One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and, of course, Big Government are leftwing angels. And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the left fear big corporations but not big government? The answer is dogma — a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20-30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago — big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death — big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca Cola kill five million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes — the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide — committed by big governments.

How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist dogma. If there is another explanation, I do not know what it is.

Religious Christians and Jews also have some irrational beliefs, but their irrationality is overwhelmingly confined to theological matters; and these theological irrationalities have no deleterious impact on religious Jews’ and Christians’ ability to see the world rationally and morally.

But, after nearly a thousand columns and twelve years since my last book, I hope readers will forgive me for noting that today, April 24, 2012, HarperCollins is publishing the culmination of a lifetime of thinking and years of the most challenging writing of my life.

The book is “Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph.” It is an argument on behalf of the moral superiority — and universal applicability — of American values.

There are three big ideas — or religions, if you will — competing for humanity’s allegiance: Leftism, Islamism, and Americanism. I argue that the American value system — what I call “the American Trinity” — is the best system ever devised for making a good society.

The problem is that most Americans cannot identify these values, and therefore cannot fight on their behalf. In the meantime, the alternatives, Leftism and Islamism, have been spreading like proverbial wildfire, largely because their adherents know exactly what they are fighting for.

I do not fault Americans for not knowing their distinctive values. No one taught them what they are. And the problem is not new. Even the so-called “greatest generation,” the World War II generation, had not been systematically taught these values.

I only came to realize what these values are in the way medical researchers sometimes happen upon a major discovery — by chance. One night, as I emptied my pockets, I stared at the coins I had removed, and, lo and behold, there they were: America’s values. The designers of all of America’s money — paper and coin — had been telling me and every other American for well over a century what America stood for. And I hadn’t noticed:

“Liberty,” “In God We Trust,” and “E Pluribus Unum” (“From Many, One”).

No other country has proclaimed these three values as its primary values.

The news focus has been on Guillen’s remarks — for which he has profusely apologized — and whether the Marlins were right to suspend him for five games.

More important, however, have been the reactions to Guillen’s comment. They sustain a thesis that I develop in my book (“Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph”) that comes out next week: Leftism poisons just about everything it touches.

Take baseball commissioner Bud Selig’s comments:

“Major League Baseball supports today’s decision by the Marlins to suspend Ozzie Guillen. As I have often said, Baseball is a social institution with important social responsibilities. All of our 30 Clubs play significant roles within their local communities, and I expect those who represent Major League Baseball to act with the kind of respect and sensitivity that the game’s many cultures deserve. Mr. Guillen’s remarks, which were offensive to an important part of the Miami community and others throughout the world, have no place in our game.”

In other words, according to the commissioner of baseball, what is objectionable is not that Guillen said that he loves the world’s longest reigning tyrant, the killer and torturer of democratic dissidents in his country, the destroyer of the Cuban economy, and the man who singlehandedly deadened more than a generation of Cubans’ ability to enjoy life. What is objectionable is that Guillen may have offended an important minority in Florida.

To understand how this is related to Leftist poison, imagine if, let us say, a manager of the Chicago White Sox or Chicago Cubs had said, while apartheid ruled in South Africa, that he “loves” South Africa’s white apartheid leader. Would the commissioner of baseball have announced that this manager’s comments “were offensive to an important part” of the Chicago community? Or would he have said that expressing support for a racist dictator is unconscionable, and that it offends decency, not merely one of “the game’s many cultures”?

We all know the answer.

What Leftism has done is to 1) render Communist evil less morally objectionable than other evils and 2) render morality a matter of multiculturalism.

There are no moral absolutes; there is only cultural relativism. So, Cubans in Miami may find Ozzie Guillen’s love of Castro offensive, but Castro is not morally offensive beyond that community.

Black Africans know this. That is why so many seek to live in the United States. Decades ago, the number of black Africans who had immigrated to the United States had already surpassed the number of black Africans who were forcibly shipped to America as slaves.

And members of other races and nationalities know this. Even Muslim and Arab writers have noted that nowhere in the Arab or larger Muslim world does an Arab or any other Muslim have the individual rights, liberty, and dignity that a Muslim living in America has. As for Latinos and Asians, vast numbers of them from El Salvador to Korea regard America as the land of opportunity.

