William Whittle wrote a famous essay on strength and self-doubt in America. He likens our current situation to that of a body in too-clean an environment: with nothing for the immune system to attack, it attacks the body a la lupus.
Some years ago another writer put the situation better, and touched on what I think is the real problem:
From A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller (1959):
... children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens--and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn't the same....
The closer men came to perfecting themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.
(I wish I could write like that..) The struggle for the soul of the West is only partly political; only partly philosophical: its core is a spiritual struggle. On one side lie believers in _this_ earthly approximation to Eden, on the other berserk deniers, and in between a narrow road with a warning not to turn to one side or the other. The nominal cultural combatants are united in a focus on Me and what I can do, while the road is centered on Him.
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