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the noahic covenant’s importance

friday, may 9th, 2025

GOD and humans aren’t strangers to one another, as if their relationship is undefined or their obligations unknown. Instead, God has established covenants in which he defines his relationships with people, makes commitments to them, and demands obedience in return. The Abrahamic covenant with the house of Abraham, the Mosaic covenant with Israel, and the new covenant with the church serve as the Bible’s most prominent examples. Thanks to these covenants, God’s people haven’t had to wonder about the nature of their relationship with him or the terms on which he deals with them.

If you don’t get your doctrine of the church right, you’re going to get your doctrine of the government and the nation wrong.

But what about our political communities and civil governments? How should we understand their relationship with God? This article argues that God also relates to civil governments by way of covenant — specifically, the Noahic covenant he established after the great flood (Gen. 8:21–9:17).¹^{1 .} God also made a covenant with Noah before the great flood (Gen 6:18). This was evidently a different covenant because none of the four characteristics of the post-flood covenant I describe below were true of this earlier covenant. In this article, the “Noahic covenant” simply refers to the covenant post-flood. This fact has profound implications for defining the importance and legitimacy of civil government as well as its limited authority and modest aspirations.²^{2 .}.

A Few Basic Characteristics of the Noahic Covenant

Before turning to issues of civil government specifically, I explain a few basic characteristics of the Noahic covenant that provide the necessary background for what follows.

Universal

First, the Noahic covenant is universal in scope. God established it with Noah and his family and with all future generations (Gen. 9:8, 9, 12). He also established it with the entire animal kingdom, “every living creature” (9:9–13, 15–17). This covenant even extends to “the earth” (9:13) and the broader natural order: “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night” (8:22).

Preservative

Second, the Noahic covenant is preservative in purpose. That is, God promises to sustain this fallen world but nothing more. Instead of destroying the earth again with a flood (8:21; 9:11, 15), he maintains the cycles of nature (8:22) and enforces boundaries between the animal and human realms (9:2–4). Noticeably absent are any promises of forgiveness, a coming Messiah, or a new creation. The Noahic covenant administers God’s common grace, not his saving grace.

Modest

Third, the Noahic covenant promulgates a modest ethic for human beings. It requires being fruitful, multiplying, and filling the earth (Gen. 9:1, 7), eating plants and animals with certain restraints (9:3-4), and punishing the violent (9:6). These are important. Still, this covenant doesn’t command things that seem even more important, such as worship. This isn’t surprising. Because the covenant’s purpose is preservative, the covenant’s ethic focuses on basic activities necessary for the survival of human society: procreation, material provision, and enforcing justice.

Temporary

Finally, God put the covenant into effect for a limited period of time. He promised to maintain this world “while the earth remains” (8:22). From the New Testament’s perspective, we can say that the covenant’s expiration date is Christ’s Second Coming. Then he will judge the world and bring the present created order to radical consummation (e.g., 2 Pet. 3:3-13). God established this covenant to last for a very long time, which is what calling it an “everlasting covenant” means (9:16), but he never designed it to last forever.

The Obligation to Enforce Justice

While the Noahic covenant doesn’t formally institute civil government, it authorizes it. To understand how, consider one aspect of this covenant’s modest ethic: enforcing justice. God said: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (9:6). Although this mentions a specific act of injustice—bloody murder—it points to a broader principle, the so-called lex talionis (law of retribution). The Mosaic covenant later summarized it as eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth (Exod. 21:23–25; Lev. 24:19–20; Deut. 19:21). The point isn’t the need for physical mutilation but that the punishment should fit the crime. Acts of violence should receive proportionate retribution.

Note three aspects of this requirement: First, the covenant requires the entire community to enforce justice. God doesn’t appoint particular people to be judges or reveal an ideal constitution but simply hands over this general responsibility to the human race.

Second, the covenant indicates that every perpetrator of violence should be punished and every victim should be avenged. It doesn’t matter whether the perpetrator or victim adheres to a particular religion, is rich or poor, or is male or female (the Hebrew word translated as “man” can refer to either). The Noahic covenant demands equal justice for all. No one should be exempt from its requirements or excluded from its benefits.

