The Counter-Revolution to Come
The story of America’s cultural revolution is one of triumph. The critical theories have become the dominant frame in the academy. The long march through the institutions has captured the public and private bureaucracy. The language of left-wing racialism has become the lingua franca of the educated class.
But underneath these apparent victories, there is a darkness—a moral void that threatens to reverse these triumphs and turn the revolution into a monster.
The warning signs were there from the beginning. As a historical matter, the cultural revolution has been a failure everywhere it has been tried. During the rise of the New Left, Marcuse, Davis, and Freire all expressed unalloyed support for the communist revolutionary movements, which were putting their theories into practice. They heaped praise on Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro, and Cabral. But this dream quickly changed into a nightmare. Within a few years of the emergence of the New Left, the cultural revolutions from Beijing to Havana to Bissau devoured themselves. Mao’s government annihilated millions of its own citizens in pursuit of cultural revolution. Castro’s regime degenerated into state tyranny. Cabral’s state fell into a decades-long pit of stagnation, failure, and dependency.
Yet the critical theorists were unrepentant. Marcuse defended his support for violent revolution until his death, arguing that “there is a difference between violence and terror.”1 Freire never disavowed the regimes of Lenin, Mao, and Castro, even as their atrocities had long been a matter of public record. Angela Davis never relented in her support for global communism, claiming that, despite the collapse of the USSR, “the Russian Revolution will always retain its status as a monumental historical moment” and “Marxism will continue to be relevant” as long as capitalism survives.2
These theorists were simultaneously wrong and prescient. Their revolution failed in the Third World only to succeed in the First World. Although communism has all but vanished from modern life, the theories that justified it have taken power in the heart of capitalism. In the United States, Marcuse’s critical theory has dissolved the national narrative down to the foundations. Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and their imitators have recast the country’s “greatest heroes as the arch-villains.”3 The followers of Paulo Freire and Derrick Bell have ensured that the institutions repeat these themes ad nauseam and transmit them to the next generation.4
The administrators of this movement—the intellectuals, bureaucrats, experts, activists, and social engineers—are approaching the status of the “universal class,” in which Hegel and, in modified form, Marx had put their hopes.5 In their own minds, the members of this class represent the omniscient point of view. They can survey society as a whole, diagnose its problems, and administer the cure through the bureaucracy. They have turned Marcuse’s “society of total administration”6 into a virtue. They can achieve human perfectibility using the methods of revolution and social science.7
But this, too, as it did in the Third World, has turned out to be an illusion. The bitterest irony of the critical theories is that they have attained power but have not opened up new possibilities; they have instead compressed the prestige institutions of society with a suffocating new orthodoxy. The revolution along the axes of identity has proven unstable, alienating, and incapable of managing a complex society, much less improving it. As it moves into the position of governance, the universal class reveals itself to be more parochial, partisan, and inept than the modernist administrators whom they replaced.
From one perspective, the current battlefield may appear overwhelming. The Left has achieved cultural dominance over the entire range of prestige institutions. But from another, there is the possibility of reversal. Beneath the appearance of universal political rule, their cultural revolution has an immense vulnerability: the critical ideologies are a creature of the state, completely subsidized by the public through direct financing, university loan schemes, bureaucratic capture, and the civil rights regulatory apparatus. These structures are taken for granted, but with sufficient will they can be reformed, redirected, or abolished through the democratic process. What the public giveth, the public can taketh away.
The most urgent task for the enemies of the critical theories is to expose the nature of the ideology, how it operates within the institutions, and devise a plan for striking back. The opposition must ruthlessly identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of the revolution, then construct its own logic for overcoming it. The critical theories have proven immensely seductive, but as they have proceeded along the dialectic and manifested themselves within the institutions, they have revealed a series of insurmountable flaws. The “critical theory of society” collapses when it is put into practice. The racial revolution devolves into nihilism when it unleashes violence. The bureaucracies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” cannot improve conditions for the common citizen.
The opposition must stand in the breach between the cultural revolution’s utopian abstractions and concrete failures. It must devise a strategy for laying siege to the institutions, severing the link between ideology and bureaucracy, and protecting the common citizen from the imposition of values from above. The task is to meet the forces of revolution with an equal and opposite force, creating new ground for the nation’s common life and reorienting the institutions toward the nation’s eternal principles.
