Turns Out Virtue Actually Is Kind of Important

If there's one thing Republicans love – even more than complaining about reverse discrimination – it's yammering about how they are the party of Real American Values. In what passes for the Intellectual Right – which these days essentially means whoever watched Jesse Watters last night – that often leads to legal justifications and various other bold pronouncements based on the idea that Republicans are the sole inheritors and understanders of the True America as the Founders Intended.

About that: You know what the Founders yammered about the most? The answer is not whale oil candles, warming pans or sugar nippers. It's virtue. They talked about it constantly, specifically, about virtue being the foundation on which the new nation would be built. It's a point that Thomas E. Ricks makes in his book First Principles.

The best place to begin to understand the views of the Revolutionary generation is with a look at the word "virtue." This word was powerfully meaningful during the eighteenth century. Today it is a mere synonym for morality, and also, anachronistically, a signifier of female chastity or the lack of it, as in the euphemistic phrase "a woman of easy virtue." But for the Revolutionary generation, virtue was the essential element of public life. Back then, it actually was masculine. It meant putting the common good before one's own interests. Virtue, writes the historian Joyce Appleby, was the "lynchpin" of public life–that is, the fastener that held together the structure.

It is worth dwelling on the word for a moment, because it runs like a bright thread through the entire period of the Revolution and the first decades of the new nation. The founders used it incessantly in their public statements. The word "virtue" appears about six thousand times in the collected correspondence and other writings of the Revolutionary generation, compiled in the U.S. National Archives' database, Founders Online (FO), totaling some 120,000 documents. That's more often than "freedom." The practice of virtue was paramount, which is one reason George Washington, not an articulate man, loomed so large over the post-Revolutionary era.

Here's a representative quote pulled from a letter that John Adams wrote to a friend in 1776:

Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superiour to all private Passions.

And so, how are our Republicans doing as the sole inheritors and understanders of the True America as the Founders Intended on the one thing the Founders deemed most important? It may not surprise you to learn that they're not doing great.

Every single day is a new bottom. Taking cheap shots at previous presidents. Covering up the president's relationship with the world's most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker. Tweeting the reprehensible for laughs. Launching a political attack against a tragically murdered cultural icon.

One thing I'm grateful for is that I never again have to take seriously any Republican sermonizing about conservative values and cultural decay. They are full of shit, as their deeds have now conclusively demonstrated for more than a decade. Unfortunately, though, when one of our two main political parties has gone this far off the rails, that means we have a virtue-sized hole in our republic.

John Adams, by all accounts, was a self-absorbed ass. But he wasn't wrong about virtue. We need more of it – much more – in our leaders. I enjoyed this Bulwark piece about the need for a new Great Awakening. America in 2025 is ailing, morally lost and technologically overwhelmed, with a civic culture that's no longer working. We can and must do better.

EVERY GREAT AWAKENING in American history arose not because conditions were ideal, but because they were intolerable. People sensed that the old ways were failing, and they dared to believe that renewal was possible.

We dare, too.

The task before us is not to win arguments, but to begin to heal a moral ecology. To cultivate the virtues without which no free society can endure: honesty, courage, patience, generosity, empathy, and hope. Hope, especially—not as naïve optimism, but as disciplined commitment to the common good.

In troubled times, the question is not whether history will judge us. It will. The question is whether we will rise to the moment we have been given.

May we have the courage to awaken again.