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The great jurist Learned Hand once said that "Liberty is never being too sure you're right." Somehow, recently though, we have replaced our usual and healthy doubt with an arrogance and belligerence that resembles more the ancient and now fallen empires of our history books than a modern compassionate democracy, that is, the country I recognize and love.

We've begun to start wars instead of finishing them; begun to depend on censorship and intimidation, and to infringe on the most basic liberties that have heroically defined and described our trajectory as a nation of free people. We have begun to reduce the complexity of modern life into facile judgments of good and evil, and now, in the case of Abu Ghraib and other embarrassments and incompetence, find ourselves brought up short when we see that we have, too, sometimes, in moments, become what we despise.

We find ourselves in the midst of a new, subtler, perhaps more dangerous, civil war, where the real threat is fundamentalism wherever it raises its intolerant head. The casualties this time will be our sense of common heritage, our sense of humor, our sense of balance and cohesion.

We must all join a new Union Army, an army dedicated to the preservation of this country’s great ideals, a vanguard against this new separatism and disunion, a vanguard against those who, in the name of our great democracy, have managed to diminish it.

I want John Kerry at the head of that army. The old insult that he is a "Massachusetts liberal" doesn’t work. The United States is a liberal invention; the idea of sacrificing one's life for freedom, the idea of emancipation, these are liberal inventions born in John Kerry's state, our neighbor. Let us conserve them.