PITTSBURGH, June 15 (UPI) -- Early in his first term, President Ronald Reagan shocked European leaders and the world press with his toughest speech to date. He called for a "crusade" against our enemies, predicting the inevitable demise of freedom's opponents who would end up, he said, on the ash heap of history.
Predictably the State Department had opposed the use of this language but did support the portion of the speech in which the president called for a withdrawal of Israeli troops from their recent deployment. The president warned that terrorism in the Middle East could lead to war.
The year was 1982 and the speech was the famous Westminster Address to the British Parliament; the crusade was a crusade against communism and Israel was being urged to withdraw from her neighbor -- Lebanon.
Anyone who takes a close look at the Westminster Address, and indeed Reagan's entire rhetorical onslaught against the Soviet Union, is likely to conclude that George W. Bush was listening.
The most famous line of that Reagan speech -- "What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and daemocracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people" -- echoes through Bush's post-Sept. 11 address to the Joint Session of Congress, particularly the reference to "history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."
Bush borrowed from Reagan, raiding the intellectual temple of his adversary.
Marxism differs significantly from radical Islamism; nevertheless they share a common characteristic -- postmillennialism. Each ideology has a view of the direction and end of history.
Some ideologies, for instance, old-style conservatism, assert that ultimately their adherents will lose the battle of history. Some ideologies assert that ultimately their adherents will win. Marxism, Islam and the Puritan movement in the 17th century are examples of this. In Christian theological terminology this optimistic view of the world is called "postmillennialism," because it asserts that history does not end until after the millennium, the time of theological triumph, peace and justice.
Movements that are confident about the future tend to win, partly because they demoralize their opponents.
When early 20th century Christians changed from the postmillennial optimism of the Puritans to the premillenial pessimism of fundamentalists, their cultural and political influence began to wane in what religious historians call "the great reversal." When conservatism changed from the pessimistic viewpoint of Whitaker Chambers, the Soviet spy who, in informing the U.S. government of his activities said he was leaving the winning side to join the losers, to the optimistic view of Ronald Reagan, it won.
Twenty years ago Reagan did the same thing for democracy and capitalism on the world stage that he had done for conservatism within his own party: He reversed its philosophy of history.
In the Westminster speech, Reagan reversed the polarity of the East/West debate by borrowing the rhetoric and much of the intellectual content of Marx's optimism and used it for his own purposes.
"In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens," Reagan said.
Indeed the very phrase, "ash heap of history," is itself pilfered from a speech Lenin gave in 1917 predicting his opponents' demise.
With Reagan's speech suddenly everything looked different. The signs of Soviet decline, which had been treated by the intelligence community as exceptions to the general rule of Soviet military and economic expansion, could now be seen for what they were -- signals of the primary trend.
Likewise, Bush has pilfered the intellectual armory of his opponent radical Islamism.
While Christian and Jewish theologians have debated for millennia their differing interpretations of scripture's teaching regarding the flow of history and its end, the Islamic world enjoys consensus in its postmillennial optimism. Islam teaches that it will inevitably triumph. The symbol of Islam, the quarter moon, communicates this vision. A waxing moon inevitably becomes a half moon then ultimately a full moon, and there is nothing any human being can do about it.
The difference between mainstream Muslims and Islamists is not whether Islam will triumph, but whether Islam will triumph via persuasion or violence. This difference is at the core of the objection to former President Bill Clinton's speech at Georgetown University in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
Clinton challenged his own nation to tread more lightly in the world on the expectation that 50 years or so from now we will no longer be on top. This was counterproductive, not because Clinton criticized our dealings with the rest of the world but because he assumed that 50 years from now this nation would no longer hold its current preeminence. With this statement he ratified a fundamental proposition of the Islamist worldview -- that demography and the general thrust of history are against the United States.
There is one important difference between the situation that Reagan faced and the one that Bush faces -- the time factor.
In the Westminster Address Reagan quoted British Prime Minister William Gladstone who said, "You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side." Reagan knew that the Soviets were running out of time and that every day in which we continued to grow and in which they continued to decline, brought us another day closer to their final collapse and our final victory.
Things are different now. First of all, international terrorism is stateless; therefore our nuclear arsenal holds no deterrent value as we have no territory against which to retaliate.
Our new enemies represent a different kind of threat in that they have already lost. Reagan knew that we would not defeat the Soviets; rather we would transcend them. But what do you do against an enemy whom you have already transcended? What do you do against an enemy who has been in decline for hundreds of years and who lashes out from the shadows of resentment? Bush has told us what you don't do -- you don't wait. You track them down and you destroy them because against such an enemy, time is not on your side.
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(Jerry Bowyer hosts a daily radio program about leadership, which can be heard every weekday morning on www.1360WPTT.com. He is also the host of the syndicated television program Focus on the Issues. Contact Jerry at www.jerrybowyer.com.)