Lastly, the covenant’s context suggests that this justice must be tempered by forbearance. In the broader biblical context, God manifested his retributive justice by sending the great flood against humanity because of their violence (see 6:11). In contrast, through the Noahic covenant, God displays his forbearance by postponing the final judgment despite continuing human sin (see 8:21). As Genesis 9:6 indicates, human beings should enforce justice under this covenant as God’s image-bearers. If God now tempers his justice with forbearance, so must we. We would destroy ourselves if we tried to avenge every last wrong. Instead, the Noahic covenant demands enforcing justice in a way that promotes the covenant’s purpose: preserving the human race.

The Noahic Covenant and the Development of Civil Government

Against this background, readers can now understand my claim that the Noahic covenant authorizes civil government. Consider this both from the perspective of the Noahic covenant looking forward and from the New Testament looking backward.

The Noahic covenant commissions the human community to enforce justice but gives no specific instructions for doing so. Thus, how could the human community effectively fulfill this commission? Not by leaving matters in the hands of each individual. That’s no recipe for equal justice. Promoting and maintaining justice requires collaborative action for all sorts of reasons. It’s evident, therefore, that communities must establish institutions responsible for enforcing justice.

Fulfilling the Noahic command to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 9:1, 7) requires more than mere individuals; people must form institutions—namely, families — that support the procreation and nurture of children. Likewise, fulfilling the Noahic command to do justice requires institutions designed for this purpose. Private institutions can and do serve this purpose, to be sure. But throughout history, communities have inevitably formed public institutions called government. It’s interesting to note that governments often justify their existence (at least partly) by claiming to uphold justice in society. Moreover, people regularly beseech their governments to make wrongs right. Most communities did not intend to obey the Noahic covenant when forming such (very imperfect) institutions. But in God’s mysterious providence, they fulfilled his covenantal designs.

Consider this also from the New Testament’s vantage point. The Noahic covenant doesn’t directly institute civil government, nor does any other biblical text. Yet texts such as Romans 13:1–7 and 1 Peter 2:13–17 recognize existing governments as divinely authorized. Looking at these texts on their own raises a puzzling question: how are these governments divinely authorized if God never commanded anyone to establish them? The answer is that God has commissioned human communities to do justice under the Noahic covenant. Thus, when communities establish governments intended (at least in part) to do justice, these governments exist with God’s approval. Paul and Peter can therefore say that civil magistrates are “appointed” and “sent” by God (Rom. 13:2; 1 Pet. 2:14). He sends them to bear the sword against the evildoer and approve those who do what’s good (Rom. 13:3–4; 1 Pet. 2:14), that is, to do justice.

Implications

I close with a few implications. At the most general level, we see that Christians’ political thinking and conduct should always reflect the fact that our governments are in covenant with God through the Noahic covenant. Our political agendas should reflect God’s purposes in the Noahic covenant, and we should beware of trying to make government serve different purposes, however wise they seem to us. This general implication exposes perhaps the most fundamental flaw in the recent theonomy movement. God gave the Mosaic law to govern Israel under the Mosaic covenant (Exod. 19:5; 24:7–8; Deut. 5:2–3; 9:9; 29:1). The Law served that covenant’s purposes. But no nation in the world today is under the Mosaic covenant, and thus the Mosaic law is an inappropriate standard for any of them.

I find four adjectives helpful for describing the proper character of civil government under the Noahic covenant. Each has important implications.

1. Legitimate

Civil governments are legitimate. That is, God has “instituted” and “sent” them to accomplish his purposes concerning justice (Rom. 13:1–3; 1 Pet. 2:14). Hence, all people should submit to their civil authorities, honor them, and pay taxes (Rom. 13:1, 5–7; 1 Pet. 2:13–17), and Christians should pray for them (1 Tim. 2:1–2). Government legitimacy also implies that Christians are free to participate in politics and hold government office (cf. Luke 19:1–10; Acts 10; 13:6–12).

