Highway speed limits must be one of the most comprehensively policed laws in all America. We've established dedicated law enforcement agencies in every state to enforce this one infraction. Speeding takes place on predesignated narrow strips of land with limited obstructions, easily monitored from the side of the road or by air. We often line entire highways with cameras and speed traps just to catch speeders. It hardly makes a difference. It's not just criminals and shady operators who openly flout the speed limits without a second thought. On every highway in America, you find little old ladies who would never dream of breaking “real” laws still buzzing by at eighty miles per hour without a care in the world. Completely law-abiding people who file their taxes on time, always use their turn signal, and cluck loudly at jaywalkers, happily break the speed limits as if they were mere suggestions. Despite all the effort we put into stopping it, it's impossible to get people not to speed.
Why do nice people who normally respect the criminal code regularly break these laws without a moment's embarrassment, and often with a bit of pride? Because most of what we all actually do, or won't do, isn't governed by our desire to comply with the legal code. It's governed by a completely different set of rules, social norms and our cultural and moral beliefs. People speed because, while everyone knows speeding is illegal, most people don't think it's wrong. That truth is at the heart of the philosophy of virtue conservatism.
WHAT IN THE WORLD IS NATIONAL VIRTUE?
As Ben Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention, a woman reportedly approached him and asked, “What do we have Doctor, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”1 Franklin's famous reply expressed one of the Founding generation's greatest concerns about their creation. Constitutional rules and legal protections that look great on paper only yield a free society in practice if citizens honor them. Rules, separations of powers, and Bills of Rights, have to be constantly interpreted, administered, and applied by people. If citizens in an expedient rush to pursue other goals—whether personal selfishness, factional interests, utopian projects, or partisan power-chasing—fail to put the preservation of the republic first, republican government will eventually collapse.
It was an item of faith at the time of America's Founding that monarchies and dictatorships had a significant advantage over republics because a republic's strength is also its greatest vulnerability—the people are the government. A monarchy can flourish so long as the small circle around its king has the necessary wisdom and foresight to rule. For a democratic republic to flourish, its people must demonstrate the wisdom and foresight to continually place the nation's collective interest before their own. A republic populated by wise and capable citizens will make good decisions, and therefore succeed and thrive. A republic populated by ignorant and selfish citizens will perish. Formal institutions that separate power between competing factions, that protect rights, or that call for all citizens to be treated with justice, are a good start. Yet if citizens then ignore these restrictions when they find them inconvenient, or chip away at rights with a flurry of exceptions that allow them more freedom to act, or wield rights not as shields but weapons to bash others in society who they don't like, the republic will decay regardless of what its laws and constitution say on paper.
Among the most important influences on the American Constitution's design was the French philosopher and lawyer Charles-Louis de Secondat, popularly known as Montesquieu. America's Founders adopted almost wholesale Montesquieu's suggestion—set out in his 1748 work, The Spirit of the Laws—that a republic should separate power between an executive, a judiciary, and a two-chambered legislature.2 Montesquieu also believed, however, that separating power through a clever constitutional design was hardly sufficient to preserve a republic's liberty. He also believed a republic needed a certain character in its citizens to survive and prosper. Montesquieu believed three forms of government had existed throughout human history—the republic, the monarchy, and despotism—each of which required a different character to succeed. The citizens of a democratic republic, he believed, needed what he called virtue.3 By virtue, Montesquieu didn't mean sexual purity, a harsh and upstanding persona, or rules of social manners. He meant the virtue of good citizenship. As he put it:
One can define this virtue as love of the laws and the homeland. This love, requiring a continuous preference of the public interest over one's own, proceeds all the individual virtues; they are only that preference.