The task is, in short, counter-revolution.
* * *
The cultural revolution’s first vulnerability is philosophical.
The New Left’s house philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, created a dazzling theoretical system, but once it made contact with reality, it began to fall apart. As Marcuse rose to prominence, even left-wing academics began to cast doubts on his theory of revolution. The Marxist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, eviscerated the underpinnings of Marcuse’s political vision, denouncing his “dictatorship of the intellectuals” as elitist, authoritarian, and irredeemably naïve. “One cannot liberate people from above; one cannot re-educate them at this fundamental level. As the young Marx saw, men must liberate themselves,” MacIntyre scolded. “To make men objects of liberation by others is to assist in making them passive instruments; it is to cast them for the role of inert matter to be molded into forms chosen by the elite.”8
Marcuse’s old colleague Theodor Adorno, who had broken with him over the student riots, turned away from practical politics entirely. “When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realize it with Molotov cocktails,” he said.9
But the dialectic had already been unleashed. As the critical theory of society conquered institution after institution, these more careful scholars watched in horror as its fundamental limitation was revealed: the dialectic had a tremendous power of disintegration, but it was incapable of establishing a new ground of truth and, consequently, building a real-world alternative to the liberal society. Marcuse had sold his Great Refusal as an act of heroism, but after the initial thrill of the counterculture dissipated, it revealed itself as a form of emptiness—a rejection of society without a corresponding positive function.10
The result of Marcuse’s critical revolution was not the creation of a multidimensional society, but a one-dimensional society in reverse. The bureaucracy simply co-opted the ideology and turned it into a standard for the new “one-dimensional man”: the manipulative, guilt-ridden, security-seeking functionary, feigning revolution more than waging it.
The members of this new elite might lambaste individualism, hard work, silent strength, and striving toward success as features of “white supremacy,” but they are unable to propose anything but platitudes in their place. Privately, they know there is no practicable way to make ancient West African spirituality or lost Aztec rituals the basis for governing a modern university or school system, but publicly they continue producing boilerplate, pretending to be in opposition while abdicating any responsibility over the institutions they now control.
Marcuse and Rudi Dutschke both feared this outcome. In the 1950s, Marcuse had warned about the “centralized bureaucratic communist”11 organization of society that had turned the Soviet Union into a tyrannical regime.12 Dutschke was even more prescient: he worried that the middle-class white revolutionaries would become “parasites of the system” and use elite institutions to lavish themselves with “a certificate of independence and elite-security.”13 He cautioned against turning the universities—and, by extension, other domains of white, middle-class intellectualism—into a “fetish.” He desperately wanted to believe that the radical movement could shatter the entire “state-social bureaucracy” and bring down “the whole way of life of the authoritarian state as it has existed up to now.”14
But this was an impossibility. Contrary to Marcuse and Dutschke’s desires, the New Left was never able to transcend, in Marx’s phrase, the “abominable machine of class rule”—they simply replaced the management. The descendants of the New Left have done nothing but extend the “state-social bureaucracy” into new territories, where they fight endlessly about language, symbols, and ephemera, and their relationship to the institutions becomes purely parasitical.
There will be a reckoning. The simple fact is that the ideology of the elite has not demonstrated any capacity to solve the problems of the masses, even on its own terms. The critical theories operate by pure negation, demolishing middle-class structures and stripping down middle-class values, which serves the interest of the bureaucracy but leaves the society in a state of permanent disintegration.
Ultimately, critical theory will be put to a simple test: Are conditions improving or not improving? Are cities safer or less safe? Are students learning to read or not learning to read? The new regime can only suppress the answers for so long. The average citizen will be able to feel the truth intuitively, even if he is temporarily deprived of the language for articulating it.
This realization cannot be stopped. The working class is more anti-revolutionary today than at any time during the upheaval. The common citizens have seen the consequences of elite ideology as public policy. Their family structures have been destabilized. Their culture of self-reliance has been usurped by state dependence. Their quality of life has plummeted into a revolving nightmare of addiction, violence, and incarceration.15 Marcuse’s vision of liberated eroticism and the infinite malleability of human nature resulted not in utopia, but in catastrophe for those with the least capacity to resist it.
