Paul Weyrich, a decent Washington conservative, sent out a private letter after the Senate failed to impeach Bill Clinton. In essence, he said conservatives have lost the political war.

The reason "is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we're caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics," he wrote.

I think he's right. I've long believed that the claim there is a moral majority in America is a myth. I don't believe there is. I also think the claim by Samuel Francis, another conservative, that there is a corrupt dominant culture but also a traditional culture is wishful thinking. Where is this traditional culture in 1999? I haven't been able to find it.

The traditional American culture was first of all Christian. Where is there any evidence that this is still a Christian culture? What Christian influence do you see in art, the movies, television? Christmas is even banned from government schools.

I know about the numbers, but there are more professing than practicing. And much of what claims to be Christian is Christian in name only and otherwise unrecognizable.

Another key aspect of traditional American culture was belief in minimal government. Save for a few libertarians, who could hold a national meeting in a small hotel, where are these Americans who believe in minimal government? I can find big-government conservatives and big-government liberals, big-government Republicans and big-government Democrats, but I can't find very many minimal-government folks hiding under any label.

Traditional Americans believed the Constitution was a compact among sovereign states, that the federal government created by the compact was merely the agent of the states, and its powers were absolutely and strictly limited. Where will you find Americans who believe that anymore? Not in either major party. Certainly not in Washington.

I'm convinced that if the majority of Americans had to rewrite the 23rd Psalm, it would read: "The government is my shepherd and I shall not want." I think the American people today are by and large socialist and by and large decadent. Most of those not decadent themselves are tolerant of decadence. I also believe that government schools have succeeded in doing what Hanna Arendt said totalitarian schools do -- make it impossible for people to form and hold strong convictions about anything.

Any hope for America's future will come from church and hearthside, if it comes at all -- not from politics. Extant traditional Americans have indeed lost the political war.

Politics is not the only thing that has failed us. In a very real sense the American criminal justice system and many psychologists have also failed us. Read the following article.

EUGENE, Ore. (AP) - Comparing Kip Kinkel to the Unabomber, a psychologist said the teenager killed his parents and went on a deadly school shooting rampage because he was obeying voices in his head.

"I feel the primary thing causing him to kill was the voices," Orin Boldstad, a child psychologist who treats young killers in Oregon's juvenile prisons, testified Wednesday at Kinkel's sentencing hearing. "I don't think he is a killer separate from his mental illness."

Kinkel abandoned an insanity defense and pleaded guilty Sept. 24 to four counts of murder and 26 counts of attempted murder for the May 1998 slayings of his parents and two students at Springfield's Thurston High School. He also wounded 25 students and attempted to stab a detective.

Kinkel, 17, agreed to serve 25 years for the murders, but Judge Jack Mattison can extend the sentence to as much as 220 years.

Bolstad said Kinkel had been able to resist the urge to obey the voices for years. But he succumbed to the commands due to the stress of being discovered with a gun in his locker at school and his father's anger, the psychologist said.

Bolstad said that he was convinced Kinkel was psychotic, depressed and suicidal, and also suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.

Though Kinkel cannot be cured, he said, he can be managed with anti-psychotic drugs and might someday be safely let out of prison.

Bolstad noted that Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski was an example of someone who was mentally ill but could still be clever and calculating.

"Are you aware Mr. Kinkel told several people he saw himself as the next Unabomber?" asked prosecutor Caren Tracy.

"I am," Bolstad answered.

Kaczynski, a Harvard-trained mathematician who became a forest recluse, pleaded guilty in January 1998 to mail bombings that killed three people and injured 23.

Kinkel referred to the three voices in his head as A, B, and C, saying they got louder and louder as they told him to kill his father after they returned home following Kip's expulsion from school, Bolstad said.

"A said, 'You have to kill him. Shoot him,'" Bolstad quoted Kinkel as saying. "My dad was sitting at the (breakfast) bar. The voices said, 'Shoot him.' I had no choice. The voices said I had no choice."

Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Violence in schools is merely a symptom of a larger problem: moral decay. It is not a consequence of guns in the hands of children, but an absence of God in our hearts. If Americans can so casually kill the unborn innocent why should they be surprised to find their offspring murdering one another in school?

Our youth today are almost invariably taught they must change the world, not their souls. So they change the world, and it becomes worse.

The denial of sin and responsibility is couched in therapeutic terms, such as the need to "understand" even the worst crimes as a result of a dysfunctional childhood or other circumstances.

We want freedom from rules and transcendent moral principles, but we hate the moral chaos that ensuses.

Consider carefully the following words by Walter E. Williams, John M Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as quoted in the August 2000 issue of IMPRIMIS. These remarks are reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly speech digest of Hillsdale College.

Every tyrant has what he calls a good reason for restricting the freedom of others.

Americans from all walks of life have decided that government should care for the poor, the disadvantaged, the elderly, failing businesses, college students, and many other "deserving" segments of our society.

It's nice to do those things, but we have to recognize that government has no resources of its own. Congressmen and senators are not spending their own money for these programs. Furthermore, there is no Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus who gives them the resources. The only way the government can give one American one dollar is to confiscate it first, under intimidation, threats, and coercion, from another American. In other words, for government to do good, it must first do evil. If a private person were to do the things that government does, he would be condemned as a common thief. The only difference is legality, and legality is no talisman for moral people. This reasoning explains why socialism is evil. It uses bad means (coercion) to achieve what are seen as good ends (helping people).

Government was not long in the business of doing good before Americans found they could use government to live at the expense of other Americans, both through the tax code and through "privilege granting," a government activity that dates back to medieval times in Europe, where guilds and mercantile associations controlled trade in their particular areas. With a payment to the king or a reigning lord they were granted monopoly privileges. In modern times, we have the equivalent; we just call them political contributions. Almost every group in the nation has come to feel that the government owes it a special privilege or favor. Manufacturers feel that the government owes them protective tariffs. Farmers feel that the government owes them crop subsidies. Unions feel that the government should keep their jobs protected from non-union competition. Residents of coastal areas feel that the government should give them funds for rivers and harbors. Intellectuals feel that the government should give them funds for research. The unemployed and the unemployable feel that the government owes them a living. Big business feels that the government should protect them from the rigors of market competition. Members of almost every occupation, profession, or trade feel that the government should use licensing requirements and other forms of regulation to protect their incomes from competition that would be caused by others entering the trade.

Conservatives are by no means exempt from this practice. They rail against food stamps, legal aid, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, but they come out in favor of aid to dependent farmers, aid to dependent banks, and aid to dependent motorcycle companies. They don't have a moral leg to stand on. They merely prove to the nation that it is just a matter of whoe ox is being gored. Conservatives as well as liberals validate H.L. Mencken's definition of election: "...government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." To the extent he was right, we must acknowledge that we, not the politicians, are the problem.

Our government has become destructive of the ends it was created to serve. John Stuart Mill, who wrote the classic text On Liberty, said, in discussing the limits of government power, "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized society, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant." Mill added, "He cannot rightfully be compelled because it would be better for him to do so. . .because it would make him happier" or because, in the opinion of others, "to do so would be wise, or even right." Finally, Mill said, "These are good reasons for remonstrating him, or persuading him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with an evil in the case he do otherwise."

We have gone further than what Mill and John Locke argued are the limits to coercion in a free society.

If the Founders were to come back to today's America, I think they would be disappointed in our choice to accept what we see as safety in exchange for liberty.

I want federal funding involved. If the private sector gets involved and there is money to be had, bioethics will be thrown out the door.

More money, smaller classes, and higher teacher pay will not cure our educational problems. The long-term solution is privatization - make education subject to competitive pressure. After all, most production that pleases us is a result of ruthless competition and the profit motive. Think about it. Most of what pleases us (computers, clothing, and food) is subject to that kind of pressure and most of what displeases us is not (post office, police, and schools).