This love is singularly connected with democracies. In them alone, government is entrusted to each citizen. Now government is like all things in the world; in order to preserve it, one must love it.4
Montesquieu, like America's Founders, was keenly aware that republics across history inevitably descended into oligarchy or dictatorship when their people failed to put the interests of the republic before their own. Plato famously held aristocracy, by which he essentially meant rule by meritocratic philosophers, a higher form of government than democracy for just this reason.5 An enlightened monarch with his people's best interest in his heart, Plato thought, would back his decisions with more wisdom and ability than the unruly mob of democracy.6 On the other hand, democracies, Plato believed, inevitably degenerate into tyrannies because people crave order in hard times, and a powerful demagogue will always arise to promise it.7 Much evidence across human history supports Plato's view. The democracy of Athens had its periodic tyrants and an oligarchic coup. The republic of Florence devolved into a hereditary duchy. Most troubling, even the Romans who believed that their republican traditions—their Senate, their Consuls, and their complicated ladder of public offices—were the key to their nation's extraordinary success gave up on republican government for the authority of an emperor under the charismatic Julius Caesar, followed by Augustus. The fact that even Rome cast off its cherished republican institutions, the system that brought the Roman people unrivaled power, wealth, and dignity within the ancient world, is outright distressing.
America's Founders agreed with Montesquieu that a lasting republic required something beyond just well-crafted institutions to succeed; it also needed a republican virtue in its people.8 We too often forget that the Founders considered the formal institutional safeguards of their Constitution, like dividing power across branches of government and creating a sturdy Bill of Rights, as mere last-ditch defenses against a demagogue, factional corruption, or the tyranny of the mob. Clever constitutional safeguards, well-crafted institutions, and wise systems of checks and balances setting ambition against ambition, are only as good as the people who administer and interpret them. The Founders also believed the citizens of their republic had to honor certain values, hold specific traits of character, and put the republic's welfare first if their republic was to survive.9 Citizens had to be public-spirited enough to root out corruption. They needed to be wise enough about the substance of issues to choose representatives willing and able to do the public's business. They couldn't exercise their power like an uneducated mob. They couldn't use their power over government to loot the public till at others' expense, nor could they put their own factional interests before the interests of the state. If citizens used their democratic power to pursue their own short-term desires at the nation's long-term expense, abuse groups they disliked, or seek power for the sake of it without regard to prudent governing, their republic would ultimately fail. The experience of other republican experiments across the world suggest this was no fanciful concern. The world is littered with nations that copied, almost to the letter, the institutions set out in America's Constitution, expecting them to transform autocratic societies into democracies as if by magic. When the people in societies importing America's institutions by rote refused to honor their formal safeguards, they failed to keep them.
What the Founders called republican virtue is ultimately just another way to say culture or norms. As we all know, much of our day-to-day behavior isn't shaped by the fear we might get punished for violating legal rules, but by the complex code of traditions and cultural beliefs and social cues we carry about in our heads. We operate in a social world in which social expectation governs much of our behavior. We don't want to seem rude. We don't want to disappoint people. We don't want to feel embarrassed. We don't want to threaten our status in the community. We don't want to look ignorant. We don't want to say the wrong thing, or make people uncomfortable, or use the wrong fork. Sometimes it's something small, like whether you always politely line up into a queue or whether you push yourself to the front of the line. Sometimes it's something big, like whether you agree to marry a stranger your parents picked for you, one you don't even like, even though there's absolutely no legal requirement saying you have to do it. People expect certain behavior from us—that we honor agreements, care for our families, and behave honestly in certain situations. We come to expect those things from ourselves. These countless invisible rules we unthinkingly obey about what we're supposed to do, how we're supposed to live, and how we're supposed to behave in particular circumstances, are of more consequence to how a society actually operates than all the visible rules written into law books. No police need to catch us breaking these “laws” because we catch and punish ourselves.
Imagine yourself in a convenience store. You grab a Snickers bar and take it to the cashier. The man behind the counter is transfixed by a little television set behind him. In this moment, you realize you could easily slip the candy into your jacket pocket without anyone the wiser. Instead you get the cashier's attention and pay full price for your chocolate. Why did you do something contrary to your self-interest? It's not because you were afraid of getting caught; you could have easily escaped without anyone knowing. It's not because you were afraid of hurting the convenience store; it's part of a big corporation for which you have no real affection. If you were somehow caught shoplifting such a small item, the legal consequences wouldn't be all that great. You paid because you believe stealing is wrong. What you would dread if you got caught wouldn't be the legal slap on the wrist you would likely receive. It would be telling your mother what you had done. Or potentially losing out on a job someday when a potential employer found out you had a record for shoplifting. Or not getting a second date when someone you liked discovered your criminal record.
