The fragility and importance of civic virtue

We journalists, like most others – especially if we specialize in commentary – make errors of fact and judgment but seldom pause to correct them. The recent speeches by Barack Obama and George W. Bush, with their common emphasis on civic virtue and their unmistakable targeting of Donald Trump and his apologists, stirred an uncomfortable memory of one of my own misjudgments.

Some 40 years ago, I reviewed an important book by Irving Kristol, then a prominent leader of the “neo-conservative” movement. Like many of the neo-cons, Kristol had been a New Deal Democrat; and like many, was of Jewish and recent immigrant origins. Many had been educated at the City College of New York, an excellent institution of higher education accessible to immigrant families and their intellectually gifted children. CCNY offered them a first stage of professional advance.

Thus the wanton trashing of that institution (and others, including Columbia University) in the raucous, angry 1960s by privileged young anti-war protesters enraged and alienated CCNY alumni. The youthful insurgents and pseudo-revolutionaries of that era occupied and littered academic offices and abused academic authorities; and some even plotted violence. The case against their puerile mischief was clear. But some eminent Democratic Party elders, their judgment clouded by sentimentality, excused the assault on valuable institutions and failed to distinguish between protest and thuggery. Their blindness explained, in substantial part, the defection of many former allies, including Kristol, who fled to neo-conservatism – a hybrid creed of traditional liberal principles and Republican sympathies.

What I recall now in Kristol’s book was his emphatic stress on the essential importance of “virtue” in democratic government – an essential invoked by Benjamin Franklin in response to a query about the new Constitution: “Yes, a republic – if you can keep it.” I was reasonably versed in classical political thought. I knew that James Madison and other framers had listed that essential quality – civic virtue in the citizenry – among the requirements of good government.

Examples: James Madison said, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without ... virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” George Washington said, “Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue?”

But this is where I stumbled. I failed to see the connection clearly. Kristol’s emphasis on civic virtue seemed to me partisan, insofar as he seemed to accuse Democrats of abandoning it. It sounded like a neo-conservative rationale. No party, I thought and wrote, could claim a monopoly on civic virtue. My analysis stopped there; that was the trouble.

The essence of what Trump’s two White House predecessors said last week was this: No political system, however hallowed by custom and use, is immune to decay; and the virtue of its leaders, in breadth and tolerance, is indispensable to its success. The separate and presumably uncoordinated addresses of Bush and Obama, denials notwithstanding, were pointed rebukes of Trump’s boorish behavior, which degrades the traditions of his office and poisons public discourse. And all in the name of what Sen. John McCain, in another significant speech, correctly called “half-baked nationalism.”

It remains unclear whether Trump’s daily creations of chaos and division are an unconscious failure of intelligence and mental balance, or a form of political theater designed to rally his “base.” No matter which it is (or a blend of the two) it is inexcusable and dangerous. It radically sharpens party enmity and turns politics into cold war. And the missing element is precisely that civic virtue that I undervalued in the writings of Kristol 40 years ago.

Back then, liberal Democrats made the error of condoning violence and incivility as if they were mere excesses of democratic politics. Now Trump and his apologists make the opposite mistake: They condone his blundering indecencies of speech and act as normal extensions of “conservatism.” They are, however, no more conservative than the incivilities of the sixties left were liberal. They are radically destructive.

All praise to Bush, Obama, McCain and Corker for reminding me of a error of judgment and craft, and the rest of us of the vital truth that civic virtue is both fragile and indispensable.

Contributing columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. of Chapel Hill is a former editor and columnist in Washington.

This story was originally published October 24, 2017 at 9:25 AM with the headline "The fragility and importance of civic virtue."