When political worlds collide ...

Did you feel the ground shake?

America is undergoing the political equivalent of continental drift right now, with two powerful forces battling it out like giant tectonic plates crashing against each other in slow motion.

On the one hand are radical leftists pushing an agenda of false hope and dangerous change — ripping at the very foundations of the country, substituting man for God, and preying on the weak and ignorant with promises of social justice and endless charity.

On the other hand are the Tea Party conservatives — defenders of the Constitution, advocates of the Founding Fathers and proponents of unchanging morality, hard work and natural law.

If you are offended by those descriptions, we can guess which side you are on. But you don’t have to be offended. You can rewrite the adjectives so that I am the dangerous defender of a failed and corrupt social order which was invented to protect wealth against the demands of the masses. It doesn’t matter what you call me, or what I call you. What matters is that the political landscape is shaking. The Jacobins and the royalists cannot both stand. The White Russians and Red Russians cannot compromise and remain true to themselves. The Pacific Plate and the North American Plate cannot crash into each other without unleashing a terrible fury. Nor can the Constitution and the Communist Manifesto peacefully co-exist in the same body politic. Something must give.

Which force will be submerged and which will thrust upwards like the Rocky Mountains to dominate the landscape of the next political era we simply cannot know at this time. But we most assuredly will live with the consequences.

That is why, week after week for the past four years, I have been writing about the cultural war that threatens to pulverize the principles of equal justice, resistance to tyranny, and primacy of the individual — the principles on which our nation was founded.

I am not the first to notice that the concept of equal rights has been transformed in the past 100 years from the right to enjoy one’s own possessions and accomplishments without interference to the right to possess as much as my neighbor does without the need to accomplish anything at all.

Such a fundamental transformation has left our nation virtually unrecognizable from the one I was born into 55 years ago. And it has inspired the resistance of the Tea Party Movement, which offers a chance to restore equal justice to its original intent — a challenge to excel, not a surrender to mediocrity.

Am I confident of victory? No, but I am sure of the battle. It is as certain as the San Andreas Fault, and as necessary as the Declaration of Independence. Let each of us fight for what he or she believes in, and not try to avoid taking sides. There is no neutral ground.

Remember, if you stand in the middle of an earthquake, you will be swallowed up first.