The idea that virtue is important to maintaining a republic—that a republic's citizens must embrace and live by certain cultural beliefs and norms if the republic is to survive—suffused the thinking of America's Founders, and indeed of most intellectuals during the eighteenth century.10 The Founders understood the traits of character they sought were rare and extraordinary in people, which is why, they believed, monarchy and despotism had ruled so much of human history.11 They nonetheless hoped America's unique foundation, its legacy without the feudalism and monarchy of Europe, and the structure of its society based around small independent farms, might foster the necessary republican virtue to succeed.12 As James Madison, the Constitution's principal author, said in a speech seeking to win approval of his Constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention:
I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.13
As Madison wrote of his Constitution in the Federalist, “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”14
The traits of character the Founders prized, moreover, are important to more than simply maintaining a republic. After over two centuries of success, we've come to take for granted that the American republican experiment can and ought to work. These traits are also important to ensuring it thrives. We worry now just as much about whether the republic will continue to prosper, or whether it will fall into decline. We worry about whether citizens through the democratic process will choose wise leaders, or whether they will select short-sighted, corrupt, or incompetent ones. We worry about whether the democratic process will result in smart policies guiding the nation toward long-term success, or whether it will implement short-term kludges, backroom deals selling out the nation to some constituency, or simply fail to respond to looming crises at all. We worry about whether citizens will create innovations and infrastructure, or whether they will seek to profit at the nation's collective expense. What the Founders thought of as republican virtue is really something greater, national virtue—the cultural habits that lead to national success.
Two strong traditions exist in America about what this national virtue is and what we ought to do to safeguard it. One tradition is grounded in the belief that America's traditions reflect hard-won knowledge that have endured the test of time. The other is grounded in a zeal for moral reform, a fear of corruption and decline, and the belief that America represents an opportunity to build a more pure and perfect society. In some ways these traditions are quite similar. But the differences between them matter too.
WHO WAS EDMUND BURKE?
Edmund Burke is widely recognized as one of the world's most important political philosophers. No cloistered academic toiling away on abstract theories far away from the public scrum, Burke was a working politician—in fact, one of the most successful and famous politicians of his day. As the principal writer and idea-man of his faction of the British Whig party in Parliament, as well as a top aide to the prime minister, Burke was something of an eighteenth-century equivalent of chief party strategist. Burke's rise to the top of British politics and English society was extraordinary because his background wasn't illustrious, nor was he even English. Burke was born in Ireland at a time when the English considered the Irish something like backward foreigners.15 After graduating from Trinity College in Dublin, Burke emigrated to London where he became the protégé and private secretary of the powerful Marquess of Rockingham, who controlled the strongest faction in Parliament.16 Rockingham arranged for Burke to stand for an English parliamentary seat, where he quickly rose to influence through his talent as a writer, thinker, and orator. As Burke's influence grew, so did his national fame. He became a staple of the most select intellectual circles in London. By the outbreak of the American Revolution, Burke was one of the most powerful and renown men of ideas in Britain.