2. Provisional

Civil governments are provisional. That is, God has temporarily appointed them—in Noahic terms, “while the earth remains” (Gen. 8:22). They’re necessary but not of ultimate importance. Only Christ’s kingdom is of utmost importance, and that kingdom will one day destroy all earthly kingdoms (Dan. 2:3–45). Governments can accomplish good purposes but not the highest purposes. They might bear the sword to promote justice (and even that imperfectly), but they don’t minister the keys of the kingdom of heaven, which Christ entrusted to the church (Matt. 16:18–19). Thus, Christians shouldn’t stake too much on the affairs of the state. God raises rulers up and brings them down (Isa. 40:23–24). Through it all, our citizenship remains in heaven (Phil. 3:20). At the present, we have no lasting city here but seek one that’s to come (Heb. 13:12). Wise Christians keep politics in perspective.

3. Common

Civil governments are common. That is, God appointed them for all human beings and not for a privileged few. As noted above, God entered the Noahic covenant with all people (Gen. 9:8, 9, 12) and commissioned the entire community to enforce equal justice (9:6). Likewise, Paul calls “every person” to obey civil authorities (Rom. 13:1), says that whatever civil authority exists is from God (Rom. 13:1), and calls these authorities to punish evildoers and praise the good (Rom. 13:3–4; cf. 1 Pet. 2:14). In none of these statements does Paul distinguish between rich and poor, male and female, or Christian and non-Christian. Civil office should be open to all, civil obedience required of all, and the courts of civil justice accessible to all. Thus, Christians should seek equal justice for everyone and support religious liberty for all peaceful people. Believers are most faithful to Scripture when they resist invitations to embrace “Christian America” or “Christian nationalism” and instead promote just government policies that give no special privileges to any identity group.

4. Accountable

Civil governments are accountable. The idea that governments are common does not imply that they’re morally neutral. On the contrary, because they’re in covenant with God, they’re liable to him and his standards. Paul calls civil officials God’s “servants” and “ministers,” appointed not to pursue their own gain but to carry out “God’s wrath” (Rom. 13:4, 6). As servants, they must give account to God on the last day. This reminds Christians to be diligent and just as they participate in politics or hold government office. But most of all, it should encourage Christians who suffer injustice in this life, especially those suffering for Christ’s sake. On the last day, God will hold accountable the wicked city in which is found “the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slain on earth” (Rev. 18:24).

A Day In The Life.

Up at 8:30a on Friday, a cool, 49°F morning, I upped the heat to 73°, made coffee and an English Muffin, with Kerrygold Irish Butter and Philly Cream Cheese for breakfast, took a 250mg Bayer "Body & Back" Aspirin for various Sciatica and Neuropathy pains, fired-up the Win-7 Pentium HP Desktop to let 32 million lines of code load, had a couple smokes in the garage. Today and next week are clear, so Sherry will be here by around 1p today, and we can enjoy the rainy day together.

Borders are not racist, America is good, speech is not violence, police are not criminals, men can't be women, terrorists need killing, criminals are not victims.

I tuned into the usual "CP Show LIVE", scanned the weather and news websites, and just relaxed. Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of Hitler committing suicide in the 'Fuhrer Bunker' in Berlin, and today is the exact halfway point, in days, between Summer and Winter. Weird. After a late lunch, Sherry stopped by and we had 5 nice, relaxing hours together but alas, she had to leave around 6p, due to the forecast, coming severe t-storms and hail. I watched the 2 t-storms' progress coming up from the South and Southeast, headed toward the York are. After dinner, I caught some of the news, watched Discovery's "Gold Rush" until 11p, and shut down. Those storms passed to our west, into the Pittsburgh area.

Up at 8a on Saturday, a cloudy, more humid, warm 67° morning, I made coffee, turned on the AC, and scanned the weather and news. Possibly some nasty weather might be heading this way, later today. We need the rain; the other stuff just comes with it.

