Virtue, not power, is the true aim of politics



The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: Politics is about what is good.

We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”— an unrivaled introduction to politics:

Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.

Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that many goods exist along with many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth.

Virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.

Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: If there exists some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good — if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless — this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.

He asks: Would not an awareness of this highest good have great weight in a man’s life? Wouldn’t the art of attaining that good be the sovereign or master art encompassing all the ends or goods of the other arts? And isn’t this what we call the art of politics?

The good that the art of politics aims at, he says, is “the human good.” What name do people give to the human good that encompasses all others and lacks nothing? The Greek word, Aristotle says, is eudaimonia, which we usually translate as “happiness” in English. The art of politics is the art of happiness. But it gets even better.

The art of politics is a practical art. It aims not just at knowing what happiness is but at being happy. Thinking happiness through, Aristotle finds that it does not have primarily to do with the body. It is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — in fact, in accordance with complete virtue. You can’t be a happy man without being a good or virtuous man. And in this sense, virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Aristotle goes on to distinguish between virtues of character and virtues of intellect, or what we usually call moral and intellectual virtues. He argues that the specific virtue or excellence of the statesman — the political man par excellence — is the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom, what he would call “phronesis.” Phronesis is the only intellectual virtue that is inseparable from moral virtue. According to Aristotle, a man cannot possess phronesis without possessing all the moral virtues actively and in their fullness. He is a man in full.

I would tell students that to make progress in their study of politics — this practical art — they would have to make progress in virtue; they would have to make progress toward the human good; they would have to make progress toward happiness. This is what our semester would be about.

Happiness and politics go together?

If I were lucky, at least one hesitatingly confident realist among the students — they were still too young to be cynics — would be brave enough on this first day of class to raise a hand and say deferentially and politely something like: “What! Have you read a newspaper lately?” (They had newspapers back then.) “Every page is filled with violence, crime, corruption, and somebody grasping for power! To call someone a politician is an insult.”

And so the semester would be off and running.

I would admit that though Aristotle in his “Politics” defines man as a “political animal” because man is a “rational animal” — an animal possessing logos, or reason — he makes an empirical observation at the end of his “Ethics” that will be familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper: Rational creatures though they are, men sometimes do not listen to reason and are carried away by their passions.

Aristotle would agree with Alexander Hamilton, or rather Hamilton agreed with Aristotle, when he wrote in Federalist 15:

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” And with James Madison’s even more famous saying, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

In addition, working on our non-angelic human fallibility and culpability, bad education causes us to make mistakes about what is good. For these reasons, Aristotle argues that both education and coercion are central to the art of politics and, alas, that practicing the art of politics is not a leisurely activity. It is the burdensome art of inducing others to do what they ought to do for their own good and happiness, even when they don’t want to.

These days, our children learn in school and online that it is good to shoplift or try to change themselves from a boy to a girl or from a girl to a boy. A shockingly large percentage of them have learned that it is good to kill those who disagree with you.

From his first day in office in 2021, Joe Biden — our then-educator in chief — made it the central point of American politics that being trans was being good and questioning the goodness of being trans was evil. He thrust this bad education into the face of his country — marching trans heroes before the cameras to model the “goodness” that all Americans should admire and publicly praise if they wanted to avoid ostracism, public shaming and canceling, expulsion from school, losing their jobs, being put in jail, or being murdered in cold blood.

Politics requires goodness

Knowing what is good is not easy. A man in ancient Athens with the greatest reputation for wisdom knew only that he did not know what was good. To have what was good, to be good, was so crucial to Socrates — the one thing needful — that it made no sense to do anything else with his life than to try to find out what it was.

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Photo by Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

But we do not need to be philosophers to know that boys cannot become girls, that biological males should not be competing against biological females in sports or sharing their bathrooms, and that killing those who disagree with us is evil. Glenn Ellmers, Salvatori Research Fellow at the Claremont Institute and an old friend, published a short essay on the urgent need, in this increasingly deranged world, to hold on to our common sense.

Machiavelli — the infamous teacher of “realist” politics — seeing unflinchingly what we all could read in the newspaper, taught that in a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for those who would succeed in the art of politics to enter into evil. I would suggest an alternative lesson to students, one that I think is in the spirit of Aristotle: In a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for the good to be great.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

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How woke broke the country



Andrew Beck makes a cogent case at the American Mind for why the United States, like other countries, requires cultural and moral cohesion to protect its nationhood and to act with a unified will on behalf of the common good. Beck correctly notes that the U.S. started out as a country with a well-defined collective identity. If we look back at America’s beginnings, we discover John Jay in Federalist 2 defining this original American identity in a memorable observation:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

At the time this was written, the newly formed American nation-state was composed overwhelmingly of Northern European Protestants; its legal institutions were largely British.

