Ronald Reagan represented a fundamental shift from the long bipartisan consensus on the Cold War. After Presidents Truman and Eisenhower oversaw the Korean “Conflict,” our strategic leadership and thinking turned pessimistic. We shifted from an assumption that our system had greater viability and resilience to a defensive crouch, hoping the horse might learn to sing before the bear and the dragon consumed the world. Reagan radically rejected that dark view. Today, we face a continuation of the same struggle in a new guise, and once again people who identify as conservative are mostly pessimistic, believing that the best we can hope for is a long delaying action, ending in leftist victory. Donald Trump represented a shift in the cultural war, the internalized Cold War between freedom and totalitarianism.

Korea and Nuclear War: doubting democracies’ durability

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as a superpower. We alone had achieved dominance on land AND air AND sea. America alone had the demonstrated ability to rain nuclear fire on its enemies. In this context, George Kennan’s famous 1946 “Long Telegram” expressed confidence that the United States could prevail, without open warfare, against the Soviet Union.* His conclusion is well worth our reading or re-reading in today’s context, so I reproduced it below.

The Korean War, combined with the treason of U.S. scientists delivering the atomic bomb to Stalin’s USSR, shook U.S. confidence and assumptions. The Soviets successfully tested an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, four years after the Manhattan Project culminated in the successful Trinity site test. They had the ability to deliver the copied bomb because they had the very aircraft used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Four B-29 Super Fortresses made emergency landings in the far eastern reaches of Soviet territory, under allied mutual aid agreements. The crews were detained, interrogated, and the Soviet Union seized the B-29’s for reverse engineering, creating the Tu-4.

The year after the Soviets demonstrated the ability to wield the same atomic fire as the U.S., their client state, North Korea, nearly defeated an unprepared American military thrown into action with no preparation and poor logistical support. The North Korean People’s Army launched a lightning attack on June 25, 1950. They pushed the Republic of Korea and U.S. forces all the way down the peninsula to a small parameter around the port of Pusan.

We threw enough resources into the fight to stabilize the parameter. Then General of the Army MacArthur planned, and the U.S. Marine Corps violently, successfully executed, a massive counter-offensive by amphibious landing at Inchon, far behind the communists’ front lines. However, hubris led to MacArthur attacking all the way to the Yalu River. If successful, Korea would be unified as a U.S. client state directly on the border of Communist China and the Soviet Union. Mao could not tolerate this, so launched a massive infantry counteroffensive, catching MacArthur and his forces completely off guard and driving the “United Nations” (really U.S. controlled) forces back past the pre-war border.

MacArthur sought to cover his miscalculation by publicly demanding the release of the atomic bombing authority. President Truman, the first and only national leader to order the use of atomic weapons to this day, considered that Stalin had the ability to respond with the same terrible weapons. Our existing strategy was to defeat communism by promoting a more viable economic and political system, not to engage in a third world war more terrible than the Second World War. So, the war settled into a grinding stalemate, with small units struggling to take or hold a hilltop.

President Eisenhower, the victorious Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, did not authorize a renewed push to the Yalu, let alone the use of atomic bombs in the Korean War. November 1, 1952, three days before his election victory, the U.S. had successfully detonated a 10 megaton hydrogen bomb, a secret leaked within days, appearing in the Los Angeles Examiner on November 8, 1952. Less than a year later, on August 12, 1953, the Soviets successfully tested a hydrogen bomb.

Unlike the first Soviet atomic bomb the development of which was hastened by espionage in the United States, the first Soviet hydrogen bomb was of an original design. In the spring of 1954, the United States tested its own two-stage super-bomb in the Pacific. This type of “deliverable” weapon was replicated by Soviet physicists and first tested on November 22, 1955.

Whether the Soviet H-bomb was truly independent or helped by communists in the U.S. program, the A-bomb gap lasted 4 years, while the H-bomb gap lasted only a year. Eisenhower used limited increases in military pressure plus diplomacy to achieve a cease-fire and the armistice still in place today. He did so in the knowledge that the Soviets could deliver atomic bombs and that the horror of city-obliterating H-bombs was just around the corner.

With the Soviets looking more competitive than assumed in the Kennan telegram, and with the race for global reach missiles and the new high ground of space, a more pessimistic view emerged. From T.R. Fehrenbach’s history This Kind of War to Robert Heinlein’s science fiction Star Ship Troopers, we get deep doubt about democratic societies confronted with the iron will of communist regimes. How can you convince American mothers to let their sons be sent to far-flung outposts to merely hold the line? Without a quick clear victory, without even big battle successes, how do you sustain political will in a representative democracy? In the face of thermonuclear fire, of megadeath, what is victory?