And when any of these people come here – from anywhere, speaking any language, looking like a member of any race — they are accepted as Americans the moment they identify as such. He or she will be regarded as fully American. This is not true elsewhere. A third-generation Turkish-German, whose German is indistinguishable from the German spoken by an indigenous German, will still be regarded by most Germans as a Turk. The same holds true elsewhere in Europe.

On the other hand, a first-generation Turkish American, who speaks English with a heavy Turkish accent, but who identifies as American, will be regarded every bit as American as anyone else.

As is often the case, a foreigner pointed this out most clearly. On a visit to America in February, The president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, said:

“The other day, I was in a small company — and there were Asians, Koreans, Middle Easterners, some other people.

And they had been in America for, like, two, three, four years. And they talk American. They look American. Body language is American. I’m sure they already think American. Go to Korea and become Korean in one or two years’ time. Good luck with that. That’s what’s so special about this country.”

The editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, offered an explanation on his magazine’s blog. “American liberals,” he wrote, “know their own language, but they don’t know the language of their ideological and partisan opposite numbers. … Conservatives speak liberal, but for liberals in the United States, conservatism might as well be Esperanto.”

I have argued this point for many years. In my book to be published later this month (“Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph”), I argue that the left is a victim of its own brainwash. How could they not be? All they hear, see and read from childhood on, from elementary school through graduate school, on TV and in the movies, are leftist ideas.

Yet this is not true for conservatives. One would have to grow up in a silent monastery not to be regularly exposed to liberal and leftist ideas.

For 30 years, I have had leading left-wing thinkers on my radio show, and I continue to be shocked at their lack of awareness of conservative arguments. About two years ago, for example, I asked one of the most powerful Democratic members of Congress — a major force behind every tax increase — what tax rate he thought might be too high. He replied that he had not given it thought. I asked a leading liberal writer who maintained that all American wars since World War II had been imperialist if he thought the Korean War was also imperialistic. He replied that he didn’t know enough about that war to respond.

After interviewing leftists, liberal listeners frequently ask me why I don’t invite the best liberals on to my show.

The answer is that I have had some of the best liberals on my show. They just don’t tend to do well when challenged by thoughtful conservatives.

That may be why the majority of influential liberals refuse to go on conservative talk radio or to debate conservatives.

Think about that sentence for a moment. It ends oddly. Logic dictates that it should have said, “transfer income from the affluent to the less affluent,” not the less fortunate.

But for Porter, as for the left generally, those who are not affluent are not merely “less affluent,” they are “less fortunate.”

Why is this? Why is the leftist division almost always between the “affluent” and the “less fortunate” or between the “more fortunate” and the “less fortunate”?

To understand the left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil, as humanity has generally understood the term. The leftist divides the world not between good and evil but rich and poor.

Because inequality is the chief moral concern of the left, the words “less affluent” or even “poorer” do not meet the left’s moral needs. It needs to believe, and to have others believe, that what separates economic classes is not merely how much material wealth members of each class have. Rather, it is the amount of good and bad luck — “fortune,” as the left puts it — that each class has.

This is how the left justifies high taxes. Isn’t it only fair and moral that as much money as possible be taken from the lucky and given to the unlucky? After all, the affluent didn’t achieve affluence through harder work, but through greater luck.

To acknowledge that most of America’s affluent (meaning those who earn over $200,000) have attained their affluence through hard work is to undermine the fairness issue at the core of the left’s understanding of economic inequality and justification for confiscatory taxes.

For the left, affluence is won, not earned.

Those “forces” are laws being passed by various states that require a photo ID for voting.

The NAACP move is so absurd and so self-destructive that one has to wonder why the organization has done this. According to the Freedom House 2011 assessment of freedom in the world, of the 41 members of the U.N. Human Rights Council, fewer than half are free countries. Ten are ranked “Not Free,” and 12 “Partly Free.” Among the “Not Free” members are Angola, China, Congo, Cuba, Jordan, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Those countries’ elections, if they have them, are rigged, and prominent opponents are jailed, tortured and killed.