Burke involved himself in all the great questions of his day—the British treatment of his native Ireland and the immoralities involved in maintaining the empire in India among them—but the issue that came to define him most was his views on his era's republican revolutions. The British Whigs were what we would now consider a party of the left, championing innovation, progress, and change.17 Whigs tended toward Enlightenment values and classical liberal economic views, favored commercial interests over the landed aristocrats, championed rationalism and commerce against the feudal remnants of the British aristocracy, and prized the ideal of liberty over traditional authority. The party's defining issue, however, was defending Parliament's power and the traditional rights of citizens against royal authority.18 At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Burke, like most Whigs, jumped to the colonists' defense. To Whigs like Burke, Americans were fellow British citizens defending their traditional liberties against a monarch trampling upon them.19 Burke spoke out in Parliament that Britain ought to honor the American colonists' reasonable grievances and make peace with them.20 While he hoped America would remain within the British fold, he also believed the British government was principally at fault for the division.21 Burke treated the American struggle against the king as another part of the Whiggish cause—defending the traditional rights of free English citizens against usurpation from the monarch. If Whigs allowed such injustice to stand in the colonies, it would only encourage the Crown to stomp on more liberties at home. Had history ended there, Burke would now be remembered as simply another great Enlightenment philosopher—a British counterpart to Madison and Jefferson.22
A few years after the end of the American Revolution, the French sought to install in France a republic much like the new republic in America. Most British Whigs saw the French Revolution and the American Revolution as part of the same cause—the same embrace of liberty, rejection of monarchical authority, and support for Enlightenment reason over arbitrary authority—and they rushed to the defense of the French revolutionaries. Edmund Burke, however, loathed the French Revolution. He didn't see it as a noble people defending their traditional liberties against a dangerous monarch. Rather, he saw radicalism and utopianism. At first, Burke kept his opposition somewhat quiet, speaking against the French revolutionaries but not making too much noise. In 1790, however, he published a political pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France, fully setting forth his views.23 Many fellow Whigs recoiled, viewing Burke's opposition to the French Revolution as a betrayal of Whig principles. Reflections sparked a pamphlet war, with luminaries like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft penning high-profile responses.24 Burke became a controversial figure among Enlightenment liberals, and many openly broke with him.25 Burke's popularity swiftly declined and people whispered he must be going mad. The Whigs even split into two opposing parties, with Burke leading an “Old Whig” faction against a “New Whig” faction led by party leader Charles James Fox.26 Within a few short years, Burke lost many lifelong friendships, resigned his seat in Parliament, and then died.
Why did Edmund Burke, a man with a pristine liberal record for his era, a leader of the liberal party, and a champion of the American Revolution, come out so publicly against the revolution in France? As he explained in his writings, Burke loved liberty but believed it could only be protected as a part of a stable and ordered society.27 As a Whig, Burke believed change was unavoidable, necessary, and often good.28 He also believed society must pursue that change slowly and carefully, keeping consistent with tradition, to avoid breaking what it had already achieved. Real human beings, he believed, weren't creatures of reason ruled by neat abstractions and a nation, as he saw it, was a vast clockwork of complicated mechanisms that no one truly understands:
It is the result of the thoughts of many minds, in many ages. It is no simple, no superficial thing, nor to be estimated by superficial understandings. An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance, and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption.29
Societies to Burke were complex machines with too many moving parts for any one person to really understand. Underneath all of a society's formal laws and institutions are deeper cultural rules encoded in tradition.30 Burke thought these traditions encode carefully negotiated methods by which complex societies work through difficult issues. This second set of rules developed over centuries of trial and error. Although nobody can really see these rules, or completely understand their workings, they exert a powerful force on everything. To just charge forward into radical change without taking these cultural rules into account risks accidentally breaking them, thereby breaking invisible but powerful forces responsible for the nation's success.
But none, except those who are profoundly studied, can comprehend the elaborate contrivance of a fabric fitted to unite private and public liberty with public force, with order, with peace, with justice, and above all, with the institutions formed for bestowing permanence and stability, through ages, upon this invaluable whole.31
Burke, therefore, believed destroying a system that took centuries to build only to replace it in a moment with a well-intentioned but abstract scheme was doomed to fail.32 If you plunge a nation into disorder, looking to root up its foundations to make it anew, the chaos you create will more than likely lead not to the utopia you dreamed of but something worse. As he wrote, “To innovate is not to reform.”33
Burke saw the American Revolution as a noble cause because it sought to preserve well-established traditional liberties against the radical actions of the king. The French Revolution, on the other hand, was to Burke the foolish casting off of tradition in the name of an unknown plan that was unlikely to function in practice the same way it did in books. Burke feared the French were throwing out centuries of carefully negotiated tradition they didn't understand in the name of abstractions. The disorder they would create wouldn't lead to liberty. It would create violence and chaos.34 Burke's predictions proved more or less correct. Throwing off the old regime so abruptly to implement nice-sounding and rational yet untested new institutions in reality led to blood pouring onto Paris streets in a Reign of Terror, years of brutal war, the collapse of republican government, and the rise of a new monarch in Napoleon Bonaparte. When the French Revolution turned to bloody squares and guillotines, Burke had told them so. Burke's critique of the French Revolution transformed him in history's memory from an Enlightenment liberal to the first modern conservative.
