When Virtue Came, It Came as an Inflatable Frog

While watching the World Series with my family last Friday, we saw the Canadian ad that caused President Trump to throw a tantrum and cut off trade talks with our northern neighbor.

In that video, featuring excerpts from a radio address that President Reagan delivered in April 1987, Reagan offers a full-throated defense of free trade. Despite howling from predictable corners about foul play, the ad simply uses Reagan's own words.

The ad includes several excerpts from Reagan’s address that are edited together in the one-minute video, and are not one full minute of Reagan’s five-minute address. The comments used, however, remain consistent with Reagan’s overall message about his distaste for tariffs and protectionist policies, despite imposing them on Japan at the time.

The ad begins, “When someone says, let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs and sometimes, for a short while it works. But only for a short time.” This is a direct, unedited quote that begins at around 2 minutes and 35 seconds into Reagan’s address; however, the next words come from earlier in the speech.

“But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer,” are words that were said following opening remarks that Reagan was imposing duties on Japan, an action he said he was “loathe to take.”

The ad then goes deeper into Reagan’s speech.

“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries, and the triggering of fierce trade wars,” Reagan says.

[. . .]

“They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological decisions they need to succeed in world markets. And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs,” he said in the full speech, before saying the line about high tariffs leading to trade wars.

The ad continues, “Then the worst happens, markets shrink and collapse, business and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.”

[. . .]

The ad goes on, “Throughout the world, there’s a growing realization that the way to prosperity for all nations is rejecting protectionist legislation and promoting fair and free competition.”

After the ad, my 15-year-old asked: Did he really believe those things? It was a clarifying moment, a reminder that there are millions of people who have no memory of the Republican Party being anything other than it currently is. My son was legitimately surprised that a Republican would say those sorts of things about free trade (and was also unsure whether to believe the recording of the radio address itself was authentic, which is another distressing story for another day).

I told him that, yes, President Reagan really did believe those things about free trade and that Republicans used to have other ideas that he would also probably find surprising, about, for example, foreign policy (NATO good; Russia bad), the national debt (bad), states' rights (good) and virtue (good).

It's that last one – virtue – that I wanted to talk about more because that's the one that haunts my days and nights like a demented clown lurking outside my window. But I dropped it because my son just wanted to watch the game and not talk about the virtue vacuum in our degenerate era and I really couldn't blame him for that.

But we do need to talk about it. It haunts me because it's the unavoidable contradiction at the heart of both my family story and the awful drift of our politics. As a child of the '80s, raised by Republicans in a very Republican part of Ohio, virtue was the organizing personal standard without which, I was told, the system would veer into corruption and excess and eventual collapse. And, really, it wasn't hypothetical. It wasn't that the system would veer into corruption and excess, but that it already had, and that was what the Republican Party was standing against: the played-out bloat of the New Deal and Great Society Democrats and the valueless, virtueless culture that had grown up during their decades-long reign.

Virtue and values. Values and virtue. Personal integrity. Personal responsibility. Morality. Honor. Honesty. Decency. We had those things. The other guys didn't. The fathers of the conservative movement told us we were the keepers of the flame in a fallen world, and the survival of the Republic in a version that the Founders would recognize depended on us.

In his 1982 essay, "Virtue: Can It Be Taught", conservative political philosopher Russell Kirk asked: "Are there men and women in America today of virtue sufficient to withstand and repel the forces of disorder? Or have we, as a people, grown too fond of creature-comforts and a fancied security to venture our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor in any cause at all?"

He defined virtue, distinguished moral virtue (grown out of familial habits) and intellectual virtue (learned through instruction), and bemoaned the decline of virtue generally in an America that had grown fat and happy after World War II. Determining that developing moral virtue at scale would be difficult in an era of familial decay and cultural excess, Kirk examined the prospect of attempting to teach virtue. He was not optimistic but suggested that some kind of looming "adversity" could push Americans toward virtue.

Can virtue be taught? Why, it can be learnt, though more through a kind of illative process than as a formal program of study. Surely it cannot be taught by those incompetent and chameleon-like intellectuals whom Solzhenitsyn calls “the Smatterers.” Few seem competent to teach virtue in our Republic nowadays; and relatively few hungry sheep look up to be fed.

Yet adversity, which we Americans seem liable to experience sharply and suddenly in this present decade, frequently opens the way for the impulse toward virtue. The terrible adversity endured by decent folk in Soviet Russia forged the virtue of Solzhenitsyn, a hero for our age. Only rags and tatters of the old moral virtue survived in Russia after the triumphs of Lenin and of Stalin; Solzhenitsyn and some other Russians of moral vision found it necessary to raise up intellectual virtue from the ashes of revolution. They have succeeded, in the sense that Socrates and Plato succeeded; whether their reconstruction of virtue will take on flesh more swiftly than did the Greek reconstitution, we do not yet know.

“Feed men, and then ask them of virtue,” is the slogan upon the banners of the Anti-Christ, in Solovyov’s romance. We have done just that in this Republic, since the Second World War. We Americans have grown very well fed, very much starved for virtue. Nowhere is this more amply illustrated than in Washington. Whether or not virtue can be taught, we have not troubled our heads with it, or our hearts. When the Rough Beast slouches upon us, what Theseus or Perseus, incandescent with the energy of virtue, will draw his sword?

Forty-three years after Kirk's essay, the conservative movement has won. How are we doing on the virtue front? This is the conservatism my son sees, the only conservatism he has ever known:

I'm not a political scholar or philosopher. I don't know anything about Russell Kirk other than his writing and certainly have no idea what he would think of Trump and the MAGA movement. I imagine we wouldn't agree about much, but I do agree that there is a virtue deficiency in America.

On the Trumpist right, it's not so much a lack of virtue, but anti-virtue. What is the correct word for the videos and posts above, what we're witnessing on a daily basis? I'll go with depravity. Whatever it is, it's what Kirk's conservative movement of 1982 has curdled into. It's the source of that daily dread of mine, not so much the depravity of the diehards, but the depravity that is ignored (or worse, cheered) by otherwise decent people who still support the movement, the gulf between conservatism as it exists in their imaginations through some combination of rationalization, misapprehension and willful blindness, and conservatism as it actually exists in America in 2025.

What about the rest of us? Well, elite resistance has been in short supply, as others have rightly noted. What I keep waiting for are more people and institutions in positions of authority to stand up and say: "Enough with this un-American bullshit." What I get instead are fundraising requests from universities too pitiful to stand up for themselves and news alerts about bribes being given in broad daylight on the White House grounds.

And yet . . . we've got the inflatable brigade arrayed against the shock troops.

The thing is, I think Russell Kirk was right about the Rough Beast slouching upon us. It's just that the identity of the Rough Beast isn't what he thought it would be, and his Perseus incandescent with the energy of virtue is an inflatable frog. It turns out there is virtue in us, and there is fight, once you get down past Apple and Google and Meta and the surrendering law firms and colleges and congressmen and senators and all the rest. There's hope in that virtue, in the people doing the work of saving ourselves.