Excuse me, but we've been here already. Before our Compassionate Conservative-in-Chief bumbles any further toward diverting billions of dollars from the existing budget to create "enterprise zones" and an ownership society in the Gulf Coast for people who didn't invest their wealth justly in the first place, he -- and liberals, too -- might study how New York City rose above devastation as bad as New Orleans' before September 11. Only hard-won syntheses of left and right got New York beyond the old shouting matches in which each side was right only about how the other was wrong.

Here I am, three days after this election, teaching a seminar on "New Conceptions of American National Identity" at Yale, where George W. Bush, John Kerry, and I overlapped as undergraduates in the late 1960s. Surely I will have to tell my students how Bush has revived an old conception of our national identity that depends heavily on notions about free markets and spiritual salvation that are necessary but nowhere near sufficient to sustaining republican freedom.