To bring a human rights complaint before countries in which there are almost no human rights is truly absurd. That the alleged human rights violation takes place in the freest country in the world further elevates the level of absurdity. And when the alleged violation is a law that requires all voters, irrespective of race, creed or color, to show photo identification before voting, we have gone beyond the absurd and entered a modern Twilight Zone.

The absurdity explains why what the NAACP doing is also self-destructive. It’s one thing for a prominent individual or organization to make a mistake. But it is quite another to seem ludicrous, which is how the NAACP appears to everyone who is not on the left — and perhaps even to thoughtful leftists.

Why, then, would the NAACP open itself to ridicule?

According to NAACP President Ben Jealous, the reason is that “We are here today because in the past 12 months, more U.S. states have passed more laws pushing more U.S. citizens out of the ballot box than in any year in the past century.”

People who control themselves.

Happiness is dependent on self-discipline. We are the biggest obstacles to our own happiness. It is much easier to do battle with society and with others than to fight our own nature.

People who are given little and earn what they have.

That is why lottery winners are rarely happier than those who have far less money — they didn’t earn their newfound wealth. And they are often less happy after their win than they were before it.

So, too, those who get used to receiving unearned material benefits (such as government entitlements) are likely to be unhappier than they were before receiving those benefits — and much less happy than those who have earned whatever they have. That is why the entrepreneur who has worked day and night for years is usually happier than the person who inherited vast wealth.

People who do not see themselves or their group as victims.

Virtually every person can legitimately see himself as a victim — of an unloving upbringing; of bullies in school; of a loveless, or just plain bad, marriage; of financial problems; of membership in a victim group; of health problems; and of so much else. But however valid the fact of one’s victimhood, perceiving oneself primarily as victim is the road to misery.

If the primary conclusion you have reached after years of therapy is that you are a victim, you really are a victim — of lousy therapy.

The post-’60s labeling as victims of virtually everyone except WASP males (blacks, women and Hispanics, etc.) has exponentially increased unhappiness in America.

People who rarely complain.

Complaining not only ruins everybody else’s day, it ruins the complainer’s day, too. The more we complain, the more unhappy we get. Want to raise children who will be happy adults? Teach them not to whine.

People who have close friends.

Close friends not only prolong people’s lives; but on a day-to-day basis they contribute more to most adults’ happiness than even their children do.

From their teenage years on, children are considerably more capable of causing parents unhappiness than bringing them happiness. That is one reason parents who rely on their children for happiness make both their children and themselves miserable.

People who are in a good marriage.

A good marriage — having a real partner in life — is so contributive to happiness that it is almost enough. Almost.

As high school seniors throughout America will be receiving acceptance letters to colleges within the next month, it would be nice for parents to meditate on what they’re getting for the $20,000 to 50,000 they’ll pay each year.

—The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas, it’s worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically, it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor while discriminating against non-whites.

—There is no better and no worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities in the past taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Bach rather than, let’s say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians and Native American storytellers, was “Eurocentrism.”

—God is at best a nonissue, and at worst a foolish and dangerous belief.

—Christianity is largely a history of inquisitions, crusades, oppression and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is “a religion of peace.” Therefore, criticism of Christianity is enlightened, while criticism of Islam is Islamophobia.

—Israel is a racist state, morally no different from apartheid South Africa.

—Big government is the only humane way to govern a country.

—The South votes Republican because it is still racist, and the Republican Party caters to racists.

—Mothers and fathers are interchangeable. Claims that married mothers and fathers are the parental ideal and bring unique things to a child are heterosexist and homophobic.

—Whites can be racist; non-whites cannot be (because whites have power, and the powerless cannot be racist).

—The great world and societal battles are not between good and evil, but between rich and poor and the powerful and the powerless.

— Patriotism is usually a euphemism for chauvinism.

—War is ignoble. Pacifism is noble.

—Human beings are animals. They differ from “other animals” primarily in having better brains.

—We live in a patriarchal society, which is injurious to women.

—Women are victims of men.

—Blacks are victims of whites.

—Latinos are victims of Anglos.

I’d like to offer a simple proposal that, if enacted, could generate a great deal of a most precious resource: moral clarity.

It concerns the death penalty.

