Powerful, from the heart, and spot-on

Breitbart.com felt that a piece Erick Erickson wrote for Red State called "What I Fear" was important enough to reprint it.

It is about how the level of vitriol and spiritual poison on the Left in this country has reached a point at which some conservatives - particularly young ones - may decide to adopt Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome out of abject fear.

He begins is piece listing a few examples of the harrassment and threats of torture and murder of his family he has endured in recent years, and says that this really isn't what he fears.  Then he gets to the gist of his point:

Let me tell you what I do fear.

I fear that because of these people, their hatred for me, and the world’s hatred for God Almighty, that my children might decide it is a far better path through life to find an accommodation with the world than have the world hate them because of either of their Fathers — the one here or the one in Heaven.

I fear my kids might decide to go along to get along. The Bible says, and history bears it out, that the world hates those of God because the world hates God. I fear my children, though, may decide they love the world more than God because it is easier to get through this world doing that.

It is not easy for my family. My wife sometimes gets asked questions or mouthed off to by people who would not do that to me. The kids pick up on more than we realize. We are occasionally stopped in public by people who recognize me.

This is my fear. This is why I write checks to my church. Yes, God says tithe, but I write the check as much because our church is a safe haven from the world — a place where my kids can go and worship and learn to love God apart from the world — to love him as he is meant to be loved and to be surrounded by others willing to love God.

The other day, I was in the midst of one of my periodic Facebook tangles with a leftist of my acquaintance, and somehow Sarah Palin got inserted into the proceedings.  This person said, "If there's ever a public guillotining of that bitch, I want a front row seat."

This is the difference between the sides in the war for America's soul.  The Left conflates hatred of our ideas and principles with hatred of us as persons.  We characteristically don't do that, and must guard our thoughts and emotions against it.  In fact, Erickson alludes to the way out of such a position by basing his position on the centrality of God.  We must pray, and pray fervently - that we can find the effective way to change the minds and hearts of our enemies, and, in any event, pray that we can stay above a desire to wish them personal ill.

This tenet has been at conservatism's core since Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.  Burke foresaw the profound difference in the way that revolution was shaping up, and the recently concluded revolution in America.  Chivalry, charity, a desire for good to prevail, the exaltation of dignity, were essential to the American revolution (recall Jefferson's discussion of how the colonists had tried, in the Declaration of Independence, to appeal to the common bonds held with their British brethren), and lacking in the unrest brewing in France, which would shortly lead to Robespierre's reign of terror (speaking of guillotines) and the outsized imperial ambitions of Napoleon.

The reason conservatism is so preoccupied with the individual vis a vis the collective society is that individual virtues that equip us for dealing with a fallen universe are at the core of what we seek to foster.