Since the 1950s, Levittown has been a great battleground (albeit a friendly one) for liberals and conservatives to mix it up. In some ways this seems to have intensified in recent years and in the past week it seems to me as though everybody in town is talking about America's two most talked about people: Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter.

How I wish Ann Coulter would stop calling her enemies "liberals" and how I wish Ann Coulter's enemies would stop calling her "a conservative". They are not John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton and she is not Sir Edmund Burke or Lord Bollingbroke.

There's nothing liberal about liberalism and there's nothing conservative about conservatism. Both, seen through the proper lens of history, are revolutionary sociopolitical doctrines whose impact has led to the one challenge to Western societies that's more perilous than emergent China or Islamic fundamentalism: the disintegration of society's basic institutions.

Liberalism resembles little its 19th century ancestor that advocated, what the editors of Reason magazine call "free minds and free markets." How could it? Social engineering by the state via courts and bureaucracies, censorship or demonization of opposing viewpoints, and the transformation of education from a repository of knowledge to a vehicle of sociopolitical activism and change is hardly liberal. Liberalism in Victoria's day espoused mankind's "liberation" from class, rulers, and tradition because its advocates believed that people thusly liberated would seek morality and the truth. Today's "liberals" believe in liberation from morality and the truth.

Conservatism is lost because its spokespersons can no longer articulate what's to be conserved. Christian fundamentalism, for example, is defended as "old time religion" even though the foundations of its liturgy and Biblical interpretation originated in the minds of such 1800's theologians as John Darby, Joseph Smith, and William Miller and has little coherence with respect to Christianity as it was understood in the previous 19 centuries. Conservatives today are also staunch advocates of modern corporate capitalism: the one institution that has uprooted traditional values, families, and communities more pervasively in this country than communism did in Russia.

Conservatism leads to a stagnant and oppressive society and liberalism leads to anarchy. Neither comes close to the spirit of Western Civilization that disseminated science and culture throughout the globe during Victoria's long reign.

The current struggle between liberals and conservatives - so-called - has come to be called "the culture wars" but this is misleading. Consider that in communist and fascist regimes, ballroom dance, ballet, classical music and architecture and representational art flourished. They inherited their cultural tastes and values from the pre-20th century aristocratic societies while democratic Western societies developed a popular culture whose prevailing themes are raunchiness, violence, cruelty, and the lionization of ignorance. Here too, the liberal vs. conservative "culture wars" is really a clash of civilizations - not between the West and some other civilization tradition (like Asia or Islam) but between traditional western culture and the products of the contemporary liberal, democratic, capitalistic society.

The real struggle for the world is between the edifice that gave us Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton, Christ, Socrates, and Darwin and the edifice that wrought cyber porn, gangster rap, and reality TV. The real "culture wars" is between that characterized by the Judeo-Christian ethic, the Classical aesthetic, and scientific rationalism and that mass-produced by media conglomerates, mega-recording studios, and software companies.

Paul Manton

Vice President of Levittown Historical Society