Under the Burkean conception of national virtue, when we charge into reforms, even when they seem to make sense on paper, we risk breaking important safeguards we often don't even know exist. Burke has come to represent the idea that while change is necessary and even good, it should be enacted slowly, gradually, when there's no other alternative, and in accordance with a society's deep traditions. To a Burkean, the complex relationship between culture and institutions is often mysterious. While constitutions, laws, and institutions are important to a society's success, so are the invisible rules embedded in its culture—notions like ensuring fairness, prizing freedom, rewarding entrepreneurialism, celebrating the pioneer spirit, or cherishing democracy. Under the exact same laws, a society prizing merit operates differently than one with a strong sense of family and tribe. Hiring your cousin over a more qualified candidate is shameful in the first society; hiring a stranger over family is shameful in the second. These strands of law and culture are like tree roots grown together, each taking its shape because of the presence of the other. The formal laws and institutions we see are simply the visible tips of powerful social rules and culture entwined with them underneath the soil.
To a Burkean, romantic notions of imposing progress too often ignore complexity, choices, tradeoffs, and the impossibility of creating a perfect world by simply willing it to exist. Achieving our current state of progress was no easy task, and simply maintaining that progress is difficult work requiring constant vigilance. At their worst, these reforms can lead to idealistic but unrealistic actions that permanently damage society. The formal legal rules written in books only police the margins, reining in the minority of people who refuse to live up to the social bargains the rest of us take for granted. Which is why law breaks down when people don't believe the behavior the law targets is actually wrong—such as the vast number of law-abiding Americans who regularly break speeding laws. If one acts incautiously, well-meaning reforms can break unwritten rules and accidentally break the very system that should provide peace, freedom, and prosperity.
Burkeans are often labeled traditionalists, but Burkean virtue isn't about tradition for the sake of tradition or knee-jerk resistance to change. Burkean virtue is based in doubt. Burkeans defend tradition not because they know the traditional way is right—in fact, they know some tradition is certainly wrong—they defend it because they believe sudden change might break a critical piece of culture that can never be repaired. Burkeans support measured and careful change that organically arcs toward progress, but avoid sudden moves that might unwittingly throw society backward instead of forward. Burke was aware that, in addition to things getting better, things can also get worse. Violently discarding a tyrannous and out-of-touch king for a regime founded in democracy and liberty might, if you go about it too quickly and in the wrong way, lead to a mass-murdering dictator like Robespierre, followed by a warmongering out-of-touch monarch like Napoleon Bonaparte. Burke's philosophy, balancing a desire for progress with respect for tradition, echoes through much conservative thought in modern democracies. Many believe Burke's defense of tradition and ordered change is the very heart of conservatism.
Edmund Burke's ideas are not, however, the only American tradition concerning national virtue. A second tradition also holds that culture is important to national success and prosperity, but this tradition isn't based in doubt. It's based in confidence. This is the virtue of national improvement, and over the last few decades it's been ascendant.
THE VIRTUE OF NATIONAL IMPROVEMENT
There's a second strain of virtue politics in America, one based not in Burke's doubt and humility but rather in assurance and zeal. This virtue not only holds out confidence that we already know how and why culture is important, but also demands we take bold action to improve it now. It sees the culture as already degraded and declined. It sees corruption setting in to eat away at the republic's foundation. It wants to urgently restore the virtue it believes is already lost—perhaps even morally improve America to become better than before. This virtue doesn't just want to stave off foolish utopian proposals. It isn't looking to dig defensive trenches against dangerous ideas. It wants to blow the trumpets of a crusade.
