The awareness of the predicament (on the part of both the politicians at the microphones and the voters in the streets) conceivably could lead to a reconstitution of the American idea, but the finding of the phoenix in the ashes presupposes a debate rising from an intellectual structure a good deal sturdier than the one lost in the wreckage of the World Trade Center.
If there is one point about this
predicament that Elshtain seems to wish to stress (and one central affinity among Augustine, Arendt, and Elshtain), it is that
awareness of the fallen and pluralistic nature
of the world «should usher into a rueful recognition
of limits, not a will to dominion that requires others for one to conquer.»