Written By
Andrew Bard Schmookler

In early September, 2004, I felt that I saw clearly something dark and dangerous threatening the soul of America. Ever since, I have been embarked on a mission to convey to my countrymen in every way I can my vision of what’s happening.

As an important part of that effort, I have composed a series of commentaries that attempt to capture –vividly and succinctly—the important dimensions of the moral crisis that I perceive. Many of these commentaries have been broadcast on the radio, on the NPR station that covers much of New Mexico. Others have been published as op/ed pieces in newspapers around the country, including the Baltimore Sun and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Because of the care I put into crafting these pieces to be rhetorically powerful, and clear, and persuasive, I am assembling a collection of some of these pieces here in a single place to make them readily accessible to the visitors to this site. Consider it a kind of “best of” anthology.

Many of these pieces will also be posted elsewhere on this site, including especially among the articles organized in Book-cubed, and also as appropriate as blog postings.

Each of the commentaries below is described in a single sentence which is linked to the text of the entire article.

There is also, at the bottom of this list of written commentaries, a video of a public talk I gave in which I discussed, in an overall kind of way, many of the dimensions of America’s present moral crisis.

What is needed is a prophetic social movement that speaks moral truth about amoral power in such a way as to awaken our traditionalist countrymen from the trance state into which their leaders have put them. (Prophetic Opposition)

When governing forces, like America’s current ruling group, create conflict and division in every arena they touch, one can infer that it is a dark spirit that governs them. (By Their Fruits)

Liberalism in America has, in recent generations, shown its own moral blind spot –an inability to recognize how deep and real is the distinction between good and evil—and that blindness has contributed to the rise to power of these dark forces. (Liberal Blind Spots)

The ruling forces in America today, like many powers before them, distort morality, diverting people’s attention to peripheral matters in order to hide their own immorally corrupt and exploitative abuses of power.

It is often in the patterns of things that one discovers the underlying spirit behind them, and in the conduct of America’s ruling group there is an unmistakable pattern of falsehoods that reveals an arrogant and dangerous disregard of the need to respect reality. (Connecting the Dots)

Contemporary American liberalism is beset by a spiritual void –an inability to contact and speak from a deep moral and spiritual connection in articulating its values and goals—that has helped open the door to the perpetration of a spiritual con job from the right. (Liberalism’s Spiritual Void)

The danger to the soul of America is urgent, for the forces now ruling America are systematically dismantling the structures that have protected goodness in this country over the generations, and this process could lead to much greater darkness than we see now. (Before It’s Too Late)

The fact that these ruling powers have managed to deceive so many good people about the true amoral nature of the spirit that animates them raises the question of what it is that makes Americans susceptible to a con job of this sort. (What Makes Americans Susceptible to Manipulation)

The liberal incapacity or unwillingness to make the kind of moral judgments necessary to understand the nature of evil forces is manifested in responses I got to my analysis of what there is in some basically good people that makes their seduction by evil leaders in some ways gratifying to them. (Who Knows What Evil Lurks)

Members of my generation who, like me, came of age in the 60s and who rebelled against the Establishment in the belief that American could readily be improved, were naïve in not realizing that change would not necessarily be for the better. (Taking for Granted)

While I have sometimes wondered whether it is always better to believe what is true rather than what feels best to believe, recent years in America have made it clear to me that, while there may be innocent illusions, losing the habit of integrity about the pursuit of truth opens the door to disaster. (The Value of the Truth)

Although it is good news for America that the poll numbers for our present leadership are falling, it is quite premature to celebrate, because what is really needed is for the American people to repudiate not just these particular leaders but also those dark aspects of the American culture that these leaders have embodied and have exploited in their rise to power. (Not Reassured Yet)

Although much of liberal America imagines itself to have moved beyond the understanding of our spiritual traditions with respect to the concept of evil –too dangerous and primitive a notion, many sophisticated people now believe—there is indeed an important reality in the human realm that warrants being labeled with that ancient and freighted term, “evil.” (The Concept of Evil—Why It’s Intellectually Valid and Spiritually Important)

Video—This is a video of a presentation I gave in a Forum created by the Unitarian Church in Santa Fe, Mexico. It’s entitled See No Evil: America’s Moral Crisis. In it, I discuss some of the chief dimensions of the troubling aspects of what’s going on in America in our times. It includes many of the ideas found elsewhere on this site in written form. As you will see, the presentation is largely improvisational –from but the barest of notes—and therefore conversational. Click here to see the video.

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