Each of the three pillars is indispensable

Conservatism has been depicted as having three pillars for some time. There are some useful shorthand-type ways to identify each pillar, but here's my own description:

1.) Free-market economics, beginning with the axiom that a good or service is what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Period.

2.) An understanding of how Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind.

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature - or, put another way, on our allies knowing we have their backs, our adversaries respecting us, and our enemies fearing us.

In a PJ Media piece dealing with last night's truck massacre in Nice, France, Michael Walsh points out that prior to the recent shift to asymmetric warfare - terrorism - on the part of the Muslim world, the West had not lost a battle with that world since Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187.

He then lays out in stark and discomforting terms the reasons why the West has been reeling for the past few decades in the face of the new style of assaults:

Lots of reasons: ennui, cultural Marxism, the mutation of the Left into a suicide cult that wants to take the rest of us with it. A loss of faith in organized religion (some of it brought on by the faiths themselves, or rather the imperfect men who represent and administer them). The transformation of government schools into babysitting services for subsections of the populace with severe cultural learning disabilities, no matter the skin color of the pupil. The marginalization of the very notion of excellence. And a political class that is little more than a collection of criminals, throne-sniffers, pantywaists and bum-kissers, all dedicated to their own enrichment.

He then explains why that second pillar  is key to the success of the third in fighting this menace:

As I argued in The Devil's Pleasure Palace  -- and will expand upon in the forthcoming companion volume, The Fiery Angel -- the antidote to this is a return to our cultural roots, including the pre-Christian principles of Aristotle (passed down via St. Thomas Aquinas, among others) and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Those roots are neither race- nor faith-specific and in fact the genius of Western civilization is that its principles -- not "conservative" principles but civilizational principles -- have proven so successful that they resulted in the United States of America, the very embodiment of those ideas.

Which is, of course, why Islam and its ally of convenience, the Left, hate America so. We and our cultural heritage are the refutation of every satanic principle they hold so vengefully dear.

In other words, along with our guns and bombs, we're going to need unwavering fealty to such principles as representative democracy, trust in what experience tells us about the world, and Judeo-Christian values.

A tall order given how far we've drifted, but consider the alternative.