Opponents of capital punishment for murderers argue that the state has no right to take a murderer’s life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person’s family, not only on behalf of society.

In order to make this as clear as possible, here is my proposal: Americans should be able to declare what they want the state to do on their behalf if they are murdered. Those who wish the state to keep their murderer alive for all of his natural years should wear, let us say, a green bracelet and/or place a green dot on their driver’s license or license plate. And those who want their convicted murderer put to death can wear a red bracelet and/or have a red dot on their license.

Just as I have a pink “donor” circle on my driver’s license signifying that in case I die, I wish to provide my organs to help keep some person alive, I wish to make it known that if I am murdered, I do not want my murderer kept alive a day longer than legally necessary.

There are a number of reasons for recommending such a policy.

First, as noted, it is clarifying for the individual. It is easier to take a position in the abstract than when it hits home. It is one thing to oppose the death penalty when others are killed, but if you have to decide what happens if it is you who is murdered, the mind focuses with greater clarity.

Before deciding which color to choose, let a woman imagine herself raped and then stabbed to death. And let her further imagine that if this happened to her, she now has some say in determining what happens to the person who did this to her. She is no longer a silent corpse. Her voice will be heard, perhaps even be determinative of her killer’s fate.

Likewise, the woman who truly opposes death for any murderer, no matter how heinous and sadistic his actions, will also now have the ability to speak from the grave. No matter how much her family may seek the death penalty, family members will have no say. Any woman — or man — who passionately opposes the death penalty under every conceivable circumstance can now help to ensure that at least in his or her case, a murderer’s life that might have been taken might now be preserved. There is no more direct way to give death-penalty abolitionists the right to have a say over the fate of a murderer.

Second, such a choice gives great power to the individual. Abolitionists who live in pro-death-penalty Texas, for example, can now have a say on a matter of enormous moral magnitude.

The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism.

Both seek to dominate society and to use state power to do so. Both seek to eliminate the Other — for Islamic fanatics, that means non-Muslim religions and secularism; for secular fanatics, it means Christianity and virtually any public invoking of God. The Islamists impose Sharia law; the American Civil Liberties Union and the left generally impose secular law. The Taliban wiped out public vestiges of Buddhism in Afghanistan; the ACLU and its allies seek to wipe out public vestiges of Christianity in America — as it did, for example, in Los Angeles County, when it successfully pressured the County Board of Supervisors to remove the tiny cross from the county seal. A city and county founded by Catholics — hence the name “The Angels” — was forced to stop commemorating its founders because they were religious.

This fanaticism has been on display most recently in the state of Rhode Island. This past Christmas, the governor, Lincoln Chafee, renamed the state Christmas tree a “holiday tree.” Though Christmas is a national holiday, for the secular fanatic, anything Christian — or, as we shall see, anything that relates to religion or God — must be banned from public life.

The latest expression of the secular equivalent of Islamism is the lawsuit brought against a Rhode Island high school, Cranston High School West, for allowing a banner, written by a seventh grader in 1963, to remain hanging on one of the school walls. An atheist student, along with the ACLU, brought the lawsuit and a judge ruled that it is unconstitutional for it to hang in a public school.

To appreciate how fanatical the student, the ACLU and the ruling are, you have to know the words on the banner. So here they are:

Our Heavenly Father

Grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers, to be honest with ourselves as well as with others.

Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win. Teach us the value of true friendship. Help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School West.

Amen

The idea that this prayer violates the Constitution of the United States is as much a mockery of the Constitution as it is of common sense. Only a fanatic can welcome the removal of such a non-denominational, sweet, moral exhortation from a high school wall. America is indeed as endangered by the ACLU as the Muslim world is by Islamists.

In the Republican presidential candidates’ debate on Jan. 7, Congressman Ron Paul said: “I’m the only one up here … that understands true racism in this country is in the judicial system.”

He said this racism has to do with “enforcing the drug laws” and then added: “They (blacks) get the death penalty way disproportionately.”

Two groups immediately defended Paul — his supporters and commentators on the left. The former support anything Paul says, and the left supports anything that Paul says that portrays America as ugly (see, for example, the defense of Paul by left-wing USA Today columnist Dwayne Wickham, whose columns are regularly devoted to how much blacks suffer from American racism).