Even Marcuse, the brilliant prophet of the critical theories, conceded again and again that he could not see beyond the abyss. He blindly hoped that the “total rupture” would lead to a world beyond necessity. But his descendants—all of them lesser minds than their master—have proved that the destruction of the old values is not automatically followed by the creation of new ones. To the contrary, when the philosophy of negation prevails, it can succeed only in shredding the social fabric within which the common citizen must survive.
* * *
The racial revolution follows a similar line of development. The activists of the black liberation movement summoned the romantic spirit of the revolutionary and used sophisticated continental theories to legitimize their use of violence. They believed that “violence is a cleansing force” that “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair”16 and, ultimately, serves as a catalyst for meaningful progress.
Their theory, however, was bunk. The truth is that their cultural revolution could only exist in a state of disintegration. As the opposition, they could tear away the masks, dispel the great myths, and humiliate the old heroes—but after the bombs detonated and the blood dried, they were left with nothing but an immense and overwhelming void.
Rather than freeing the black militant from his “inferiority complex and from his despair,” the racial revolution cemented his feet into those exact psychological conditions. In truth, the praxis of the black liberation movement was not an expression of liberation, but a death wish. The militants, following Eldridge Cleaver, had internalized the image of the black lumpenproletariat, demonstrating little confidence in its ability to achieve productive self-determination, and instead relied almost exclusively on its capacity for violence and destruction. “We take a revolutionary position against every organized structure that exists in the world,” Cleaver wrote.17 These are the words of a madman, a thrower of dynamite, a human kamikaze, and, ultimately, an incantation of self-destruction.
The true heart of the quest for liberation—the driving force behind its theory and praxis—is nihilism. Cleaver believed that raping white women was “freedom.” Angela Davis believed that taping a shotgun to the neck of a county judge was “justice.” Black Lives Matter activists believed that looting and burning down shopping malls was “reparations.” But all of these are, in truth, pure resentment. The black liberation movement rationalized violence, first dressing it up in Kant and Hegel, and then, in the contemporary period, using it as a method for extorting corporate and public support. But this method of liberation is ultimately a dialectic of destruction.
In the end, the “abolitionists,” who seek nothing less than the “total rupture” of society, cannot fill the void with anything but abstractions: “justice,” “liberation,” “freedom.” But their policies—defunding the police, closing the jails, relieving the prosecutors—do not produce justice. They produce disorder. Each transgression of the law reveals the emptiness of those abstractions; each spasm of activism unleashes a new wave of violence in poor neighborhoods.
The ugly secret is that the radical Left cannot replace what it destroys. The peace circle and the synthetic tribal ritual are no substitute for the existing architecture of social institutions. When the left-wing activists control the moment of decision, it becomes clear that they do not have an agenda to transform their sweeping visions into a stable reality. Instead, chaos becomes the highest value. They believe they are succeeding because there is a frenzy of activity. Destruction begins to provide a sense of meaning in and of itself.
Then the vultures swoop in. The new revolutionaries pretend they are striking at the foundations of the capitalist order, but when their campaign inexorably fails, they simply want their cut. The looters get a box of sneakers and a flat-screen television. The intellectuals get permanent sinecures in the universities. The activists get a ransom payment, disguised as a philanthropic contribution, from the corporations and the local government. The revolution becomes a pose, a reenactment of the 1960s on the stage of the present.
And the leading actors are well compensated. After their summer of revolution, Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors signed an entertainment deal with Warner Bros. and spent $3.2 million on four high-end homes across the country.18 The other cofounders, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, signed entertainment deals with marquee Hollywood talent agencies19 and the group secretly bought a $6 million mansion in Southern California.20 Meanwhile, their organization descended into outright graft: one leader allegedly stole $10 million in donations.21 Others transferred millions to family members through shadowy consulting firms and nonprofit entities.22 Massive sums of money went missing altogether.
BLM activists were never a threat to capitalism—they were its beneficiaries. The wave of chaos they unleashed was never a viable path to liberation; it was an accelerant for destruction.
* * *
The ultimate tragedy of the critical theories is that, as a governing ideology, they would trap the United States in an endless loop of failure, cynicism, and despair.