★★★ SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH ★★★

• WHAT: THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH 219 IN EFFECT 4 PM UNTIL 11 PM EDT THIS EVENING FOR THE FOLLOWING AREAS IN PENNSYLVANIA. THIS WATCH INCLUDES 3 COUNTIES IN CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA: ADAMS, LANCASTER, YORK. THIS INCLUDES THE CITIES OF GETTYSBURG, LANCASTER, AND YORK.

After lunch, I had some errands to do and got back home around 3p. After a few condo chores, I tuned into some F1 Qualifying for tomorrow's race in Miami, then the 6p news, had dinner and the massive t-storm's rain arrived -- no hail -- and lasted unto after 11p. The moisture was most welcome. I watched History's "Ancient Aliens" until 2a, and finally quit.

Awake and up at 8:30a on Sunday, a rainy, 61° morning. I made coffee, fired-up the HP DeskTop, scanned the weather and news, and relaxed for a while. After getting ready for the day, I made breakfast, started laundry, got the garbage and recycle bin to the curb, broomed-out the garage, noted that we got 1" of rain over the past 2 days, and did some weeding while new shoots were tiny and easy to pull.

If I'd have known that I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

I watched the F1 Miami Grand Prix and the IndyCar Race in Alabama, which overlapped on TV scheduling, and by 6, had made some dinner. Sunday is one of those "NBC (Nothing But Crap) nights for TV, but NEWSMAX was there for straight news, and I switched to MotorTrend's "Garage Squad" for a few hours, while I did paperwork in my Office-Sunroom. Tired, I shut down at 1a.

Up at 9a on Monday, 63°, a rainy, sticky, humid heavily-overcast morning, with more *Severe Weather* Alerts forecast for today and tomorrow. Great, we'll sure take the rain. I made coffee, scanned the weather and news headlines, and skipped the "CP Show", since a sub was hosting. I had a simple 2-stop trip down south, and left at 11a. Traffic was heavy, rain cells were moving thru the area and I hit a few going south, and more coming north on the retur4n trip.

For the past 2-3 mornings, the R/S Sciatica has been at the severe pain level, but rather than take the opioid/narcotic pain relievers (Tramadol 50mg), I've opted for the Bayer Aspirin 250mg, and it works for a few hours. No steroid injections and no surgery. Neither work.

Around 4:30p, I got a WGAL-8 eMail notice of another ***SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH*** for the York area, as massive, nasty t-storms were headed our way. After dinner, I watched the evening news, switched to MT's "Iron Resurrection" until 12 midnight, and unplugged.

Up at 4:30a on Tuesday, I made coffee, had a smoke in the garage, scanned the weather and news, and drank LOTS of coffee. I had another bad night, unable to get much sleep, other than 1-2hrs, for unknown reasons. DAMN! My pharmacy of 35+ years, Rite Aid, is officially going bankrupt and out of business. SHIT! Now I've got to scramble and get the Rx records transferred to either CVS or Walgreen's.

Heavy t-storm cells were moving south-to-north, thru the York and Lancaster areas, while the lawn mower teams were working, drenching everyone and everything. Another ***Severe Thunderstorm Watch*** was posted on the Susquehanna Valley websites and TV, and I enjoyed the storms and rain. Weird, huh? I listened to the "CP Show LIVE" (he's back), had lunch and did some condo chores, a couple nearby errands and back home to do some file -- on 4 HDs -- maintenance on the computer. After dinner, I watched the evening news, History's "Curse of Oak Island" until 11p. Lights out.

Up at 6a on Wednesday -- 0 DARK THIRTY -- I made coffee, had a smoke and tuned into the "CS Show LIVE", while scanning the weather and news. After a late breakfast, I left at 10:30a for a haircut and beard removal app't. That went well, and I didn't recognize myself after 7 months with the beard. Heh. I got home around 12noon, had lunch, and went back out to get 3 errands done.