Just last month, Paul was asked by a representative of an organization (We Are Change) that holds the government responsible for 9/11, “Why won’t you come out about the truth about 9/11?”

Paul’s response: “Because I can’t handle the controversy. I have the IMF, the Federal Reserve to deal with, the IRS to deal with. Because I just have more — too many — things on my plate. Because I just have too much to do.” The interview is readily available on YouTube.

Whatever the implication of his cryptic response, when Paul is confronted by the mainstream media, he denies that he believes the American government was involved in the 9/11 attacks. But what is undeniable is that Paul, like much of the left, holds America largely responsible for 9/11 because of its foreign policy. That includes its “occupying” of countries all over the world; the sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which Paul and the left claim killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis; the injustices against Palestinians that America has supported (through its support of Israel); etc.

Paul mocks the idea that the primary reason for 9/11 was that people of great evil attacked a very good country — because this is what the evil do, just as they did on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese regime attacked Pearl Harbor.

It does seem that the Texas congressman’s description of the American justice system as racist is part of Paul’s generally dark view of America.

Only a fool believes that all those with whom he differs are bad people. Moreover, just about all of us live the reality — often within our own family — of knowing good and loving people with whom we strongly differ on political, religious, social and economic issues.

That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner.

Two examples in just the past week offer compelling evidence.

Prominent left-wing commentators used the way in which Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of one of their children to attack — make that mock — the former Pennsylvania senator.

In a lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot of meanness. But one just assumes that some things — not many, just some — are off limits to political pundits and activists.

Among these few things, one has to believe, is the death of a child.

But I was wrong.

In 1996, Karen Santorum gave birth to a premature baby boy who died two hours later. After spending the night in the hospital with their baby son between them, the grieving parents brought the lifeless infant home for a brief period because, Santorum explained, it was important to them for their other children to “know they had a brother.” The Santorums didn’t want Gabriel Michael Santorum to be an abstraction to his siblings.

First, Alan Colmes on Fox News: “Once (voters) get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his 2-hour-old baby who died right after childbirth home and played with it for a couple of hours so his other children would know that the child was real …”

Colmes was then interrupted by Rich Lowry: “You are mocking him. They lost a child, Alan. That’s very serious and it’s not something you should be mocking on national TV.”

After a lifetime of studying the left, I have concluded that leftism is a form of moral poison. It causes otherwise decent and kind people who take it into their systems to say and/or do cruel and sometimes evil things.

While not specifically about the left, a major new scholarly book, “Pathological Altruism” (Oxford University Press), explores this phenomenon of people wanting to do good things yet ending up doing bad. It applies to The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who has a deep altruistic urge to bring peace to the Middle East. But because he sees the world through the liberal/left prism, he says morally reprehensible things — statements that individuals associated with hate-filled, non-altruistic groups and ideologies would make.

In his Dec. 13 column, yet another of his attacks on Israel and its supporters, Friedman wrote: “The standing ovation (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) got in Congress this year was … bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

If a non-Jew had written this, he would have been severely condemned for writing something outright anti-Semitic. The notion that Jews manipulate the levers of power in Western societies for their own nefarious ends is probably the most enduring of all the West’s Jew-hating myths. It was a staple of Nazi anti-Semitism and is the single most repeated charge of those in the Arab and larger Muslim worlds who seek to annihilate Israel, since its purpose is to convince people that non-Jews who support Israel have been paid off by Jews.

But Friedman, who is a Jew and a liberal, can get away with it — even though it is so morally repulsive that Jew-haters can now assert they are merely quoting a well-known Jew. Who’s going to call him on it? The New York Times?

To his credit, one congressman did condemn Friedman. Rep. Steven R. Rothman (D-N.J.) released this statement: “Thomas Friedman’s defamation against the vast majority of Americans who support the Jewish State of Israel, in his New York Times opinion piece today, is scurrilous, destructive and harmful to Israel and her advocates in the U.S. Mr. Friedman is not only wrong, but he’s aiding and abetting a dangerous narrative about the U.S.-Israel relationship and its American supporters.

