By: R.J. Moeller

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We're roughly a year away from the next Inauguration Day.  At this time next year, one of three men will be sworn in as our president for the following 4 years.  For all intents and purposes, it's between Mitt and Newt for the Republicans, and then obviously between Barack Obama and the winner of the GOP family feud.

It's a frustrating and nervous time for many voters - especially conservatives.  Many people who share my worldview are disheartened by the prospect of having to vote in the primaries for someone they aren't thrilled about, followed by 6 months or more of wall-to-wall partisan quarreling.  Added to this is the fact that all Americans are frustrated and nervous about things like the economy, education, and foreign policy time-bombs that appear on the verge of massive explosion.

The hard, bitter truth is this: all of those worries are legitimate and justified.  No sense in denying it.  Acceptance is the first step to recovery.

But alas, all is not lost.  Not yet, anyway.  I stumbled upon one of my all-time favorite YouTube clips this evening and it reminded me of something very important: This is a special place, our country.

The ideas, ideals, and values we have built our society and government on are different.  They are special.  We aren't individually special or better than the people of other countries.  We're all God's children.  We're all fallen men and women, no different than Americans of any other age.  The times in which the Founders or Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan lived in weren't special.

The beliefs those men lived by, governed by, were special.

It's easy to grow nostalgic when you watch a clip like this one above.  It's easy to grow discouraged when you step back and take an honest assessment of the political and cultural landscape of our time.

But I still believe that this is a special place, made so by our ideas, ideals, and values.  The capstone of the American experiment in self-government - one which the progressive builders of a secular welfare state have rejected - is simply this: "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights."  That's it.  That's everything.  With it we may still fall, should it be God's will.  Without it, we cannot help but fail.

Americans still claim a faith in God, however weak the beating pulse of true religion in this country may be.  We still acknowledge the importance of family, even to the point where we have contentious on-going debates about how "family" (and its precursor "marriage") will be defined.  We even still have huge swaths of young men and women who volunteer their lives to serve and protect their fellow citizens. (Thanks Brent and Matt!)

God, family, country: and in that order.

It may be a different time, but it's still the same place. We don't need another Reagan.  We need an intellectual and spiritual revival - a moral resuscitation.

We need 300 million "Reagan's" who share in the vision articulated above.  Or - and this is in closing - at the very least can agree on the moving words from a WWI soldier's diary that The Gipper quoted that cold, blustery Inauguration Day 21 years ago:

We are told that on Martin Treptow's body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, "My Pledge," he had written these words: "America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone."

Few things interest this blogger more than WWII history.  It is the single most important event of the 100 years, and perhaps well beyond that.  Andrew Roberts is a fantastic historical writer from Great Britain and has penned an excellent new book, The Storm of War, for which he sat down with Peter Robinson and Uncommon Knowledge to discuss recently.

Here's the entire interview, but even if you only have time to watch part of it, watch some of it!

I also highly recommend Roberts' Napoleon and Wellington.  He is England's David McCullough.

Recent guest of The R.J. Moeller Show podcast Professor Paul Rahe was interviewed by friend-of-the-show Peter Robinson for Uncommon Knowledge last week.  Below is Part 1:

We love us some Paul Rahe here at AVITW, and so will you!

Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, discusses the Declaration of Independence, the founders, Woodrow Wilson, and the founders of modern liberalism and how they gave more power to government.  Not knowing history, especially the history of our nation, is, in my opinion, a large part of the problem in a quickly-declining America.  It's hard to make decisions about what we should do when we're not certain what has worked, what hasn't, and in each case, why?

Newt Gingrich wrote this short piece for National Review today to honor our veterans and the men and women in uniform who have kept this country safe for more than 230 years.

An excerpt:

What makes this Veteran’s Day so different is that, earlier this year, our last surviving veteran of World War I passed away and now rests with his comrades at Arlington.

Army Cpl. Frank W. Buckles died on Feb. 27, 2011, at the age of 110. He was the last of the 4.7 million Americans who fought in the Great War nearly a century ago.

Having joined the ranks of American doughboys at the age of 16 — after being turned down by the Marine Corps for being too small, and rejected by the Navy for having flat feet — Buckles finally convinced an Army captain that he was old enough to enlist. He was so eager to join the conflict that he volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver, having heard that this would place him on a fast track to the front lines in France, where he did indeed come face to face with the ghastly toll of war as he transported the broken bodies of his comrades.