The homogeneity that the U.S. possessed at the time of its founding, and for at least several generations afterward, was perhaps an irreplaceable strength.

Its shared culture was shaped by, among other things, reading and revering the King James Bible. Among the professional class, the Bible’s authority was supplemented by that of Blackstone’s "Commentaries on the Laws of England,” Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (to some extent) classical texts like Plutarch’s “Lives.”

Protestant theologians went a bit farther in their reading and would have also studied John Calvin’s “Institutes,” the works of St. Augustine, and perhaps some of Plato’s dialogues. Political thinkers back then might also have pondered John Locke, Montesquieu, Polybius, and a few other influential political theorists.

In early America, a shared understanding of civic virtue, social manners, and community arose from revering the same classics as well as holding similar religious beliefs and being, in most cases, “descended from the same ancestors.”

Even in Federalist10 and Federalist 51, when James Madison addressed the possibility of the American polity becoming an extended republic, he did not recommend any modern concept of diversity or disagree with Jay’s judgment about America’s strengths. He was simply explaining how a country that consisted of mercantile and agrarian sectors could be held together by a “common passion of interest.” Madison’s novel theory posited that a representative government could filter the popular will in such a way as to coordinate overlapping interests.

The homogeneity that the U.S. possessed at the time of its founding, and for at least several generations afterward, was perhaps an irreplaceable strength. This strength may have been at work even when the country faced the ravages of civil war, which it survived because — as Lincoln observed — however calamitous their differences, both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same deity.

Cohesion without coercion

In my view, these sorts of inherited, culturally sustained bonds of unity furnish the ideal conditions for a collective political identity. This unity was there at the beginning of the American republic and did not depend for its creation on coercion by the state or military forces. The shared heritage that was obvious to John Jay bespoke a deeper unity than the one imposed on German Americans during World War I (and, a fortiori, Japanese Americans during World War II). Perhaps Andrew Beck and I view this chapter of our national history quite differently.

Although European nation-states were formed partly by coercing those who resisted them into accepting a centralized form of sovereignty, such political entities were able to establish themselves by drawing on an already developed national consciousness. Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, etc. all identified with some kind of national history and culture even before they accepted or were forced to accept a unified national government. Force was not the main factor that generated unity in historic nation-states.

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German Americans in the early 20th century already had a sense of being American but were bullied with the help of government inducements into giving up their ancestral heritage. This took place after the Wilson administration managed to push the U.S. into World War I.

In my part of Pennsylvania, where German Pietist farmers settled, intimidation achieved its intended effect. Churches and other buildings had their German inscriptions effaced. The teaching and use of the German language ceased. Even schools like Linden Hall in nearby Lititz that were founded by German sects stopped offering German courses and have not revived them to this day.

I won’t get into the already widely known and horrendous treatment of the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese, after Pearl Harbor. I will say only that it may have exceeded in awfulness what was done to German Americans 25 years earlier. As should be obvious, Norwegians, Swedes, and many other ethnic minorities became Americanized without the tactics applied to German and Japanese Americans. This happened through a natural process of assimilation.

By now, the national unity that Andrew Beck properly values seems to have been mostly lost. I wonder whether the “America First” politics of the MAGA movement can recover it in any meaningful way. Once the American republic lost its original ethnic and religious unity, its leaders and intellectuals were obliged to turn to other ideas to hold American citizens together. In my youth, American public education still emphasized civic patriotism and a state-sponsored pantheon of national heroes.

Unity through civic patriotism persisted until radicalized minorities began to vent their hate on ‘Amerika.’

That unifying effort succeeded for several generations, particularly since it was reinforced by a civil religion with recognizably Protestant cultural elements. This way of assimilating hyphenated Americans served well in two world wars and at least during part of the Cold War. It was the American public philosophy when I was growing up in the 1950s. An understanding of Americanness that did not depend on shared ethnicity may have worked well at the time because other unifying factors were at play.

Most of the population remained Euro-American and had some Christian affiliation. Deeper cultural bonds united (for example) an Italian American and a Swedish American than those existing between either and a third-world Muslim.