“I gave Prime Minister Netanyahu a standing ovation, not because of any nefarious lobby, but because it is in America’s vital national security interests to support the Jewish State of Israel, and it is right for Congress to give a warm welcome to the leader of such a dear and essential ally. Mr. Friedman owes us all an apology.”

The governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, announced last week that he would not allow any more executions in his state during his time in office.

Kitzhaber, a Democrat, gave five reasons for his decision. My response follows each one.

1. “I refuse to be part of this compromised and inequitable system any longer.”

This has become one of the most frequently offered reasons for objecting to capital punishment — that because the system is not equitable, no murderer should be put to death.

This is a reason that is devoid of reason. If a system is not equitable, you don’t end the system, you try to end what is not equitable. This is classic left-wing thinking — destroy what is good if it is imperfect. Documentary-maker Michael Moore was recently on CNN with Anderson Cooper and provided a perfect example of this way of thinking.

Moore: “2011 capitalism is an evil system set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many.”

Cooper: “So, what system do you want?”

Moore: “Well, there’s no system right now that exists. We’re going to create that system.”

The utopian streak that is an essential part of the left-wing mind is puerile and destructive: “If it isn’t perfect, eliminate it.”

2. “I do not believe that those executions (the two that the governor allowed) made us safer.”

We all acknowledge that two executions do not make us safer (though they do make it safer for prison guards and for other inmates). Who ever said two executions would make us safer? Overwhelmingly, the reason people give for supporting the death penalty is justice. It is indescribably unjust to allow everyone who deliberately takes a human life to keep his own.

But if you want to talk safety, then yes, we who support the death penalty are certain that, applied with any consistency, it is a deterrent. The late sociologist Ernest van den Haag had an interesting thought experiment. Suppose that murders committed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays carried a death sentence, while those committed on the other days were punishable by a prison sentence. On which days do you suppose more murders would be committed?

The notion that parking tickets deter illegal parking but that death does not deter murder is truly irrational.

It shows what happens when people put ideology over common sense.

Commentary Magazine asked 41 Americans to respond to this question: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future?” The responses, including my own, appear in the current issue of Commentary. As we were limited to 500 words, I offer my response here, in edited and longer form.

I am both optimistic and pessimistic regarding America’s future.

Here are my reasons for pessimism:

First, the unique American values system — what I call the American Trinity — is under assault. These three values are declared on every American coin: Liberty, “E Pluribus Unum” and “In God We Trust.”

The left has declared war on all three. And it is winning. It seeks to replace Liberty with egalitarianism, “E Pluribus Unum” with multiculturalism, and “In God We Trust” with a godless society. America is being transformed — candidate Barack Obama’s favorite word for what he sought to do to this country — into a Western European country, the left’s model of a great society.

Second, the primary purpose of high schools and colleges — and, increasingly, even elementary schools — has become turning students into leftists.

That’s one reason many of those who graduate from America’s schools know what the climate will be in 2080 but don’t know who Stalin was, let alone who Cain and Abel were. They are proficient at using condoms and at recycling but at little else. They have been taught nothing of American exceptionalism and would likely find the term incomprehensible, if not objectionable. And they would save their dog before a human they didn’t know because morality is a matter of feelings, and they feel more for their dog.

Third, the expansion of the state is producing a new American. This American believes in rights more than in obligations and thinks that the state should take care of him, his parents, his children and his neighbors.

Fourth, the melting pot of Americans has been replaced by a patchwork quilt of “Latinos,” “African-Americans” and other identity groups, all of whom, moreover, are taught to consider themselves victims of a sexist, racist, intolerant, Islamophobic and xenophobic society.

Fifth, half or more of the Jews and Christians who attend synagogue or church are more likely to be led by a priest, minister or rabbi who sermonizes not about their sins but about America’s.

Sixth, civilization’s single most important institution — marriage — is increasingly regarded as pointless and is being redefined for the first time in history to include members of the same sex. Why? Because the notions that marriage is sacred and that men and women are intrinsically different — a difference that carries unique significance — are depicted as patriarchal, anachronistic and sexist.

