The Work of Virtue
A free republic depends on citizens who can take their prosperity into their own hands.
Mark T. Mitchell has written a book that addresses the specter haunting our decayed and decaying American republic. The title of the book gives that specter an apt name: “plutocratic socialism.” This two-headed creature combines the worst of an imperious oligarchy with the illusions of a socialism that is at once paternalistic, woke, and despotic. The principles of our republic remain admirable and choice-worthy, to be sure, but their presence in our common life has become attenuated with each passing day. The soul of our great republic has become hollowed out, because we have lost touch with the virtues that animate responsible citizenship in a free society.
More fundamentally, we have lost an appreciation of self-government in the most capacious sense of the term. The plentiful rights guaranteed by our constitutional order (and by “Nature and Nature’s God”) too often degenerate into excuses for self-destructive hedonism, veering inconsistently between impulsive self-assertion and debilitating passivity. As Mitchell persuasively argues, rights must be accompanied by the self-limitation that makes political liberty—what Aristotle called “ruling and being ruled”—possible and sustainable. There can be no self-government in the political sense without the governance of the self, and some self-conscious effort to put order in the human soul. Here the classics, Christians, and the American founders have more in common than we sometimes realize. Despite their elevation of rights as the central political category, the founders never broke with the Great Tradition’s understanding that “statecraft is inescapably soulcraft,” to cite the old locution of a more conservative George F. Will.
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