There is a profound irony that haunts all the leading figures of the movement: the solution was always within their sight. Herbert Marcuse admitted that the United States was among the freest countries in the world, but still argued that it must be destroyed in order to achieve true liberation.23 Paulo Freire spent decades searching for the secret to literacy, but fell to the myth that education must begin with the suicide of the middle class, blind to the evidence that the opposite is true. Angela Davis succumbed to the illusion that violent revolution was the only path to liberation, while millions of Americans fought for and achieved substantive freedoms by appealing to the Declaration and utilizing the democratic process. Derrick Bell surrendered to pessimism in an era of undeniable progress, forgetting the lessons of his own rise, which was made possible by parents and neighbors who prioritized merit, education, family, and hard work while fighting to eliminate all-too-real barriers and injustices.
Looking back at his life, Bell described being trapped in “the protestor’s dilemma,” a feeling that each righteous action had the potential for unintended consequences, eternal regressions, and the alienation of allies as well as enemies.24 He was a man captured by his premises. For decades, he had argued that racism was permanent, indestructible, and essential. He could not deviate from its inevitable conclusion without invalidating his life’s work. He believed that he was “imprisoned by the history of racial subordination” and, like the slaves before him, was fated to exist in the netherworld between the abstract understanding of freedom and the concrete existence of the bound and shackled man. His lasting conviction was that “racism lies at the center, not the periphery; in the permanent, not in the fleeting; in the real lives of black and white people, not in the sentimental caverns of the mind.”25
There is a seductive romanticism to Bell’s prose, but, in the final judgment, his philosophy is better understood as nihilism in the mask of the tragic hero.
Derrick Bell burned bridges, nursed miseries, diminished victories, and failed to recognize authentic progress in America’s past and present. His disciples—Crenshaw, Harris, Delgado, Matsuda, Lawrence—carried on the contradictions of their master and added the striving inauthenticity of the precocious student. They entered adulthood in a different world, after the hard-won victories of equal rights and the regime of affirmative action, yet they imagined themselves as the avatars of the oppressed. They populated elite institutions and wielded the politics of position while ignoring the masses of the black underclass, who, despite the achievement of equal rights, continued a long slide into social pathology.26
For all of their faults, Davis, Cleaver, and black revolutionaries at least grappled with and appealed to the black lumpenproletariat. The critical race theorists, on the other hand, treat them like lepers—the lumpen class is nowhere to be found in their work, except as symbolic justification for their abstractions.
This is where the critical race theorists reach the final impasse. Their program has become a form of empty professional-class aestheticism, designed for manipulating social status within elite institutions, not for alleviating real miseries or governing a nation.
The critical race theorists pretend to reveal a deeper understanding of racism in the United States, but by reducing the complex phenomenon of inequality to a single causal variable—racism—their theory is dangerously incomplete. Their policy of “anti-racism”—the destruction of middle-class norms and the construction of a racial patronage machine—would deepen racial divisions, not transcend them. Even worse, it would undermine the very institutions that are essential to addressing inequality in America.27
The critical race theorists, who claim to represent the oppressed, exist outside the class system altogether: they represent a new bureaucratic class that exists outside the demands of labor and capital, with permanent sinecures in the institutions and total protection from the constraints on either side of the private market. They think of themselves as Gramsci’s organic intellectuals but are, in actuality, paper tigers.
This is not to say that they are not powerful. The opposite is true: they have seized the means of cultural production and, through the cynical games of elite social status, launched a supremely ambitious bureaucratic coup.
But now, as the ideology is identified not as an insurgent force but as an arbiter of the status quo, they will have to confront a series of difficult questions. What do they have to offer the oppressed? How does their revolution move beyond the cultural superstructure? How will their proposals achieve better results than the Great Society’s “health, education, and welfare” programs, which have ballooned to more than one trillion dollars in annual public spending but have failed to stop the rise in social pathologies among poor populations of all racial backgrounds? How will they address the catastrophic cultural conditions in poor communities that are the greatest barrier to substantive equality in America?
There are no good answers in the literature of critical race theory. For all its pretensions, it provides nothing more than a repetition of the vague formulas of the black liberation movement that had exhausted itself a generation prior. They would rather reenact the fantasies of past revolutions than grapple with the intractable truth that the only viable answer to inequality is to strengthen the very institutions that they have helped to dissolve.