Last week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens, a physics professor and history professor at Eastern Nazarene College, respectively. The authors take evangelicals to task for being anti-intellectual, anti-reason and anti-science. Their evidence:

— Evangelicals doubt man-made global warming,

— Evangelicals believe that gays can “pray away” their homosexuality.

— Evangelicals believe Earth is only thousands of years old and that men lived alongside dinosaurs.

— Evangelicals oppose same-sex marriage.

Given how often they are made, it’s worth analyzing these charges.

With regard to man-made global warming, the accusation that all skeptics are anti-science is despicable and, indeed, anti-science. The list of prominent scientists who dissent — including the scientist widely considered the dean of climate science in America, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — is so long that there are entire websites that feature their names and credentials: There’s a Wikipedia page titled “List of Scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming” and a website called PetitionProject.org.

The authors of the Times op-ed piece, like virtually all other left-wing intellectuals who comment on the subject, dismiss all skepticism regarding the Al Gore hypothesis that humanity is headed toward a worldwide apocalypse due to heat resulting from man-made carbon emissions. This is a reflection on these intellectuals’ politics, not on their commitment to science.

With regard to “praying away” homosexuality — if it is indeed the normative evangelical position that all gays, with the right faith, can cease being sexually attracted to the same sex — that position is wrong. But to the best of my knowledge, that is not the normative evangelical position; evangelicals believe that no more than they believe that prayer alone will end any undesired physical condition.

At the same time, the opposite position — the position of nearly all the liberal intellectual world — that everyone’s sexual orientation is fixed is a position also driven by ideology rather than by science. Society has a huge influence on how people act out their sexuality, including the gender of person with whom they choose to be sexual. Human sexuality — especially female — is far more elastic than the intellectual community admits. And the widespread liberal belief that, all things being equal, it makes no difference whether a child is raised by a mother and father or by two fathers or two mothers is hardly rational. On the issue of homosexuality, the intellectual left is just as driven by ideology as evangelicals.

With regard to those evangelicals — and for that matter, those ultra-orthodox Jews — who believe that Earth is less than 10,000 years old and that there either were no dinosaurs or that they lived alongside human beings, my reaction has always been: So what? I believe that Earth is many millions of years old, that “six days” is meant as six periods of time (the sun wasn’t even created until the third day, so how could there have been any days before then?) and that dinosaurs preexisted man by millions of years.

The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers — Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot — was what groups they chose for extermination.

For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other “non-Aryans” were declared the enemy and unworthy of life. For the Communists, the rich — the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists — were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life.

Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race, the Communists on the basis of class.

Because the Holocaust was unique in its industrialization of death and in its targeting of every Jew, including babies, for death, the post-World War II world has been rightly obsessed with eradicating racism (but not anti-Semitism!), i.e., the hatred of another solely because of race. But the world has not been obsessed with eradicating the other source of genocide: classism, or the hatred of others based on class.

The reason for this embrace is that class hatred is as fundamental to the left as the Trinity is to Christians, and the left dominates the media and education. This is dangerous because there is an ideological continuum from the democratic left to the Communist left. Making the rich into scapegoats for society’s ills unites the left.

The democratic left believes in democracy, and, before the 1970s, some of its adherents were fierce anti-Communists. But while the decent and the indecent left differ on democracy versus tyranny and on non-violence versus violence, the nicest leftists in the world agree with the indecent left about who the enemy is.

Being on the left means that you divide the world between rich and poor much more than you divide it between good and evil. For the leftist, the existence of rich and poor — inequality — is what constitutes evil. More than tyranny, inequality disturbs the left, including the non-Communist left. That is why so many on the left fell in love with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and, at other times, with every left-wing dictator.

This week, for the fourth consecutive year, I am conducting Jewish High Holiday services. Though not a rabbi, I spent 12 years studying in yeshivas and 35 years teaching and writing on Judaism. The following is a summary of the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) sermon that I gave this past Wednesday night.

The purpose of the High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) is moral introspection: What kind of person am I, and what kind of person can I become? So, every year, Jews meditate on the issue of becoming a better person.

But how many of us do become better people the next year?

This question has bothered me for many years, and I have decided to finally address it. Why is it so hard to become a better person?

I have — unfortunately — come up with 13 reasons.

