our culture. Anger and loneliness together are a dangerous mixture.  

 

What is to be done?  We need to unplug and find our primary life offline!  Then we need to commit to build lasting relationships. It is to build a counter-culture, to stay in one place for a long time, to build a congregational community, to build a good family and more.  We have to build a counter culture that is aware of the issues and lives contrary to the trends of our day. It is not easy, but we did it in our building congregations from the days my leadership in congregations.  We seek to do it in Israel as well. We need to raise consciousness of what is happening. 

The homeless issue in the United States is horrendous. The liberal run cities are allowing the homeless to take over areas of the city creating squalor without historic precedent in the United States. There are rats, now even bubonic infection, and other serious diseases. Living on the street is defended as if it were a right. Some are even defending using the parks for the homeless and thus having the parks no longer a joyful place for normal citizens and their families.  

 

The solution is very straightforward but expensive. First, it has to be understood that the homeless are 98% of people with serious mental illness or drug problems. So here is the solution.  

 

1.  A massive church effort to win the homeless through the Gospel, healing centers for addicts like Teen Challenge, and Church mental health facilities.  These can provide healing prayer as well.
2. Passing laws so that living on the streets is illegal.
3. Providing shelters for all homeless.  The homeless have to use shelters or be in facilities for the mentally ill. 
4. Police to enforce the standard that no one lives on the streets. 

 

So why is this not done? My guess is that it is expensive and easier to just ignore the situation and then offer some liberal crocodile tears by showing support by allowing the camps with all their squalor to expand.  The homeless are people created in the image of God. They may want to live on the street, but for their sake, we can not allow them to. This is a freedom that we cannot promote.

The Democratic Presidential Debates open up the issue of the Black underclass especially in the light of President Trump’s critique of the city of Baltimore and Elijah Commings, whose district includes the poverty areas of the city. Trump states that Commings should do something with his district instead of focusing on investigating him.  For this Trump is called a racist. But all that is beside the point. The issue is the city underclass. The murder rate is horrific; the drugs, the rat infestation, and sub-par housing and more are so tragic to behold. We are seeing the results of 60 years of bankrupt liberal policies. Here are a few aspects of it. 

 

1. Ignoring the importance of spiritual foundations for a solution.  The Church is also much to blame because as I have written many times, the white churches with money should make the poor the center of Gospel efforts as the key to change. 
2. Incentivizing fatherless homes by the way welfare is structured. Rather welfare should incentivize fathers to be in the home and education and work for mothers where it is not possible to have fathers in the home. 
3. Not training in the black community for family life.
4. Fostering an education system that is bankrupt as the only alternative rather than charters and vouchers as a way out of schools that do not perform. $16,184 is spent per pupil in Baltimore. Yet in one school no high school student could read or do math at grade level! Schools should have to perform up to a level or be closed. Testing should constantly measure this progress. Can you imagine what a private school could do with this much money per pupil? Cut the non-teaching part of the system drastically and get results from a good teacher? Our teaching colleges train the lower end of academically capable people. We have to attract good people to teaching in private and public schools.  The money should go do them and not the bloated non-teaching sector of the schools. 
5. Not recognizing that a massive police presence will be necessary to stop crimes and drugs. These should be community police that build relationships in the neighborhoods.  There should be so many that it is not possible for crime to continue. But instead, liberals vilify the police. Yes, there are problems, but vilifying police will lead to more tragedy. 

 

Where are the Church leaders to mobilize the Church for massive involvement and presence in these communities? 

Three types of gun violence dominate the landscape in America.  One is gun violence in the inner city connected to drugs and gangs.  This requires a holistic effort for the inner city which I spoke of in another post on the Black Underclass.  It also requires a massive community policing effort that is very expensive and which politicians have been unwilling to support. 

 

The second is ideological hate crimes, either from white supremacy or from Islamic terrorism.  

 

The third is from a deranged evil that simply hates and wants to kill people.

 

My daughter Rebecca wrote a very intelligent post on the issue of guns and violence, so I want to write on it more extensively.  We do get the news of such things in Israel and Israelis are quite amazed that it is safer in Israel!  

 

I am only here speaking on the second two types.  It appears that the shooter in El Paso was carrying out an ideological hate crime and the one in Dayton, Ohio was carrying out a deranged hatred in general.  I think these two provide a paradigm of killers that can be helpful.  

 

In the first case, I think it is crucial that social media be surveyed to alert people to white supremacists and Islamic radicals who may commit crimes.  We must not use political correctness about the latter to not track Islamic terrorists. We must not use free speech to prevent tracking white supremacist individuals and groups.  All people who belong to such groups or who post their ideologies should be on a red flag list that prevents them from buying guns, though they can get guns from the black market. At least some acts might be prevented.  In addition, people need to come forth to authorities when they have information.  

 

In the second case, this shooter was feared in his high school days and suspended. He should have been on a red flag list.  He constantly spoke of his desire to murder and rape. It was a non-ideological evil. Laws did not allow a minor to be in a database for red-flagging for the future.  Youth crimes are expunged from the records. This has to change with regard to gun purchases. This evil individual was able to purchase the gun legally. 

 

It is crucial that those who are mentally unfit not be allowed to purchase guns.  In this regard, we need to have a system to prevent those with mental illness issues connected to violent behavior from ever purchasing guns.  

 

Lastly, all who purchase should go through rigorous background checks.  We can also preclude rapid-firing weapons with large magazines. Some will say that self-defense requires such firepower for fending off criminals.  I don’t buy it. This is very rarely the case. Also, such weapons make hunting less of a sport and more of a killing spree.  

Radical deconstructionist neo-Marxist thinking along with relativism has destroyed much of American education.  The idea of a body of great literary works is dismissed as simply the writings of white male oppressors. The idea of historical progress from the magna carta to the U. S. constitution is dismissed.  The U. S. constitution was passed (at least in part) by slave holders which makes it invalid. (Of course, some of the great leaders in that effort were anti-slavery abolitionists like John Adams). Those on the cutting edge of the vilification of the historic figures in U. S. history, such as Washington, Jefferson and Madison, are fostering this as part of a lager purpose. It is to sweep away the constitutional republic of the United States and replace it with a socialistic hedonistic society.  To do so they have to destroy respect for the founders. The idea is a utopia where all will have material provision through state distribution, a leveling of wealth, and an embrace of all sexual orientations. Anything else is hate speech. The great jurist Robert Bork, in his great book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, outlined their redefinition of freedom as limiting political freedom while fostering libertine hedonism.  This is the opposite of the vision of the founders in order liberty.

 

Last night I had a succession of dreams.  It was to see a new movement of reformation in education where the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are upheld and where respect for the founders would be restored.  Maybe someone is creating such an organization to reform education. As part of this, I saw articles on each founder, Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Franklin, Madison and more. I saw an article with a picture of each.  It would then describe their accomplishments and how they brought advance to civilization. However, it would also be honest about their failures and where they did not overcome the limits of their age. However, it was their age. We are grateful for the progress and respect them in spite of their failures.  Liberty is such a great gain and came mostly from the British traditions of common law and through the influence of the liberties enshrined in the U. S. constitution. Restoring the United States will require such an education reformation. It will be heavy on teaching civics and the importance of free enterprise that is regulated to avoid crony capitalism.