Throughout American history, movements, groups, and factions have repeatedly pushed into the public arena on urgent missions to improve the character of the republic and its people. These movements also believe culture and norms are important. They fear, however, that these cultural protections are breaking, if not already broken. Sometimes they fear the proper virtues were never there at all, that a more perfect society lies tantalizingly ahead if only the republic's citizens might be improved and morally uplifted. Some feared the republic was overrun with corrupt forces threatening to erode its republican character. That was the crux of Andrew Jackson's populist rebellion, which believed it was taking back the republic from corruption threatening republican government.35 A similar fear drove the late-nineteenth-century populist revolt, which wanted to rid the nation of the Gilded Age industrial titans, bankers, and railroad barons who they believed were corrupting America's institutions. More darkly, the Know-Nothing rebellion believed they too were defending America's republican character—in this unfortunate case from the Roman Catholicism of new immigrants they believed were threatening America's republican traditions with a degraded morality and the potential for papal tyranny.36
Other movements have grown out of America's continual bursts of moral revival. These movements have believed republican democracy is the most moral form of government, but one requiring an equally moral citizenry to flourish.37 Fearing the moral decline of its people, reformers have embarked on missions to improve and uplift America's citizens in order to save the republic. One such revival swept through America in the years before the Civil War, undertaking to morally improve the nation to turn America into God's Kingdom on Earth and thereby trigger Christ's thousand-year reign.38 They believed God specifically sanctioned republican government, meaning Christians had a special duty to defend the American republic and its virtue as a part of God's divine plan.39 They sought to turn Americans toward personal morality and charity, and they advanced programs of personal improvement such as abstaining from intoxicating drink. They decried the moral corruption of public officials, and often the immoral grasping for offices of party politics itself.40 Most importantly, they built an enthusiastic movement to abolish slavery and limit its spread, believing slavery not just immoral but also a corrupting influence on republic government.41 To preserve the republic, they sought to uplift and reform the character of America's institutions and that of its citizens.
A similar revival broke out near the end of the eighteenth century, one also committed to creating God's Kingdom on Earth, this time through the Social Gospel. Working with secular reformers, Social Gospel reformers joined the Progressive Movement's great national crusade to enact fair and just policies across America to purify and improve the republic. Progressives fought against industrial-era abuses, seeking to ban child labor, to limit the length of the workday, and to impose a minimum wage. They fought for good government reforms to combat corruption and political machines, for health and safety measures to ensure clean food and medicine, for public schools to educate the young, and for public parks to provide a clean natural environment. They won constitutional amendments to allow the ban of immoral “demon rum,” which they believed destroyed families, and also to grant women suffrage, in part in the belief that women would exercise their public power more morally than men. They also sought to uplift the poor, offering them charity and public assistance but also education, which they presumed would transform the destitute into better people. Their agenda was to comprehensively reform an America they feared was falling into injustice and decline.
This second strain of national virtue, the virtue of national improvement, agrees with Burke that hidden laws and rules are critical to the nation's success. It agrees that the character of citizens and the morality of institutions exercise tremendous influence on the republic's survival and success. Unlike Burke's virtue, however, the virtue of national improvement doesn't believe it's sufficient to simply defend culture and traditions. It believes the nation's culture and norms are already broken, or at least at risk of breaking. That institutions are damaged. That corrupt forces are hijacking the republic. That citizens have become too selfish, short-sighted, greedy, lazy, or immoral to serve as proper guardians of the American experiment. It believes it's urgent to actively intervene to re-instill necessary virtue where it no longer exists—that to stave off the risk of failure or collapse, the virtuous must embark on great projects of national improvement to perfect and improve the American republic and its people, so the nation will properly thrive.
The virtue of national improvement agrees with the Founders and Edmund Burke that culture and norms are critical to the republic's success. It rejects, however, the Burkean notion that tradition already encodes the necessary virtues to succeed. Reformers embracing the virtue of national improvement believe those virtues are already under assault, if not lost. They see their duty not as merely defending tradition, but instilling new virtue. They want to remake and perfect institutions and the American people, thereby saving the republic from its impending decline and doom. Burke's virtue is one of tradition, stability, and careful progress. The virtue of national improvement is one of radical reform and revival. It's a crusading sprit that, when it pours into politics, can lead to amazing reforms. It can also radicalize and alarm as it seeks to remake not only America, but also its people, in order to save and uplift the republic.
