Rushing through the Seattle airport after a relaxing holiday in Anacortes, Washington, I decided to grab a couple of titles from the airport bookstore for the redeye flight back home to Tampa. Natan Sharansky’s latest, “Defending Identity” jumped off the shelf. Having met Sharansky in Israel and devoured his “Fear No Evil” and “The Case for Democracy,” I knew his latest would be a must read for any freedom lover. On the way to the checkout I spotted a paperback with a thought provoking title, “Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America,” by Cullen Murphy. If it weren’t interesting it might at least induce sleep in an uncomfortable airline seat.

After settling in for the transcontinental flight ahead, I eagerly launched into “Defending Identity.” Four hours later I sat back and simply marveled at how Sharansky’s decade in a Soviet gulag inspired such moral authority and clarity of thought. This work is on the same high level with conservative “must reads” like Friedman’s “Free to Choose,” Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” Goldwater’s “Conscience of the Conservative,” and Sowell’s “Basic Economics.”

Sharansky opines that each citizen’s strong personal “identity” (i.e., his or her sense of the value of history, of tradition, of community, not to mention his or her race, creed, color, sex, religion, national origin, etc.) is an essential ingredient for a free society, not something to fear or attempt to eradicate in a “post-identity” worldview. Sharansky clearly lays out the recent historical causes for the current infatuation of liberal Western leaders, academics and elites with “post-identity” concepts, such as post-modernism, post-nationalism and multiculturalism as based upon the false assumption that strong identities cause conflict and war. Stripping people of identity will supposedly guarantee peace. Sharansky shows that these post-identity concepts are essentially a reprise of a Marxist ideal of an emasculated populace, stripped of all identity. Such a populace will be a more tempting target for aggressors—making conflict more, not less, likely.

In a world where identity is seen as a source of conflict, nothing is worth fighting for. In such a world we will find ourselves unable to condemn, much less confront, the onslaught of the real threats to democracy, such as radical Islam and other totalitarian regimes (e.g., Russia v. Georgia) that exhibit strong identities that inspire their followers. In other words, the West not only needs to find something worth living for, but dying for, if we will survive, and quit trying to appease aggressors by confronting their ideologies.

To steal a term from the left, “Defending Identity” “informs” the conservative reader on a broad range of political concepts about which they intuitively feel strongly but are not always able to articulate a rationale. For example, now I understand why I am repulsed by Obama’s self-identification as a “citizen of the world” as a misguided post-identity, multicultural, post-nationalism thought process that will make the world less, not more safe for my children and grandchildren.

Then I picked up “Are We Rome?” and looked for the author’s bio. Bad sign: Cullen Murphy is the editor at large for Vanity Fair. Well, to his credit it did take 98 pages before Murphy cast aside all pretenses of objectivity for a liberal rant listing multiple reasons why America should be hated. While taking great relish in the military defeats of Rome, Murphy reminds us that ancient people hated Roman “exceptionalism.” Rush Limbaugh warned us that the America-haters exist—the kinds that deny American exceptionalism. Yet, I had never actually read any of this hate-America propaganda, but it was therapeutic to do so.

“Are We Rome?” concludes with a pathetic and embarrassingly naive “Hundred Year Workout Plan” for America which sounds eerily like Obama’s recent answer to a question from a seven-year-old about why he’s running for president: “America is …, uh, is no longer, uh … what it could be, what it once was.” Coincidentally, Murphy’s first recommendation for the salvation of America is, “First, instill an appreciation for the wider world … there is no substitute for fluency in another language.” Sound familiar? Second, Murphy says we should stop fighting big government and learn to “rely on it proudly.” Third, open our borders embracing post-nationalism and fourth, unilaterally withdraw the projection of our military power throughout the world so that “regional powers shoulder more of the burden” (consider, again, Georgia v. Russia).

There you have it—one book with a look inside the liberal mind, and another to translate all the doublespeak.