Home by 2p, due to construction choke points and heavy traffic, I unpacked and noticed that I'd left my cellphone in the condo -- sure didn't miss it, since I left earlier this morning. Figures; I hate the damned intrusive things. I rechecked the news and weather on the computer. The Catholics are still watching the chimney. As a "Recovering Methodist", I don't care. The last Pope-a-Dope was a commie/socialist/Marxist stooge, and the world was glad to see him go. This one? Who knows? I had a late lunch, and grabbed a 3hr nap.

Back up after 6, I skipped dinner, had the last of the coffee, and watched the news, then switched to History's "American Pickers" until 1a. Lights out.

Up at 8:30a on Thursday, a beautiful clear blue sky, 64°, I made coffee, turned-off the AC, opened the front/back screen doors to get some fresh air thru the condo. I got ready for a Weis Market delivery between 12-2p, and a Akita Pest Control to come between 1-3p. And of course, the Net went down at 12:05p. Zero service... for about 30mins; then back. Web Fart?

I rechecked the radar maps, and storms were headed our way, from the Southwest. Soggy weekend ahead. After 2 short errands, there was a dwindling pile of paperwork to finish-up, defrag a large, external HD and enjoy the day's nice temps and low humidity, with the condo wide open for fresh air. The large rain storm arrived and I closed the condo I grabbed a 2hr nap on the LR couch, woke to the evening news, dinner and an evening of interesting episodes of History's "Ancient Aliens". Lights out at 1a. Still raining.

Tomorrow starts a new week, here in the "Journal" and -- Sacre Bleu! -- it's another clear week, with plenty of time to spend with Sherry -- if she's not too busy with her other responsibilities. She'll be here tomorrow afternoon, and I'll find out what time she has to spare. Hoo-Rah.

Of Foxholes and Atheists and Donald Trump.

The leftist elites always hate Republicans, but there is something much deeper going on with their hatred for Donald Trump. The desire to destroy him has an almost religious element to it.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. The basic premise is that when facing an existential threat, particularly when lives are on the line, people will look for something stronger than themselves, often God, to pull them through.

The opposite might be when things are good. Then, atheism, or at least an indifference to God, grows.

Sadly, in this context, the last 75 years have been very good for the West. WWII was horrible, of course, but there were some good things that came from it.

The first good thing features two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the utter destruction of Germany and Japan. I don’t mean their defeat, but rather the utter destruction of their infrastructure and that of many of the nations fighting them. The result for the relatively unscathed United States was that its full wartime manufacturing footing put it in a position to provide pretty much of everything the war-torn world needed. The result was that by the middle of the 1950s, the American economy, with 5% of the world’s population, approached 40% of world GDP. Times were indeed good.

The other side of that coin was that because the German and Japanese infrastructures were so completely destroyed, they could leapfrog over many iterations of evolution and begin again with the latest technologies, machinery, and processes. The result was that by the 1980s, the Japanese and German economies were the most powerful in the world after the US.

The second positive outcome of WWII was the Cold War. Now the Cold War had many downsides, including the hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but what it did was draw a clear line between who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. America and the West were far from perfect, but we knew that at the end of the day, the West was the land of freedom, while the communists were tyrannies constantly seeking to expand.

The result of that clarity was that, for the most part, Western nations understood there was real danger in the world and prepared for it. They focused on trading with one another, they took defense seriously, and while they sometimes tolerated communists in their midst, they rarely made heroes of them.

The consequence of that Cold War clarity, and the Soviet and Chinese understanding that the West was willing to fight to preserve freedom across the planet, was a relative peace. And that relative peace was the West’s undoing.

For the half-century from the end of World War II until 2000, the world experienced more economic growth than it had in the previous 2,000 years combined. Driven by relative peace, world trade took off both within the West and with the developing world.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual prosperity. The West, basking in its victory over the Soviets and its certainty that communist China would evolve into a modern Western democracy if only allowed to sell us tchotchkes, began to turn on itself.