Critical race theory is, at heart, pseudo-radicalism. Professors at Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA are not guerrilla fighters with their chests wrapped in bandoliers. They are not a threat to the system; they are entirely dependent on the system. Their ideology is not revolutionary; it is parasitic, relying on permanent subsidies from the regime they ostensibly want to overthrow.
The critical race theorists and their allies have turned resentment into a governing principle. But this is also a trap: resentment is a tool for obtaining power, not of wielding it successfully. One can almost imagine a cinematic sequence, in the style of the old Soviet propaganda films, in which the new professional-class proletarians seize the means of elite cultural production and then, shocked and bewildered at their arrival, look at one another with an immense fear spreading across their faces. The revolution was a pretension, a posture of opposition; they never intended to wield the machines; it was not supposed to work this way.
This fear, this hesitation, provides the space for another reversal. It provides the opportunity to face the revolution, on its own terrain, with an equal or greater force of counter-revolution. The critical theories might have taken hegemony over elite institutions, but their grip over the superstructure might not be as strong as it appears. Through a mobilization of the physical classes against elite abstraction, it can—and it must—be broken.
* * *
The revolution of 1968, although it seems to have captured the edifice of America’s elite institutions, might not be as strong as it appears. It has created a series of failures, shortcomings, and dead ends—and in this gap of contradiction, a counter-revolution can emerge.
The fear of counter-revolution has haunted every revolution since the beginning. Marx saw the counter-revolutionaries—the monarchy, the church, the bourgeoisie—as an overwhelming threat and watched them defeat all of the left-wing political movements of his time.28 This recursion would repeat itself throughout history: the French Revolution fell to the forces of Thermidor,29 the Revolutions of 1848 fell to the bourgeoisie,30 the Bolshevik Revolution fell to internal tyrants. Karl Korsch, a colleague of Herbert Marcuse at the Institute for Social Research, believed that the twentieth-century revolutions were doomed along a similar line. “More than any preceding period of recent history, and on a much vaster scale, our period is a time not of revolution but of counter revolution.”31
The urgent task for the political Right is to correctly understand the contours of the current revolution and create a strategy for defeating it on real political grounds: revolution against revolution, institution against institution, negation against negation. This new counter-revolution will not take the form of the counter-revolutions of the past: it is not a counter-revolution of class against class, but a counter-revolution along a new axis between the citizen and the ideological regime.
Despite the success of the long march through the institutions and the capture of the “technology of liberation,”32 the new elite has failed to extinguish the bourgeois desires for property, family, religion, and democratic representation. The intellectuals and, following them, the institutions have spent decades disparaging these desires as racist, exploitative, and illusory, but quietly, in the tract homes and small churches in the American interior, they have proven remarkably durable, even as their tangible expression has degraded.
The great weakness of the cultural revolution is that it negates the metaphysics, morality, and stability of the common citizen. As it undermines the institutions of family, faith, and community, it creates a void in the human heart that cannot be filled with its one-dimensional ideology.
The counter-revolution must begin at that exact point: to reestablish the basic human desires, to redraw the boundaries of human nature, and to rebuild the structures for the fulfillment of human meaning, which cannot be engineered by the critical theories and must go “beyond politics”33 into the realm of ethics, myth, and metaphysics. The truth is that, despite a half century of denigration, most Americans still believe in the Declaration and the promise of liberty and equality. The statues of America’s Founders might have been toppled, spray-painted, and hidden away. Their principles might have been deconstructed, denigrated, and forgotten. But the vision of the Founders strikes at something eternal.
The common citizen understands this intuitively, down to his bones, but he must be guided through a process of recollection. The theorists of the counter-revolution must breathe new life into the American myth and mobilize the tremendous reservoir of public sentiment toward a project of restoration. The critical theories work via negation, but the counter-revolution must work as a positive force. While the revolution seeks to demolish America’s founding principles, the counter-revolution seeks to restore them. While the revolution proceeds by a long march through the institutions, the counter-revolution proceeds by laying siege to the institutions that have lost the public trust.