But even after the Armistice, this did not end Buckles’s experience of war. Over two decades later, during World War II, while serving as a civilian shipping contractor in the Philippines, Buckles was captured by the Japanese and became a prisoner of war for more than three years.

He lost over 50 pounds during his imprisonment, surviving on a daily diet of only a small amount of mush served in a tin cup the size of a coffee mug that he kept the rest of his life.

And now that Buckles is no longer with us, our last link with his generation of warriors has quietly slipped away.

As a boy, I attended the parades in their honor, men still young in their 40s and 50s. The young veterans who once marched beside them — now remembered as our “Greatest Generation” — were in their 20s, having returned not long before from Iwo Jima, Bastogne, and the flak-torn skies over Berlin and Tokyo.

Of the nearly 15 million who served during the Second World War, little more than a million remain with us, and approximately 1,000 of these pass away with each day. Today, the younger vets who march beside them are those of more recent eras: Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan — a total of more than 21 million veterans living among us.

Always remember folks: We are free because they are brave.

It's so easy for people of my generation to forget that, up until 1991, Russian Communism was a reality in the world.

A dominating, all-encompassing  reality.

The Cold War wasn't just some foot-note of history that your public school history teacher glosses over to squeeze in yet another unit on how we mistreated Native Americans.  This summer I've been reading through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, considered to be one of the most important works of the 20th century.

It is the non-fiction account of what exactly it was like to live under the totalitarian USSR regime, but the thing reads like a Dostoevsky novel.  It reads like 1984 or Brave New World, only worse, because it is real.  People actually treated other humans this way.  And not in some age long past: it was within my own lifetime.

It still continues in various forms today around the planet.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, "People need to be reminded much more often than instructed."  We all know communism is a bad thing.  But just how bad was it?  What ideas and values and historical events led the people of Russia to such a wretched place?  What can we learn from their mistakes and the sacrifice of millions who were murdered under Soviet rule?

Yuri Yarim-Agaev was a Russian scientist and political dissident in the 1970's.  Recently he sat down with my favorite interviewer (Peter Robinson, host of Uncommon Knowledge) and had much to say about what happened "over there" and what we can do to ensure it never happens over here.

This was only Part 1 of the interview. Watch the full conversation between Robinson and Yarim-Agaev right here.

"...And proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants." -Leviticus 25:10

For the overwhelming majority of human history, people have not been free.  Possessing any form of actual political, economic, and religious liberty is a relatively new concept.  The United States and her founders drew upon the best ideas and ideals mankind had pieced together.  Front-and-center were the Judeo-Christian teachings of Scripture.  Without the basic belief that all men are "created equal...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights", liberty is merely an existential creation of randomly-gathered proto-plasms who delude themselves into thinking one way of organizing a government/society is better than another.

So where does liberty come from?  How did it get here if things were so bad for so long?

Many Christians feel ashamed of being patriotic, or of embracing the notion that the United States of America, with all of her many faults, has been a blessing to the American people and to the world.  Some fear patriotic sentiments because they have been denigrated in popular culture.  Some because they have purchased the lie that many in academia and our public schools hold that America should spend much more of its time apologizing for its past sins than promoting its virtues to a world that could desperately use them.  And still others feel ashamed of shows of patriotism simply because they don't know their history, and have little idea of what it took to win, maintain, and enrich our freedom.

The 4th of July is my favorite holiday.  As a Christian, nothing can alter the importance I place upon the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the 4th is not devoid of a spiritual component.  Hear the words of the document that started this great "little experiment in democracy" and tell me we shouldn't be on our hands and knees every day thanking the sweet Lord above that we were born when we were, and in the cultural heritage we were.

I even played you a clip of a bunch of liberals reading the thing! That's how confident I am in the timeless, penetrating words.Not even Whoopi Goldberg can ruin them!

Enjoy your holiday.  Enjoy your BBQ's.  Enjoy your friends and family.

Just remember that freedom isn't free, and that we didn't get here by mistake.  Certain ideas are better than others.  If you are a Believer, remember that God is truth, and it is truth that sets us all free.

