From Kristol's latest column for Time magazine, now available here:

In the old days, historians--at least some of them--were patriotic and moralistic. No longer. We live in what Andrew Ferguson, in his brilliant new book, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, calls "a wised-up era." Now, Ferguson explains, "skepticism about the country, its heroes and its history" is "a mark of worldliness and sophistication." Ferguson is himself a worldly and sophisticated observer of contemporary America. (Full disclosure: he also happens to be a colleague of mine at the Weekly Standard.) But his guided tour of the often amusing, sometimes bizarre ways we remember Lincoln today leads us gently from being wised-up toward wisdom.

Lincoln expected that America would become a nation doubtful about its heroes and its history. In his astonishing address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., on Jan. 27, 1838, on "the perpetuation of our political institutions," the 28-year-old Lincoln foresaw the inevitable rise in a modern democracy like ours of skepticism and worldliness. Indeed, he worried about the fate of free institutions in a maturing nation no longer shaped by a youthful, instinctive and (mostly) healthy patriotism.

Such a patriotism is natural in the early years after a revolutionary struggle for independence. To the generation that experienced the Revolution and the children of that generation, Lincoln explained, the events of the Revolution remained "living history," and those Americans retained an emotional attachment to the political institutions that had been created. But the living memories of the Revolution and the founding could no longer be counted on. Those memories "were a fortress of strength; but what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls." So, Lincoln concluded, the once mighty "pillars of the temple of liberty" that supported our political institutions were gone.

Go read the whole thing.