Not what it is, but how to protect it. This is at the core of the culture war the Progressive-Democratic Party is so zealously fighting against us average Americans.

On the one hand is the Harris/Walz position of the US as a land of opportunity for all. On the other hand is the Trump/Vance position of protecting American values from outside threats.

The two positions shouldn’t be in opposition to each other. Protecting our values—our culture—from outside threats is what preserves our nation as a land of opportunity for all. If that protection fails, if our culture is materially altered by those threats, that which makes us a land of opportunity for everyone ceases to exist, and that opportunity disappears.

The problem here is in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s demand to define what those opportunities are and how they’re to be achieved. Party wants government—the government Party wishes to control—to determine those opportunities through its taxing programs and its social engineering-oriented expanding spending.

Party wants to dictate via government regulation what transportation we can have opportunity for, what products our businesses will be permitted to produce and sell, what energy sources we will be permitted to buy or sell, who will be permitted to vote, even who will be permitted to run for election.

This is as opposed to what is at the core of our culture: we—us citizens—decide what our values are, we decide what opportunities we wish to pursue, we select our opportunities from lists of our own devise or from none at all, creating opportunity from scratch. Choices may or may not include any of Party’s goals, but none of which are foisted off onto us.

Notice that: what we citizens want to pursue is much less enumerated, and that permits of much expanded opportunity and opportunities.

The choice is clear: Everything within the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party vs we’re free to do our own thing, at our own risk, on our own responsibility, and for our own benefit.

Kimberly Strassel, of The Wall Street Journal, opened her editorial with this:

Minouche Shafik is this week’s casualty of activist protesters, although her resignation as Columbia University’s president resurrects a pressing question for Democratic leaders: how long do they think they can duck their own confrontation with their angry left?

That’s her misapprehension: that “angry left” is the center of the Progressive-Democratic Party. This is the party whose leadership—Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden and Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris—actively opposes Israel in the extermination war the terrorist entity Hamas has inflicted on it and continues to pursue.

This is the party whose Presidential candidate agreed with her fellow leftists that Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro was unfit to be her Vice President running mate because he’s a Jew, and chose instead Minnesota’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Tim Walz, a man who after 24 years of honorable service in our military, chose in his moment of truth to retire from the military rather than stay with his unit while it was under a Warning Order to prepare for deployment to an actual combat zone.

This is the party that is actively pursuing the nuclear armament of Iran with its begging Iran to be allowed to reenter a JCPOA that itself (as agreed by Biden’s Party predecessor Barack Obama) codified Iran’s ability to develop and deploy nuclear weapons.

This is the party that is paying only lip service to preventing Iran-backed Houthi disruption of commercial shipping through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

This is the party that wants to continue business as usual with the People’s Republic of China, pushing investment and associated American technology and intellectual property in that nation, never minding that that nation controls vital inputs to our economy, inputs like rare earths, lithium and processed lithium for batteries; a nation that is ramping up its threats to the Republic of China with no response by us; a nation that is rapidly expanding its military establishment, including nuclear weapons, even as Party works assiduously to reduce real spending on our own defense and to weaken through a variety of Woke policies our rump defense capability.

This is the party that is afraid to confront land-grabbing Russia, choosing instead to hamstring Ukraine in its ability to defend itself, for all that far too many Republicans support that supplication.

Domestically, this is the party that insists on increasing taxes on those of us American citizens of whom they disapprove and increasing spending on social policies that us average Americans do not want.

This is the party that demands to indoctrinate our children in its leftist ways, rather than teaching our children how to think, using our history, our language, our civics, math, and science as vehicles for that end. This is the party that opposes school choice in order to keep our children trapped in failing public schools run by Party’s indoctrination arm, the teachers unions.

As Party confronts their angry left, it is confronting itself. And agreeing with itself.