A century and a half ago today, the nation split in two and began a 4-year bloody war that claimed the lives of more than 620,000 Americans.  In the history of the United States there are three definitive events: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and WWII.  The one I know the least about is the one who anniversary it is today.  Thanks to Ken Burns and back spasms, I have had plenty of time the past week to lay on the floor with an ice pack and 8 hours of The Civil War DVR-ed on my TV.

In this clip above, Burns talks about the divisive nature of partisanship and uncompromising ideology.  This reminded me of an important column that Dennis Prager wrote about this time last year on the cultural divide in America today. In closing out his piece on the widening gap between Right and Left in our country, Prager states:

We need to acknowledge that we are in a non-violent civil war.

I write the words "civil war" with an ache in my heart. But we are in one.

Thank God this civil war is non-violent. But the fact is that the left and the rest of the country share almost no values. The American value system and the leftist value system are irreconcilable. If the left wins, America's values lose. If American values prevail, the left loses.

After Sunday's vote, for the first time in American history, one could no longer confidently believe that the American system will prevail. And if we don't fight for it, we don't deserve it.

It's an interesting point Dennis brings up, but more than anything today all I wanted to do was highlight the fact that this is an important day in our nation's history.  You would do well to get your paws on a copy of Burns' incredible documentary.  We would all do well to take a moment today and reflect on the sacrifices involved over the past 234 years to maintain this, "last, best hope for mankind."

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

God bless America.

Most of us have seen the famous painting of General Washington and his troops crossing the Delaware River.  

But what many of us do not appreciate is the story surrounding that fateful day in 1776.  Editor of National Review, Rich Lowry, has in his latest column succinctly (and powerfully) recapped Washington's crossing and the miracle that kept a revolution alive at its dimmest moment.

British strategy depended on shattering American faith in the Continental Army and reconciling the rebellious colonies to the Crown. As the Americans fled to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, the British occupied New Jersey and offered an amnesty to anyone declaring his loyalty. They had thousands of takers, including one signer of the Declaration of Independence.

As David Hackett Fischer emphasizes in his classic Washington’s Crossing, the American revival began spontaneously. Low on supplies, occupying troops had to forage for food. The forage turned to plunder. That fueled a grassroots rising among “the rascal peasants,” in the words of a Hessian officer.

With New Jersey boiling and expiring enlistments about to reduce his army further, Washington decided on a scheme to cross the Delaware on Christmas and surprise the Hessian garrison in Trenton. “If the raid backfired,” Chernow writes, “the war was likely over and he would be captured and killed.”

Behind schedule, Washington’s main force of 2,400 started crossing the river that night. Yes, most of them were standing up in flat-bottomed boats. Yes, there were ice floes. It wasn’t until 4 a.m. that all the men were across the river. They had nine miles still to march to Trenton in a driving storm and no chance of making it before daybreak. Washington considered calling it off, but he had already come too far.

The story continues:

Arriving at Trenton at 8 a.m., his spirited troops seemed “to vie with the other in pressing forward,” he wrote afterward. They surprised the Hessians, not because they were sleeping off a Christmas bender. Harried in hostile New Jersey, the Hessians had exhausted themselves on constant alert. They didn’t expect an attack in such weather, though. The battle ended quickly — 22 Hessians killed, 83 seriously wounded, and 900 captured, to two American combat deaths.

“It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world,” British historian George Trevelyan wrote.

The American troops found 40 hogshead of rum in the town, which temporarily blunted their effectiveness. Washington followed up soon enough with another victory at Princeton. In the space of a few weeks, the Americans killed or captured as many as 3,000 of the enemy and irreversibly changed the dynamic of the war.

David Hackett Fischer sees in that resurgence after our fortunes were at their lowest a reassuring aspect of our national character in this season of discontent: We respond when pressed. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a great supporter of the American cause, wrote: “Our republics cannot exist long in prosperity. We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed.”

May it still be so.

Merry Christmas.  God bless America.

In 1967 then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, debated Robert Kennedy (who was just about to make a run for the White House) on national television.  The panel asking questions of the two politicians was comprised of liberal students from Oxford University.  Again, the sound quality here isn't ideal, but PLEASE take a few minutes and watch The Gipper handle his business against someone (RFK) who was supposed to be smarter and more well-versed in matters of foreign policy than the former actor.

Calm, cool, and collected.