In historical terms, the counter-revolution can be understood as a restoration of the revolution of 1776 over and against the revolution of 1968. Its ambition is not to assume control over the centralized bureaucratic apparatus, but to smash it. It is a revolution against: against utopia, against collectivism, against racial reductionism, against the infinite plasticity of human nature. But it is also a revolution for: for the return of natural right, the Constitution, and the dignity of the individual.
For this movement to be successful, the architects of the counter-revolution must develop a new political vocabulary with the power to break through the racialist and bureaucratic narratives, tap into the deep reservoir of popular sentiment that will provide the basis for mass support, and design a series of policies that will permanently sever the connection between the critical ideologies and administrative power.
The counter-revolution must be understood not as a reaction or a desire to return to the past, but as a movement with the intention of reanimating the eternal principles and reorienting the institutions toward their highest expression. The foundations of the counter-revolution are thus moral in nature, seeking to guide the common citizen toward what is good and to rebuild the political structures so that his moral intuitions can be realized in society.
If the endpoint of the critical theories is nihilism, the counter-revolution must begin with hope. The principles of the society under counter-revolution are not oriented toward sweeping reversals and absolutes, but toward the protection of the humble values and institutions of the common man: family, faith, work, community, country. The intellectuals and activists of the counter-revolution must arm the population with a competing set of values, spoken in language that exposes and surpasses the euphemisms of the left-wing ideological regime: excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos.
The counter-revolution must also restore a healthy sense of historical time. The past must be remembered not as a procession of horrors, but as a vast spiritual tableau for mankind, in which his greatest cruelties and his greatest triumphs are revealed. History must once again serve as nourishment for society, and its highest symbols—the Founders, the Constitution, the Republic—must inspire a renewed and unashamed defense. The critiques of the critical theories, insofar as they reveal injustice, must be absorbed into the narrative of the counter-revolution and serve as a reminder of human limitation, which has been gradually and steadily overcome through the unfolding of the principles of the American Republic.
The ultimate objective of this campaign must be the restoration of political rule. The deepest conflict in the United States is not along the axis of class, race, or identity, but along the managerial axis that pits elite institutions against the common citizen. The revolution, which seeks to connect ideology to bureaucratic power and to manipulate behavior through the guise of expertise, is ultimately anti-democratic.
The counter-revolution, on the other hand, seeks to channel public sentiment and restore the rule of the legislature, executive, and judiciary over the de facto rule of managers and social engineers. It must reanimate the instincts of self-government among the people and mobilize an organic movement of citizens that will reassert its power in the institutions that matter: the school, the municipality, the workplace, the church, the university, the state. The anti-democratic structures—the DEI departments and the captured bureaucracies—must be dismantled and turned to dust. The counter-revolution must work not to seize the centralized institutions, but to disrupt and decentralize them in the interest of small, textured, and differentiated communities.
In the end, America under counter-revolution will return to being a patchwork republic: local communities will have the autonomy to pursue their own vision of the good, within the framework of the binding principles of the Constitution. The common citizen will have the space for inhabiting and passing down his own virtues, sentiments, and beliefs, free from the imposition of values from above. The system of government will protect the basic dignity and political rights of the citizen while refraining from the hopeless and utopian task of remaking society in its image. The promise of this regime lies in the particular, rather than the abstract; the humble, rather than the grandiose; the limited, rather than the limitless; the shared, rather than the new sensibility.
Under the cultural revolution, the common citizen has been shamed, pressed, and degraded. His symbols have been subverted and buried below the earth. But he still retains the power of his own instincts, which orient him toward justice, and the power of his own memory, which makes possible the retrieval of the symbols and principles that contain his own destiny.
The partisans of the counter-revolution must provide a clear vision of this process, so that the common citizen can begin to see the source of the nihilism that threatens to bury him, too. The counter-revolutionaries must put themselves in the breach, so that the common citizen can finally look up, with his worn and weary face, toward that eternal and unchanging order that will put him at peace and allow him to finally escape the emptiness and desolation that surrounds him.
From that humble beginning, America’s cultural revolution can be overcome. The American public can restore the mechanisms of democratic rule, reform the institutions that have compromised public life, and revive the principles of the revolution of 1776. And, unlike their enemies, whose promises always vanish into the ether, they can make them real. They can re-secure the rights of the common citizen, allowing him to live as an equal, raise a family, participate in the Republic, and pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful.