The Second World War ended four generations ago. We are as far from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1945 victory in the Second World War as he was from Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1865, and both men died in April of their final year of conflict, leaving to their successors to sort out the peace they promised to the American people. To remember Pearl Harbor, we must accept that we can no longer simply recall it. It is now like the recollection of Fort Sumter was for the men who stormed Normandy. History does not play favorites and everything that is not deliberately passed down will be forgotten. This forgetting is not an exclusively American failure; it is the natural passage of time. But its repair demands something of us. When memory passes into the afterlife, the convictions of the living must take its place. 

The American people urgently tried to avoid both wars, but once in the conflict the electorate of 1864 and 1944 chose to stay the course and complete the task. This is remarkable because other countries such as Britain, suspended elections for the duration of the war as a sign of unity. The American system was stronger. Lincoln and FDR, men whose leadership could rightly be called indispensable to the national emergencies, submitted themselves to the electorate. The American system has been built on the idea that no man is above civil audit, even during the greatest of emergencies the people must have the free and open choice of their leaders. It was an imperfect system. Many American soldiers, coming from poll-tax states that disenfranchised the poor of all racial categories, fell in Europe having never been able to cast votes in their republic. And yet their campaign against the Axis sparked hope for a expanded liberty at home in opposition to the monstrous vision of America’s enemies. 

The Second World War was a new birth of freedom for Americans for whom the promises of the country were an unpaid debt. While we often think of the conflict in terms of race and racialism, we might better think of the conflict as one of unifying sacrifice across the American family, for the American nation is ultimately a federation of families. Black families in the South and inner city, Native tribal families on the reservations, and even maligned immigrants like the Italian and Japanese Americans who faced persecution because their ancestry traced back to enemy countries. These families gave their sons and a few of their daughters not simply to defeat the Axis but to ensure they would have the benefits of a free society after the victory was won. The New Deal liberal-nationalism of President Roosevelt created hope for a stronger, fairer America, and the bottom rungs of the greatest generation fought for their right to ascend. The war demanded everything from these families, yet they accepted in the knowledge that American freedom, however imperfect, was worth perfecting rather than abandoning. America’s traditionally Protestant classical-liberalism was, even with its faults, better than the alternatives.

Earlier this year I visited Normandy and remain struck by the contrast between the graves of the fallen on both sides—between the honor of victory for a righteous cause and the double shame of losing the war while fighting on the side of wickedness. Standing among the German graves, you feel the weight of choices. Each stone marker represents not just a life lost, but a life wasted in service of evil. The American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer tells a different story: here rests the mortal remains of Americans who crossed an ocean to die for strangers’ freedom, and their own. Their graves face west, toward the homeland and families they would never see again.

The legacy of the Second World War was previously the American-led postwar order and the atomic age, but as the world continues to spin and the distance between 1945 and our time lengthens, we must build a new legacy to honor the forefathers of 1945. We must determine to be realists about the place of honor, integrity and transcendent morality in establishing national power and stability. And we must be resolved to embrace that same integrity in the ruthless pursuit of the public good and moral order through the defeat of wicked men and ideas. 

This is not about nostalgia for a simpler time for there was nothing simple about global war across the Pacific and the Atlantic, the Great Depression, or domestic injustice of the Jim Crow system. Rather, it is about recognizing that each generation must choose its own relationship to the principles that previous generations died to preserve. The men who stormed beaches, seized command of the skies, and fought their way across oceans, did not do so for us to slip into a comfortable docility of passive resignation. Rather, it was for our capacity to be active, empowered citizens of a great republic, alive to the urgency of our times as they were to theirs.  

Christian realism does not seek perfect justice on this side of eternity. Nor does it shrink from doing what it can to pursue peace and good order in the temporal world. A lesson of the Second World War is not that the arc of history bends towards justice of its own accord, but that we must prudentially do our part to shape history, to compel the victory of righteousness over evil. We must intentionally choose to learn what we, as a society, can no longer remember from experience because to forget is to lose the wisdom of history.