Faced with the apparently sustainable Soviet tyranny and the mutually assured destruction of two massive nuclear arsenals, thinking shifted from winning to surviving one year at a time, delaying Soviet dominance with newly developed Special Forces assisting indigenous resistance, and use of economic and public communications tools to counter Soviet influence. In this light, Nixon going to China makes sense. This astute and combative politician started his political career in the House of Representatives investigating communist infiltration in the 1950s. He sponsored a bill in 1948 (the Mundt-Nixon Bill), requiring registration of all Communist Party members and reporting on communist funding or the origin of publications. Yet, by 1968, he sought the same result in Vietnam that we accepted in Korea.

Recognizing the communists as the legitimate government of China, opening diplomatic, cultural, and economic relations, was calculated to draw Soviet forces eastward, away from Central Europe, to check the massive Peoples Liberation Army. Never mind that U.S. traitorous scientists had helped Mao go nuclear. The Chinese bombs could be targeted on Russian cities as well as Los Angeles. China vastly outnumbered the entire Soviet Union, let alone Russia, and had pretended claims, as good as Russia’s, to Siberia. The modern borders come from an ascendant czarist Russia imposing an agreement on a decrepit imperial China in 1860. Even as China advanced to ICBM capability, threatening America from sea to shining sea, Russia had to calculate that those missiles also targeted Mother Russia.

And yet. Nixon and Kissinger’s “realist” politics meant the developing Asian democratic states would lose some status in the global and regional order. We would balance our interests with new weight on keeping China and Russia apart. The Chinese were exporting communism and seeking client states in their own expansionist campaign. The 1970s saw the Rust Belt, the rise of Japan, Inc., the oil embargo, stagflation, and the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis, punctuated by the disastrous failure of our best special operations rescue attempt. Hunkering down and playing a delay game seemed sensible, realistic.

Then came Reagan with a revived and more muscular vision of Cold War victory:

In 1977, Richard Allen, a confidant and advisor, asked Ronald Reagan for his theory of U.S.-Soviet relations. “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War,” Reagan replied. “We win, they lose.”

In two terms, despite resistance from the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, Reagan led a coalition of military, moral, and material might to defeat the Soviet Union. Less than a year after he left office, the Berlin Wall was torn down by the hands of ordinary Germans, as the East German regime gave up control. Not one Russian tank rolled, not one Russian fighter or bomber appeared overhead. We won, they lost because Reagan believed in and purposefully pursued victory.

Changing Form, Similar Responses

The fall of the Evil Empire did not signal the end of history, let alone the end of evil. As Tolkien portrayed repeatedly in his Middle Earth tales, evil, when confronted and defeated, turns into a shadowy cloud that first flees and then settles in a new place to grow again in a new form. Even as the Berlin Wall fell, the left was rapidly marching through the institutions. Reagan and his team had nothing to say about this internal threat, beyond seeking to counter propaganda affecting the struggle with Moscow. The shift from economic class struggle to the cultural war on the basis of race, sex, and sexuality were well underway. In this new manifestation of the permanent struggle for a bit of liberty in the face of the many manifestations of men controlling other men, Reagan left a legacy of ashes.

Today, we face a continuation of the same struggle in a new guise, and once again people who identify as conservative are mostly pessimistic, believing that the best we can hope for is a long delaying action, ending in leftist victory. A significant portion of Christian “social conservatives” may see that moment of leftist victory as a precondition for the true end of history, the culmination of our rebellion triggering fiery final judgment, out of which the new heaven and earth emerge. Yet, the underlying, apparent majority belief is that the left will prevail, that liberty is a fleeting and unusual thing, that America is lost, the constitutional republic failed.

We now talk about retreating into smaller, more easily defended, positions, state strongholds that might even secede. Small “o” orthodox Christians talk about homeschooling, smaller home churches, and relabeled mere Christianity, dressing up futile retreat as pious progress. We assume that they win, we lose (until a miracle occurs). Conservatives of all stripes, to the extent that they even identify as conservative anymore, are back in the Nixon-Ford-Bush tradition, staving off likely long term failure with short-term tactical maneuvers for temporary, limited victories.

Consider the claims of the Benedict Option:**

For much of the past fifty years, many Christians believed if we just won a few more elections and placed a few more judges, we could turn back the cultural tide in our direction. Here is the harsh reality: the culture war is over. Whether or not you can see it in your particular corner of America, Christians have been trounced in the culture war. The culture war waged for 50 years, and we’ve lost nearly every single major battle. You might hold out hope for a victory here and there still, but in the main, culture has moved on. That is why America is now post-Christian.

However, we cannot just blame politics for turning the country post-Christian. We need to point the finger of blame inward. Christians had our shot as the dominant political force for a long time. And yet we still wound up here. Likewise, for several generations now, we have not raised the kind of disciples that could withstand the realities and allure of post-modern, consumerist Western life. If the country and our children move away from Christianity, we better not blame everything in sight except ourselves.