1. Most people don’t particularly want to be good.

The biggest obstacle to people becoming better is that you have to really want to be a good person in order to be a better person, and most people would rather be other things. People devote far more effort to being happy (not knowing that goodness leads to increased happiness), successful, smart, attractive and healthy, to cite the most prominent examples.

2. Confusion exists about what goodness is.

Goodness is about character — integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.

Not everyone agrees.

For thousands of years, more than a few religious individuals have regarded goodness as being more about sexual behavior and religious piety than about character and the decent treatment of others. And while sexual behavior and religious piety are important, they are not as important as simply acting decently toward other human beings. That is what God wants most (see Micah 6:8, for example) and what we should want most.

At the other end of the spectrum, to modern progressives, goodness is all too often about having the correct political positions, not about character development.

3. Goodness is not about intentions.

Very few people have bad intentions. Even many people who commit real evil — such as true-believing Nazis, Communists, and Islamists — have good intentions. But as an ancient Jewish dictum put it, “It is not the thought that counts but the action.” Good intentions alone produce good people about as often as good intentions alone produce good surgeons.

4. We don’t learn how to be good.

Even if you want to be a good person, where is the instruction manual? Where are the teachers, the coaches and the schools? People spend years studying how to be good at everything — from sports to medicine to plumbing — except how to be good people.

5. We think too highly of ourselves.

Self-esteem frequently runs counter to goodness. Raising children with self-esteem sounds great, but when unearned — which it usually is — it leads to bad results. In fact, it is people who do not have particularly high self-esteem, people who feel that they constantly have to prove their worth, who are more likely to act good. And it is violent criminals who have the highest self-esteem — ‘I am better than others and can therefore do whatever I want.’

6. We think we will be taken advantage of.

Many parents have told me that they fear raising their children to be “too” good, lest they be taken advantage of.

People confuse goodness with weakness. It is weak people, not good people (goodness demands strength), who are taken advantage of.

Yes, bad people take advantage of others. This is why it is so important that good people surround themselves with good people. They allow us to be good and they make us better.

7. There are few personal models.

It is very difficult to grow into a good person without good models — whether a parent, a sibling, a friend, a clergyman, or even good characters in literature and film.

That is why it is so important for all adults to try to be good models — not necessarily friends — to all young people.

About five years ago, I was invited by the Hoover Institution to lecture at Stanford University over the course of a week. Coincidentally, Israel’s Independence Day fell during that week, so I was invited to speak at the celebration held by pro-Israel students. In my talk, I noted that the crux of the problem in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was that most Palestinians wanted Israel to cease to exist.

After my talk, a woman walked over to me and introduced herself as a peace activist. She told me that she could not agree with me because Palestinians, in her view, were quite willing to accept Israel’s existence.

As it happened, about 50 feet behind the pro-Israel celebration was an anti-Israel demonstration led by Palestinian students. So I told the woman to go over and introduce herself to the Palestinian students as a peace activist — that way they would immediately trust her — and ask them if they were willing to acknowledge the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. I told her that I would bet her $5 that they would not answer in the affirmative.

She accepted the bet and walked over the Palestinian students.

After about 10 minutes, she returned.

“So,” I asked her, “who won the bet?”

“I don’t know,” she responded.

“I don’t understand,” I replied. “Didn’t they answer you?”

“They asked me, ‘What do you mean?’” she answered.

I told her she owed me $5 but that I wouldn’t collect.

Earlier this month in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, I interviewed Ghassan Khatib, director of government media for the Palestinian Authority and the spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. I asked him the same question: Do the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state?

He was more direct than the Palestinians students at Stanford.

His long answer amounted to: “No.”

There is no Jewish people, he told me, so how could there be a Jewish country? The Palestinian position is that there is a religion called Judaism, but there is no such thing as a Jewish people. (Interestingly, the Jews are referred to belonging to a religion only once in the entire Hebrew Bible — in the Book of Esther, by the anti-Semite Haman.)

In other words, Palestinians — people in a national group that never existed by the name “Palestine” until well into the 20th century — deny the existence of the oldest continuous nation in the world, dating back over 3,000 years.

Now, that’s real chutzpah.