Washington ? President Bush concentrated in recent speeches on answering a question key to his war on global terrorism: Who is the enemy? But events and institutions conspire now to force Bush and all Americans to address a different question: Who are we?

Are we a nation where the rule of law prevails even in times of emergency? Or has the coming of a new millennium, new technologies and the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, altered the underlying values and norms of American society in ways we have not had time to understand, much less codify?

Such broad questions peek out of the rising challenges from Congress, the courts, the media and others to Bush’s insistence on the need for greater secrecy and sweeping presidential powers to counter wartime dangers.

The Supreme Court is not likely to address those societal questions directly when it decides in the near future on the denial of habeas corpus to Jose Padilla, an American citizen as well as an al-Qaida suspect. And newspaper exposes on secret CIA prisons abroad and warrantless surveillance by the NSA at home don’t pose those big thoughts up front. But the undercurrent of a historic identity-check runs through those and other recent events.

The sense of a restoring of balance could be glimpsed even in the case of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, which in its own squalid way suggests the ending of a particularly self-indulgent moment in Washington history.

Eras flash by with startling velocity in today’s hyper-connected, hyper-informed global society. The first five-year slice of the 21st century came to an end last weekend as Abramoff was striking a bargain with prosecutors to plead guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy charges. Coincidence? Or a wave of excess cresting and starting to recede? Here’s why I think it is the latter:

A millennium mentality – a psychological bubble in which people convince themselves that things are suddenly and irrevocably different, that old rules and laws don’t apply to this particular moment/decade/generation – dominated and helped corrupt the years on both sides of the changing of the century. Think of it as the too-many-zeroes syndrome.

That attitudinal matrix – Germans call it Zeitgeist – spread across and out of the U.S. stock market and then hung on longer in global politics and business, especially after 9-11 and the U.S. response suggested that the world had spun onto a different, far more threatening axis.

Americans demanded that President Bush change the world and the nation, with Congress forcing an ill-conceived Department of Homeland Security on the administration and passing the USA Patriot Act in a whatever-it-takes rush. Bush and Vice President Cheney, it must be said, were eager to go in that direction anyway – and have stayed on it longer than many in Congress, the media or the courts seem able or willing to sustain in the absence of new attacks at home.

Laws are not immutable. What is reasonable behavior, by the state or by individuals, changes as circumstances change. Courts exist to decide that. But the acceptance of the rule of law serves to root societies in their most innate and entrenched values. In times of significant upheaval – like these times – the rule of law anchors what should not be changed in haste and superficiality.

The Padilla case is a good illustration of what I mean. Padilla was arrested in 2002 under suspicion of plotting to set off a “dirty” radioactive device in Chicago. Designated by Bush as an enemy combatant, he was held for three years without charges and for much of that time without access to counsel.

He turns out to have been a much smaller and less dangerous fish, according to the charges finally filed against him in late November. That the Justice Department did not move much more quickly – and less grudgingly – to extend his constitutional rights to Padilla undercuts the administration’s claim that it does everything in its power to respect the rule of law consistent with national security.

What happened in the Padilla case amounts to disrespect for the rule of law – as does the failure over four years to amend the 1978 federal statute that prohibits warrantless eavesdropping.

Such disrespect for established legal tradition is a clear if implicit statement from the president and his aides about who they think Americans are becoming in this stressful era of change and danger. But it is a question they alone will not get to settle.