The Right Stuff

“How do we restore America?” is a question people are asking. Most of America has the answer.

A reader asked an easy question of me in the same way a man standing at the foot of Everest asks someone else to “just run up there real quick and plant a flag.”

He asked, “How do conservatives reduce the size of government and restore honesty, integrity, accountability and competence in America?”

The short answer is this: you cannot have limited government without a population capable of limiting itself. That is the part modern America increasingly refuses to discuss because it is uncomfortable, judgmental, unfashionable and, worst of all, it points the accusatory finger not at Washington, but at us.

What we lack are enough citizens who understand that self-government begins with governing the self.

So, let me ask a few very simple questions:

• If you go to church regularly, why do you go? What motivates you?

• What stops you from walking over to your neighbor’s house and simply taking his stuff?

• What stops you from beating your wife, husband or kids?

• Why do you obey stop signs, speed limits and lane markers even when no police officer is present?

• Why do you go to work instead of lying in bed waiting for someone else to feed you?

• What keeps you from blowing your paycheck on the Hunter Biden Special—hookers and blow every Friday night—and waking up Saturday morning hungover, morally bankrupt and broke?

• Why do you return the extra twenty dollars when the cashier accidentally gives it to you?

• Why do you stay faithful to your spouse when temptation and secrecy present themselves together?

• Why do you stand in line instead of simply shoving your way to the front like a baboon fighting over fruit at the zoo?

• Why do you keep promises no court could enforce?

• Why do you feel shame after lying and pride after enduring something difficult honestly?

Now here is the important part: if your answer to most of those questions boils down to “because it is wrong,” then congratulations, you are carrying around the invisible machinery required for a free civilization to exist and you can be sure the problem doesn’t rest with you.

The problem is this: when enough people stop believing those things are wrong, no constitution ever written will save the republic.

That was one of Alexis de Tocqueville’s great observations about America. He recognized that America’s freedom did not emerge merely from parchment, elections or institutions. It emerged from habits, morality, churches, families, customs and self-restraint. Americans governed themselves internally, which meant government did not need to govern every external aspect of their lives.

In short, freedom worked because most people voluntarily stayed between the lines without requiring an armed bureaucrat to scream instructions through a megaphone. Civilization survives because enough people choose not to act like drunken trash pandas fighting in a dumpster behind a casino buffet.

De Tocqueville understood something modern progressivism desperately tries to deny: morality cannot be fully outsourced to government bureaucracy.

You cannot regulate a people into virtue. You cannot subsidize responsibility into existence. You cannot create honesty through federal grant programs, and you certainly cannot sustain liberty among people who lack impulse control, discipline, delayed gratification or moral restraint.

A society capable of self-government requires a population of millions of people making small, invisible decisions every single day that nobody applauds and nobody monitors.

Going to work.
Paying debts.
Raising children.
Keeping promises.
Telling the truth.
Showing restraint.
Accepting consequences.
Choosing duty over indulgence.

Civilization, in the end, is not held together by the Capitol dome, Supreme Court robes or inspirational campaign slogans. It is held together by internal restraint practiced voluntarily by ordinary people who will never appear in history books.

The frightening reality is that when enough citizens cease governing themselves, government inevitably expands to fill the vacuum. If people will not control their impulses voluntarily, government will attempt to control behavior coercively. The less self-discipline a population possesses, the more external discipline becomes necessary. That is the trade being made all around us right now—people losing the ability to govern themselves while demanding ever larger systems to govern everyone else, and history shows that road does not lead to liberty.

It leads exactly to where every civilization eventually goes when appetite replaces virtue and entitlement replaces duty: toward soft despotism, managed decline and eventually collapse under the sheer weight of moral and institutional decay.

What makes America great is not what makes great politicians. We must stop treating politicians as if they are an inevitable consequence of a separate class made from finer clay—because they aren’t. As we each must answer those aforementioned questions every minute of every day, so should they and when they are found wanting, it is time for them to go because they no longer represent you.

A republic we have, as Benjamin Franklin warned, if we can keep it. The terrifying part is realizing that “keeping it” was always going to depend less on politicians than on whether ordinary citizens could keep themselves.

Most of us already have what it takes and are doing what is required, so the answer seems to be that it begins with us and what we will accept.