Give thanks for America's strength

Question: This Thanksgiving season, Americans have a lot to be thankful for - a strong economy, a vital democracy and a variety of personal and civil freedoms. To what do we owe our strength as a nation?

Bonnie Erbe: We owe our strength as a nation to an array of factors, including great natural wealth and a diverse population. But we have been able to succeed where many countries have failed as a result of two seemingly contradictory characteristics of the American body politic: Americans share a unified desire for freedom from government oppression and, at the same time, Americans couple our need for individual expression with an ability to sublimate our political differences to work within the two-party framework.Countries where individual egos and muscular special interest groups make power-sharing an impossibility run into repeat crises. Consider the plights of Italy or Russia, for example. And countries with cultures where individuality and expression take a back seat to uniformity can't seem to keep up with our gurgling economic engine. Japan comes to mind.

But this Thanksgiving, as we count our blessings, we also should note potential impediments. It is no overstatement that the greatest threat to our collective ability to move forward comes in the form of a growing movement of intolerance and extremism within American politics. While in the 1960s extremism was the province of the left wing of the Democratic Party, today it comes from its antipodal image - the right wing of the Republican Party. Having thrown out House Speaker Newt Gingrich for "being too tolerant and mainstream," Christian conservatives have once again shown that, as a political force, it's their way or no way.

Let us hope that, just as '60s radicals found out through ostracism and loss of power, '90s radicals will soon see their politics come to the same conclusions. This does not mean that fringe groups should give up on trying to woo new converts into their camp. It only means they should give up the strong-arm tactics and stop trying to impose their will on the American majority who do not share it.

Josette Shiner: This Thanksgiving, we can be thankful for ongoing waves of specific good news about this great nation. Our economy is strong, resilient and still expanding; many of the nation's largest cities are improving each day; the FBI recently reported that we've witnessed the sixth straight year of declining property and violent crime; birth rates for unmarried teenage girls dropped nearly 10 percent between 1994 and 1998 (among black teens, they fell more than 20 percent); abortion rates are at their lowest point since 1976; race relations are improving in most quarters; and welfare rolls and unemployment rates are lower than we could have ever wished for three years ago.

More generally, the United States continues to be the world's most free, most powerful, most consequential, most enviable country in the world. Most nations join us in the fight for liberty, free enterprise, human rights and constitutional governments founded on the consent of the governed. Despite our inevitable flaws, our shortcomings, our mistakes, we are still the greatest country in the history of the world.

Bonnie Erbe is host of the PBS program "To the Contrary." Josette Shiner is president of Empower Am-er-ica.