The puzzle is this. More than a week after he lit the inflammatory phrase “the axis of evil” and watched it soar into the sky, President Bush has been receiving remarkably little criticism for the “evil” bit, and barely more than that (from Madeleine Albright, after all) for the “axis” part.

Evil? Isn’t this supposed to be a nonjudgmental country, in a nonjudgmental time? What gives?

Nearly 20 years ago, President Reagan caused a firestorm (one of many) when he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” “Manicheanism,” snorted expatriate Americans in Paris and London, distancing themselves from a lowbrow president. “Incendiary!” worried the diplomatic set. Tony Dolan, White House speechwriter extraordinaire of those days, used to say that every office that reviewed President Reagan’s speech before he gave it--State Department, National Security Council, etc.--struck out the offending phrase; the president kept writing it back in. The president knew just what he was doing. No one else seemed to. The logic Ronald Reagan used then now seems to be working for George W. Bush. But in reverse.

President Reagan really studied communism in his Hollywood union days, wanted to know what made communists tick, how their propaganda worked. He saw a secret thread that ran through everything: There is no good or evil except the triumph of the People (translation: Party). There is no right or wrong; only History. You’re either with it or against it.

This gave Mr. Reagan an opening. He’d launch a shocking new rhetoric. He’d call the Soviet Union not a union but an empire, put together the old-fashioned way, by force and stealth. And he’d refer to it not as inevitable, but as evil. An ancient, hoary word that every child knows, and loves. A basic word in world affairs.

Mr. Gorbachev would deny it, of course, when the press inevitably asked him, Is it true, sir, that the Soviet Union is an evil empire?

But in a second round of commentary, someone was also bound to ask: But what about Stalin’s purges, sir? Would you say they were evil? Would you yourself approve of show trials? And what about the man-made famine in the Ukraine?

Simply by changing the framework of moral discussion, President Reagan had laid a trap. Once the Soviets answered the question, they were going to have to start making distinctions, in Mr. Reagan’s language. The Soviets had been invited to put a fist into a tar baby, and they were never going to get it out.

Some years afterwards, in fact, U.S. arms negotiators, reminiscing over the bad old days with their now-no-longer Soviet counterparts at a happy dinner, were interrupted by a fist slamming down upon the table. “You know what caused the downfall of the Soviet Union? You know what did it?” demanded a senior general, a little flush with vodka.

Some racked their brains with thoughts of missile defense, perpetual shortages of everything from soap to vodka, the U.S. military buildup. The general banged his fist again. “That damn speech about the evil empire! That’s what did it!” The general was standing now, and to the questioning eyes of one American he added: “It was an evil empire. It was.”

Hardly anyone today will say the Soviet Union was a good example of the socialist ideal (or any other). So it’s hard to remember how shocking Mr. Reagan’s terminology was. The words were everything. The whole point was those two words: Good and Evil.

After years and years of substituting therapeutic language for moral language, “well” for “good,” “ ill” for “evil,” Americans seem sick of therapy. They long for good old-fashioned “evil.” Looking at the hole where the World Trade Center stood, they see--“evil.”

Once upon a time, there used to be real nihilists, who were serious people. One of them, Albert Camus, was troubled deeply when a German friend of his, an absurdist like himself, became a Nazi, and Camus could not argue him out of it. If life is absurd, why is Nazism wrong? At least, it’s action. To find a way out of nihilism, Camus entertained the proposition: Is not the logic of nihilism the logic of suicide? You have no mastery over your coming to be born, it was as meaningless as any other birth. If life has no meaning, is not the answer at least to choose to die? Slowly, step by step, he found a way up from nihilism to resistance. He was a serious man.

Most of what passes for relativism today is fake. Your average relativist is only a relativist when she is trying to discredit your standards. Try lighting up a cigarette too close to her, you’ll find out how relativist she is!

Not so long ago, a friend of mine was debating on talk radio someone described as a “former nun lesbian abortion rights activist” (I kid you not), when the question came up of belief in moral standards. The former nun was having none of it--no talk of “medieval absolutes and all that baggage.” The host asked my friend if he believed in absolutes, but before he could answer, the former nun burst in: “Name one.”

My friend didn’t have time to think, but by a gift of grace shot back immediately: “Thou shalt not rape.”

On the air hung three delicious seconds of silence.

The terrorists of 9/11 called nihilism’s bluff. Nineteenth-century terrorists had a better world in mind, wanted equality, liberty of conscience, a decent life for all, maybe even brotherhood on earth. These guys wanted to destroy ancient Buddhist monuments, as well as monuments in America, and, according to plans later discovered, the Eiffel Tower and St. Peter’s Basilica. They wanted to destroy, not to build.

OK, then, President Bush laid down the gauntlet--All you so-called relativists and nonjudgmentalists out there: Tell me how these guys aren’t evil. Tell me how they just need “therapy.” His words are still hanging out there as a dare. No one has picked them up. But you can bet your life somebody will. And whoever does will get laughed off the air. The moral framework of discussion has changed.

There is evil in the world. Our forebears knew that. Reinhold Niebuhr taught the generation of the 1940s that the problem of history is the persistent power of evil over good, even through corrupting the good. Our founders, taught by the dour St. Augustine, who saw in all worldly systems the inner conflicts of injustice, never expected a pure triumph of the good. That’s why they designed a system whose complicated inner struts are built on checks and balances.

Since everybody sometimes sins, they concluded from reflecting on history, trust no one with unchecked power. Divide the powers. Divide the interests. Since evil begins in me and you, tempt us not beyond our power to resist--put a watch on us, a brake, a monitor.

Our Constitution makes no sense apart from a lively sense of the evil lurking within the best of us. The Federalist Papers are so full of dire examples of official malfeasance in public service, are so unrelentingly Augustinian in their meditations on human history, that their authors even question, in No. 77, whether their canvas is too bleak; whether their “supposition of universal venality in human nature” is overdrawn. Long silences. Yes, well, even the British Parliament, venal as it may be, has a “a large proportion” of “independent and public-spirited men,” a saving remnant.

The founders were quite aware of their own awful compromise with slavery. To get to Union, they had to swallow slavery. For some, it went down hard.

President Bush, like President Reagan before him, has returned us to the moral framework of good and evil, where our founders began all thinking. There is evil in the world, and it coagulates, it gathers force, and if it bursts its bounds endangers everybody. “Axis of evil”? Yes, there can be such things. How could we ever have doubted it? What dream were we living in, what sort of mist, what fog?

But there remains a danger President Bush as yet speaks too little of. True, he warns us to be humble, to talk quietly. But the word “evil,” when used only of others, can intoxicate the user before he knows it. I commend to him, and all of us, Niebuhr’s pregnant warning:

“The final enigma of history is therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of the righteous is to be overcome.” 

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI.