Can America Survive as a Republic Without Virtue?

Today is my day, and I'd like to talk about the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and what has become of America since that auspicious event.

A lot of us are wondering— Whether or not we've got another 250 years to go, there's a lot of worry out there about just kind of the impasse or the impasses that we are witnessing in our body politic and our larger culture.

This isn't the first time we've had some rough waters that we've had to pass through.

Obviously, there's the Civil War and the Great Depression.

So there are other things that have been great events.

you know, causes for concern in the past and made people wonder whether we were going to make it.

But, uh, I think that the character of the situation that we are facing now, it has a different cast and consequently, um, you know, it's, it's actually up in the air.

It's not just because we've come through these, you know, difficult times in the past doesn't mean that we're all, we always will.

Um, So I want to reflect on an essay from Substack by my friend Matt Crawford.

Matthew B. Crawford, of course, is the author of Shop Classes, Soulcraft.

He's written a number of other books that are really worth your time, like The World Outside Your Head, Why We Drive.

But So Matt and I have got to know each other a little bit, and I subscribe to his sub-stack.

But he has been asked by the Independent Review to pull together a number of thinkers, essayists, scholars, and so forth to reflect on this very thing.

Are we going to be able to keep this thing going? So anyway, I think the name of his sub-stack is Arcadalia, if I remember correctly.

But rather than, I will have us, you know, I will make certain we've got a link in the show notes.

But just so folks don't need to go to the link in the show notes, I'm going to read a couple of pages from the article that focuses in on the subject of virtue.

We've talked about virtue many times on the show.

But what Matt is getting at here, and Yuval Eleven, whose essay he's responding to, is I think a really, pretty fundamental sort of starting point question.

And that is, are we even talking about the same thing when different people, you know, use the term virtue? So let me go ahead and read what we have here.

So I've not practiced this.

I might stumble at certain points.

So hold, you know, hang with me, folks.

I'll get through this.

So this is Matt.

In the first essay of this collection, Yuval Levin poses the question, what was virtue to the founders? More than any other type of regime, a republic places demands of good character on its citizens as self-government in the political sense rests ultimately on a capacity for self-command in the psychological sense.