BURKE, NATIONAL IMPROVEMENT, AND VIRTUE
American virtue politics isn't really about blocking change, protecting the privileged, entrenching the status quo, or imposing social order. It's about protecting and strengthening the fragile machinery of a republic. When the people become the government, the nation's success turns on the habits and culture of citizens. Virtue conservatism is about ensuring that citizens embody the necessary habits and culture for the nation to thrive. The content of this virtue has meant different things to different people at different times—the virtue of the well-read Enlightenment gentlemen, the virtue of ordinary people running farms in small towns, the virtue of upstanding Christian citizens, the virtue embodied in ideals like faith, patriotism, merit, work, and family. What's constant is that in every era of American history voices have always warned about the importance of preserving, if not actively instilling, virtue in citizens as a key to the republic's success.
The virtue of Burke and the virtue of national improvement express in different ways the same basic idea—that culture and norms are important and the success of a democratic republic turns on getting them right. These two virtues often agree on the traits that lead to national success—in our modern age, traits like hard work, patriotism, faith, merit, the pioneer spirit, and family. Yet where Burke's virtue is about defending the culture, the virtue of national improvement is about changing it. Burke's virtue clings to tradition, while the virtue of national improvement trumpets crusades to reform corrupt or immoral institutions and policies. Burke's virtue believes great projects of national reform are doomed to fail, risking national catastrophe, where the virtue of national improvement believes great projects of national reform are necessary to the nation's success. Where Burke's virtue champions stability and caution, the virtue of national improvement leads to great crusades to remake America. Burke wants to keep the nation moving steadily forward, while the virtue of national improvement hopes to turn America into the promised shining city on a hill. Burke stands athwart history yelling stop; the virtue of improvement stands athwart history yelling we must do better.
The idea of national virtue has served as an important component of Republican thinking since the New Deal. In the early decades of our Fifth Party System, that mostly meant the virtue of Burke. Republicans during the New Deal worried that the optimistic plans of the Democrats to transform America into something better, stronger, and richer might, in reality, destroy its foundation. They thought the radical innovations of the New Deal could destroy the republican institutions that served America well and undercut bulwarks of the American cultural disposition like entrepreneurialism, independence, and the pioneer spirit. They feared the central planning of the New Deal might even produce citizens who, by ceding power to experts, would lose the will and ability to govern themselves. In 1953, academic and writer Russell Kirk published one of the definitive books of American conservatism, The Conservative Mind, arguing that Burke's ideas were among the foundations of American conservatism.42 When Kirk became one of the principal intellectual architects of the early conservative movement, and his book a leading authority of the new conservative movement's philosophy, the eighteenth-century British politician Burke became the intellectual patron saint of modern American conservatism.43
In the 1970s, however, an evangelical revival emerged within Protestant America alarmed about issues like a secularizing nation, the sexual revolution, the coarsening of culture, the decline of traditional Christian morality, legalized abortion, and the end of prayer in schools. As this movement surged into the political arena, it brought an agenda of social and moral reforms it believed essential to restoring the morality of America's people and institutions. At the same time, the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s saw the culture of America changing in a turbulent era of social and political disruption. Some inside the Republican Party feared these changes were signs of national decline, signs the American people were shedding the traits of character required for national success. As the Democratic Party adopted the young radicals of the New Left and the party took on a new Great Society agenda, others feared the Democratic Party was pushing forward in the name of progress changes that they saw as decay. These new virtue conservatives were less interested in Burkean caution. They were moral crusaders on a mission of national improvement. As the New Deal debate fades with time, the differences between America's two conceptions of virtue—the one cautious and the other one crusading—have put the Republican Party increasingly under strain because they're increasingly at odds.
Virtue politics has always played an important role in the politics of America, and it's almost certain it always will. The Founders weren't wrong. The greatest strength of a republic truly is its greatest vulnerability—its people are the government. A republic cannot, and will not, survive, much less thrive, if its citizens don't embrace norms and values that put the republic first. If a republic's citizens don't cherish their republican traditions, or if they won't exercise their democratic power to govern wisely and for the benefit of all, they will not keep their republic. The debate is merely over what virtue means at each specific point in history, and what we must do to ensure it flourishes. Must we defend our traditions and norms as guardians of the nation's virtue, as Edmund Burke believed? Or must we bang the drums of revival to throw off corruption, restore America from decline, and instill the virtue necessary to truly perfect America?