In grounding a proposed strategy in a 6th Century monastic order, rather than at least, say, the 13th Century basic Rule (Memoriale Propositi) of the Third Order, a Franciscan Order for members of the laity outside the cloister walls, the natural response, all disclaimers and admonitions to the contrary, will be towards attempted retreat. Further, American Protestants had already trod much the same claimed path in the early 20th Century.

A group of evangelical believers responded to the assaults of secularism, scientism, and the internal challenge of the Higher Criticism by writing, assembling, and very widely publishing a series of essays defining and defending the fundamentals of the Christian faith against all contemporary challenges. The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth was published in multiple volumes in 1910. This work was distributed free of charge to both church and Christian civic groups, including in those days YMCA and YWCA local leaders. The costs were covered by a small group of devout wealthy men, who saw a need to shape the culture by strengthening the church, the Body of Christ.

They also remained engaged politically early on, resulting in two quick apparently catastrophic defeats. PBS should be credited for this even-handed description of early Fundamentalism in America:

In the beginning, fundamentalism did not attempt to reach out and change society as a whole. It was the anti-evolution crusade of William Jennings Bryan that turned fundamentalism into a political movement. Beginning in 1922 Bryan campaigned across America for laws against the teaching of Darwin’s theory. His crusade lit a fire in the state of Tennessee, which passed a law outlawing the teaching of evolution early in 1925.

When John Scopes was arrested for violating the law, The World’s Christian Fundamentals Organization invited William Jennings Bryan to go to Dayton, Tennessee, to prosecute Scopes. Bryan jumped at the chance.

The Scopes trial forever changed fundamentalism in America. The national media, led by H. L. Mencken, mocked Bryan and his “Bible belt” followers. Mencken called Bryan a charlatan with a particular genius for manipulating the “yokels” who worshipped him. Mencken’s reports from Dayton influenced historian’s depictions of Bryan, the Scopes trial, and fundamentalism itself for years afterwards.

“One of the false lessons of the Scopes trial,” says historian Ronald Numbers, “was that the American Civil Liberties Union coming down with a very smart lawyer from Chicago, Clarence Darrow, could through verbal embarrassment of the leader of the fundamentalists, discredit an entire movement. And historians writing in the late 50s and early 60s think that fundamentalism has disappeared from American culture.”

William Jennings Bryan was not a Republican. He represented the Christian wing of the Progressive movement and ran for president as a progressive Democrat three times. Clarence Darrow came as a representative of the radical secular wing of the Progressive movement to destroy the Christian wing. So, the culture war has been on since at least the dawn of the 20th Century, and featured two early major losses, on who controls understanding of the nature of humans, and, with Prohibition, public morality. Following those two defeats, a large portion of the American evangelical community became quiescent until the 1970s. In doing so, they completely forfeited public K-12 education and did nothing as the Supreme Court reshaped official civic morality, temporarily culminating in Roe v. Wade.

As ordinary Americans rejected the left’s call into the streets in 1968, the internal specter of communism wafted away. The left quickly began reshaping itself in our institutions of higher education as critical studies. All the variations of conflicting identities grew, taking turns in the spotlight, from gender feminism, to critical race theory, to ever-shifting sexual identity politics. Yet, the fight over the content and definition of sexual morality had been long underway during the Fundamentalists’ political quiescence.

You have only to watch the early television hit on CBS, the most-watched Sunday evening show for years, What’s My Line? Hugh Hefner was a panelist, one of the celebrities guessing the contestants’ lines, April 23, 1961. He was back as a mystery guest, with the panel guessing this pornographer and pimp’s line, January 19, 1966.

Go back a decade further, and listen to old-time radio detective series. The heroes are almost without exception unmarried and desire women who would make time with them without marital bonds. Yes, there are notable exceptions like Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles and G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown.

So, pessimism on the cultural war seems even more justified than the last half-century suggests. However, it ain’t necessarily so. No matter how much powerful people and influential institutions are invested in enforcing the narrative of historical inevitability, and not waiting on a final divine intervention, there is hope of successfully changing strategy from a long delaying retreat to rapid advances.

Go back to Prohibition. The common narrative is that it was a failure, including as legislating public morality. Inspecting charts of alcohol consumption since 1850 suggests that public campaigns against alcohol, including Prohibition, have been unsuccessful, with consumption mostly steady over 2 gallons of ethanol per capita per year! However, the American story starts much wetter. Our founders drank like fish.

Early Americans even took a healthful dram for breakfast, whiskey was a typical lunchtime tipple, ale accompanied supper and the day ended with a nightcap. Continuous imbibing clearly built up a tolerance as most Americans in 1790 consumed an average 5.8 gallons of pure alcohol a year.