The peace / communist parties, which had been funded by Moscow and had always been a fringe element of modern Western polity, suddenly morphed into environmentalists and cloaked their anticapitalist ideas in far more voter-friendly “Earth First” shibboleths. Now, just as the money spigot from Russia was coming to an end, a far larger resource was becoming viable…Western governments.

The result was the extraordinary growth in the power of the far left in Western politics. And it wasn’t just environmentalism that was driving the train. As the Cold War wound down, Western nations used their “peace dividends” to shower citizens with benefits while simultaneously seeking to regulate their economies into perfection. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work!)

The perfect encapsulation of the West’s metastasizing can be seen in the form of the European Union. Imagined as a vehicle to foster peace and then trade between perpetually warring European states, it morphed into a leviathan that not only seeks to control virtually every aspect of citizens’ lives in its member states, but it seeks to control who can grow what and when, how states can control their borders and even whether sovereign states can conduct their own elections.

Like so much of the modern West, an idea that started out as something ostensibly good metastasized into cancer. Stopping the pouring of chemicals directly into rivers morphed into eviscerating farms. A temporary safety net for the downtrodden morphs into generational welfare. An empathetic desire to help victims of war morphs into an invasion by legions of military-aged men.

And it’s not just capitalism and freedom that have taken body blows. The third leg of the stool upon which western civilization stands is Christianity, and it has been brutalized by Western prosperity, as have the foundations of Christianity, namely, marriage and children.

As they say, idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. The West’s relative prosperity has caused citizens not focused on a common enemy to turn on their own history. From British universities dropping Shakespeare and Chaucer to the New York Museum of Natural History removing Teddy Roosevelt’s statue to the Spanish government’s vow to “decolonize“ the nation’s museums, to the cancer of DEI, across the West, nations are turning their backs on their own foundations, the things that set them apart from—and above, frankly—every other civilization in human history. From socialism to communism to Islam, Western intellectuals have led the charge, via schools and the media, to champion everything that is anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-masculine, and anti-white.

At the end of the day, the globalist elites co-opted the hard-won prosperity and peace by leveraging technology, Chinese tchotchkes, and social media algorithms to aim society’s guns at the very things that built success in the first place. They’ve created a Mexican standoff where everyone loses as the core elements of Western civilization are undermined by policies specifically formatted to destroy them, while the resulting “culture” is not equipped to support anything close to the same level of civilization.

All of this is why Donald Trump is for the left, a new Jesus Christ—not in the sense that he’s godlike, because I think we can all agree that he’s not, but because he embodies their eventual destruction. Thus, just as Christ was a heretic whose message of love and a gracious God had to be destroyed because it threatened the established order, Trump’s pro-America, pro-masculinity, and pro-Western civilization message must be destroyed because it threatens the New World Order.

The globalists argue that they are best equipped to structure the lives of citizens, organize world economies, and control everything from speech to cow farts to electricity generation. Any message that suggests that citizens should control their own lives, that capitalism makes for the most prosperous outcomes, and that free speech is a cornerstone of civilization must be quashed.

Western elites think Donald Trump is the common enemy they need to unify citizens under the banner of globalism. They’ve got it backwards. They’re more likely to discover exactly how many of their citizens feel like they’ve been crouching in a foxhole waiting for someone to inspire them to climb out, pick up their weapons, and charge into a battle of ideas to take back their lives. Imagine the sheer horror on the globalists’ faces when they realize that Donald Trump just might be that guy…

Now You Know.

Woke liberalism is exactly what Christopher Lasch predicted in The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995, the year after his early death at 61. Lasch saw how the juvenile idealism of Boomer hippiedom would slide into the narcissistic, sado-masochistic degeneracy of open borders, drag queen story hours, Covid-19 despotism, DEI racism, showbiz Satanism, censorship, forever wars, and now, the legal insurrection of lawfare.

In doing so, Lasch also predicted the “mass formation psychosis” described by Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet, spawned by a crisis of meaning and purpose in the thinking classes of Western Civ. And now you know exactly how come a place like Boston, with its concentration of “elites” in universities, computer tech, and medical research displays a batshit-crazy dedication to ideas bent on destroying our political culture: the American republic.

