Are “Social Traditionalists” Un-American

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  David Brook’s op-ed piece, entitled “A Moral Philosophy for Middle Class America,” in the New York Times of October 15, 2006, seems to develop or articulate a new paradigm designed to evade the real issues in life.  What should we make of this semantic legerdemain in the use of the term “traditionalist” to pose primate social mimicry as the key to happiness and order.  Are the extremists both “right” and “left” causing the “moderates” to reinvent the wheel that caused the problem of extremism in the first place? 

  If so, the abandonment of the entire traditionalist philosophy that gave rise to the Great American Experiment would mean that the experiment in order, justice, and freedom through faith-based community and governance has failed.  Jefferson’s core teaching as a profoundly religious person was that only a society and government infused with awareness of a higher source of guidance than the merely human can remain free.  Without freedom there can be no justice, and without justice no order.  The reverse is even more true, as understood by the framers of the Preamble to the American Constitution who listed justice first and freedom last in prioritizing America’s purposes.

  Or is Brooks merely trying to restate Jefferson’s profound philosophy of life in modern language better adapted to the level of understanding that may predominate in a civilization that has already disintegrated beyond salvation?