If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?

If there is a horrific attack on this country like 9/11, the American people will demand we go to war and settle accounts with those who did it. But America's appetite for intervention, for nation building, for democracy crusades, is fully sated.

In the long run, one of the great threats to this country is its tendency to dissolve along the lines of race, ethnicity and language,

We will no longer squander the blood of our soldiers fighting other countries' wars or the wealth of our people paying other countries' bills.

Where liberals see as an ever-more-splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicities, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the Right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel. Visions in conflict that democracy cannot reconcile.

As polarized as we have been, we Americans are locked in a cultural war for the soul of our country.