The word republic derives from the Latin, res publica: the public thing, the idea of a state dedicated to the common good. By “state” you can infer both a group of people in a certain place, but also the set of conditions they dwell in. You can’t have a common good without a common culture, which means a general agreement among citizens on values in that certain place — which is our country, the USA.

You can’t overstate the importance of shared ideas and values in that enterprise of being a nation, we-the-people in our particular place. The juvenile idealism of Boomer hippiedom wrecked the crucial idea of a common culture, and I will tell you exactly how that happened. Two crusades: first, the civil rights campaign, and second, stopping the War in Vietnam, defined the era.

The first of these climaxed in twin landmark legislative acts designed to abolish Jim Crow racism: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination in public places, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited unfair obstacles to voting. The idealism in that moment of history was extreme. The dominant old-school Liberal ethos displayed a sense of triumph. Its cardinal belief in human progress was validated in the new law-of-the-land. We were supposedly entering a utopia of racial harmony.

It proved to be a huge disappointment, a failure. In some fundamental ways, black and white America could not agree on certain values, especially language and behavior. These matters were so hypersensitive that discussing them became taboo, and when someone dared to — such as the rogue journalist Tom Wolfe in his book Radical Chic, which made fun of the cultural elites trying to socialize with the Black Panthers — he was buried in the most extreme censorious opprobrium by the elite good-thinkers of politics, academia, and the cultural media. They couldn’t believe old Tom dove clear through the Overton Window the way he did, head first.

In fact, a big segment of black America after 1965 became much more overtly separatist and oppositional, while white America became more frantically confounded and depressed by it. The result was the elite’s solution to that quandary: multiculturalism! Which basically meant: we don’t need a common culture in the USA. (We don’t need an agreement about values, language, and behavior.) Each group in America can have its own menu of these things. This accomplished two ends: it allowed criminal behavior to explode; and it allowed the elites to excuse themselves from any serious further attempts to manage the res publica. The people of the ghettos were free to do their thing; while the elites turned their full attention to Boomer careerism and Gordon Gecko style financial moneygrubbing.

As for the crusade to end the War in Vietnam, that was also an epic failure, never properly acknowledged. In fact, no one in the USA, no party or faction, ended the war. We simply lost the War in Vietnam. We just never said so, and still don’t. It ended in ignominy, with the last remnants of US officialdom in Saigon having to be rescued by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy. The so-called “gooks” in their black pajamas beat the giant American “grunt” army with its bottomless supply of attack helicopters and napalm. Chalk up another “L” for old school Liberalism.

You can’t overstate how demoralizing this was. And so. . . the serial reenactments of our forever wars of recent decades, mostly botches and failures despite our vaunted “defense” establishment, our glorious war technology, and our fake commitment to “spreading democracy.” We simply need to prove that we can’t possibly lose wars against more primitive people — though we have lost repeatedly, the fiasco in leaving Kabul in 2021 being even more ignominious than the flight from Saigon. This can only be understood, finally, as a species of national neurosis.

As was absolutely everything about the George Floyd riots of 2020, Wokery-in-action, with the torching of cities, the looting flash-mobs, and the tearing down of statues honoring American heroes. Try understanding that as the latest chapter in civil rights egalitarianism gone awry, starting with the sanctification of the druggie thug George Floyd, who so perfectly personified the failures of multiculturalism. (What were his values? Ever ask yourself that?)

Now, try (if you can) to understand what the election of Mr. Trump represents: the drive to restore a viable American common culture, to re-set our agreement on values, to repair the broken res publica. And note how wildly that is resented and opposed by this corrupt and degenerate residue of idealism gone to hell (literally), this ragtag and bobtail of Democratic Party elites, consumed in their mass formation psychosis, addicted to lying and violence, and furious that they are no longer in command.

So, now you know how all this works. An American common culture matters, and if we can’t put it together, we’re sunk. This is our chance to put it together.