Lengthened Shadows

Even before the events of 9/11, it had become clear that the jagged velocity of twentieth-century life had catapulted the United States to a rare, perhaps unprecedented, preeminence on the world stage. How that preeminence would be handled—to what extent it would even be acknowledged—was rarely addressed. But then came the terrorists’ attacks and in their aftermath a new introspection. Now we ask: What exactly is the nature of this richest, most powerful, most influential of countries? Where will its unmatched influence lead? In a series of penetrating reflections on America and its institutions in the post-9/11 world, Lengthened Shadows offers some answers. Military historian Frederick Kagan, for instance, discusses the future of our armed forces and the challenges they will face. David B. Hart shows how religion, despite its variety and excess, is “alive and striving in America, with the power to shelter many virtues under its promises of supernatural grace.” From the future of the military to the future of higher education, from religion and law to music and visual arts, Lengthened Shadows provides a unique situation report on American culture and its prospects. Writers and thinkers such as Robert Bork, Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer and Mark Steyn offer a probing assessment of the institutions that organize our lives—their health, their influence, their prospects—at the beginning of what some commentators have called the next “American century.”