[ . . . ]

In 1830, consumption peaked at 7.1 gallons a year and drinking became a moral issue.
“This was a time of great reform fervour,” says [Bruce Bustard, senior curator of Spirited Republic: Alcohol in American History]. “Think of the women’s rights movement and anti-slavery movement. Another very popular and powerful movement was the temperance and ultimately Prohibition movement.”
Alcoholism – also known as dipsomania – was starting to have a serious impact on communities. Women and children might be in physical danger if the man of the house began drinking. If he became ill or lost his job through drink, there was no social safety net to support or protect his family.
In 1862 the US Navy abolished the traditional half-pint daily rum ration for sailors.

Religious revival, the Second Great Awakening, was a source of local, state, and national public campaigns to change individual behavior and public policy about alcohol retailing. Temperance was linked with other powerful reform movements that sought to influence public morality through policy. It is no coincidence that the Radical Republicans turned to child labor laws and workday hour restrictions immediately after achieving domestic victory over the slave industry in the Civil War. Generations of voters who would approve Prohibition came from extensive, persistent political engagement with every school board and every local paper, pressuring changes in curricula and editorial stances on a moral issue. Perhaps religious or social conservatives should just declare strategic victory over Demon Rum.

Since Roe v. Wade, there have been generational shifts in public opinion, favoring more restrictive abortion policy and having a higher view of the status of the unborn. This has been discounted in the conventional conservative pessimism, reinforced by the intersectional left’s rapid public advances over the past year. However, perhaps we are really in a position relative to the Cold War in 1977.

Because the cultural war is not identical to the Cold War, the tough part is in articulating an effective victory strategy, equivalent to Reagan’s “we win, they lose.” The left is quite open about winning including imposing real defeat, already manifesting in Maoist forms. Yet, a conservative saying “they lose” has to be ready to effectively deal with demonization on multiple fronts. Moreover, “win” and “lose” have to be understood as limited in scope and duration, so long as humans and human institutions are inherently limited and flawed. It matters that Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union. Ask the Poles, Hungarians, and other former occupied nations. Yet, the left was already gathering strength in new forms. If the current left suffers a significant defeat over the next few years, there will be people and communities that benefit. If this comes to pass, remember that 1989 was not the end of history, that none of us know the hour or the day that our world’s story will be rolled up like a scroll.

* Concluding part of George Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” transmitted from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to Washington D.C. on February 22, 1946 [including typos or text scanning errors]:

Part 5: [Practical Deductions From Standpoint of US Policy]

In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived. This is admittedly not a pleasant picture. Problem of how to cope with this force in [is] undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face. It should be point of departure from which our political general staff work at present juncture should proceed. It should be approached with same thoroughness and care as solution of major strategic problem in war, and if necessary, with no smaller outlay in planning effort. I cannot attempt to suggest all answers here. But I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve–and that without recourse to any general military conflict.. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations of a more encouraging nature I should like to make:

(1) Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventunstic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw–and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.

(2) Gauged against Western World as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which Western World can muster. And this is factor which it is within our power to influence.

(3) Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another. Lenin’s death was first such transfer, and its effects wracked Soviet state for 15 years. After Stalin’s death or retirement will be second. But even this will not be final test. Soviet internal system will now be subjected, by virtue of recent territorial expansions, to series of additional strains which once proved severe tax on Tsardom. We here are convinced that never since termination of civil war have mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of Communist Party than they are today. In Russia, party has now become a great and–for the moment–highly successful apparatus of dictatorial administration, but it has ceased to be a source of emotional inspiration. Thus, internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured.

(4) All Soviet propaganda beyond Soviet security sphere is basically negative and destructive. It should therefore be relatively easy to combat it by any intelligent and really constructive program.

For those reasons I think we may approach calmly and with good heart problem of how to deal with Russia. As to how this approach should be made, I only wish to advance, by way of conclusion, following comments:

(1) Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individual.

(2) We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. I cannot over-emphasize importance of this. Press cannot do this alone. It must be done mainly by Government, which is necessarily more experienced and better informed on practical problems involved. In this we need not be deterred by [ugliness?] of picture. I am convinced that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown. It may also be argued that to reveal more information on our difficulties with Russia would reflect unfavorably on Russian-American relations. I feel that if there is any real risk here involved, it is one which we should have courage to face, and sooner the better. But I cannot see what we would be risking. Our stake in this country, even coming on heels of tremendous demonstrations of our friendship for Russian people, is remarkably small. We have here no investments to guard, no actual trade to lose, virtually no citizens to protect, few cultural contacts to preserve. Our only stake lies in what we hope rather than what we have; and I am convinced we have better chance of realizing those hopes if our public is enlightened and if our dealings with Russians are placed entirely on realistic and matter-of-fact basis.

(3) Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is point at which domestic and foreign policies meets Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit–Moscow cannot help profiting by them in its foreign policies.

(4) We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will.

(5) Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After Al, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

KENNAN