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This unity through civic patriotism persisted until radicalized minorities began to vent their hate on “Amerika.” Since these irate “dissenters” proceeded to take over the mainstream media, education at all levels, and public administration, the older methods of assimilation and of producing a unified American identity became less effective.

One might apply to this changed American identity a criticism that’s been leveled at the efforts of the present German regime to assimilate third-world Muslim immigrants. Into what, exactly, can one assimilate foreign residents when public administrators, educators, and the culture industry have taught the indigenous population to hate their country?

Unhyphenated

Earlier attempts at generating unity, however, also ran into headwinds eventually. Non-Protestants, starting with a growing Catholic population, objected to attending “Protestant” public schools and seeing their religious and cultural traditions marginalized. Later the Jewish left and anti-Catholic Southern Baptists called for a more thorough secularization of the public square in the name of separating church and state, furthering pluralism — or whatever other excuse they could find for making the United States less of what it had been before.

By now our ruling class and various influencers are trying to separate whatever they intend to make of this country from its Western roots. The still widely influential Anti-Defamation League, in a pamphlet last year titled “The New Primer on White Supremacy,” explains quite straightforwardly that the designation “Western” is really a “code word” for white racism.

Indeed, according to the ADL, a racist, xenophobic taint also attaches to “Euro-American identity.” Such descriptive terms, according to this pamphlet, are used by those who oppose large-scale Muslim immigration into Europe and emphatically reject the LGBTQ agenda.

Another now-endangered vehicle of American assimilation is the melting-pot concept, which still has many adherents in our conservative establishment. The August 1 edition of the New York Post highlighted the heavily attended Muslim funeral of a slain Bangladeshi police officer in New York City.

“This most New York story,” we were informed on the Post’s front page, was intended as a celebration of the pluralism and diversity that the paper’s editors see as proof of the American melting pot at work. By now, according to this message, ethnically and racially diverse groups are coming to see themselves and each other as unhyphenated Americans.

Unfortunately, the same city with a multicultural sense of who we are is about to elect as mayor a vocally anti-Western woke Muslim — repeating something that Londoners already did when they elected Sadiq Khan and that Minneapolis will likely do if it chooses Omar Fateh as its next mayor. The slain police officer, Didarul Islam, lost his life to a crazed black killer whom CNN, out of its anti-white derangement syndrome, described as “possibly white.”

By now, the melting-pot view of assimilation and the stress on civic patriotism, which I regard as the best substitutes for an older American cultural identity, have given way to a woke dead end.

Unless we can move beyond this divisive concept, it won’t be possible to return to less fracturing views of American identity. Targeting white male Christian heterosexuals as victimizers does not seem to be a satisfactory way of bringing together this country’s legal population. Unfortunately, large demographics, particularly college-educated women, have different ideas about what the managerial state should be imposing on the rest of us.

Editor’s note: This article was published originally at the American Mind.

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Punch a cop, get a charge — even if you’re in Congress



With a recent assault on the very federal law enforcement officers they are charged with overseeing, Democrats haven’t just embraced criminals; they’ve become them.

Last month, three Democratic lawmakers — Reps. Rob Menendez Jr., Bonnie Watson Coleman, and LaMonica McIver, all from New Jersey — led a mob of protesters in storming the Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. They waited for a bus full of detainees to arrive, then rushed the open gate and physically clashed with federal officers.

Our republic will not survive if America’s elected leaders are allowed to act like this. They not only committed crimes in public but then hid behind their Article I powers as a shield.

This wasn’t symbolic. This was an elected mob laying hands on law enforcement.

The video tells the story: shoving, punching, and chaos. These three members of Congress — who represent more than two million Americans — assaulted officers doing their jobs. Then, astonishingly, they claimed they were the victims, despite clear footage proving otherwise.

All of this over what turned out to be nothing.

After the chaos, ICE officials offered the lawmakers a guided tour of the facility. The Democrats quietly admitted they found no signs of mistreatment. Their entire stunt, billed as a protest of conditions, collapsed under the weight of reality. They walked in demanding accountability and walked out with nothing but bad footage and a pending felony charge.

Yes, a felony.

Rep. McIver now faces a federal charge of assaulting a law enforcement officer, announced on May 20 by Acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba. President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have made it clear: This administration backs the rule of law. If you punch a cop, you get charged — even if you have a congressional pin on your lapel.

The left tried to frame the incident as “congressional oversight.” But oversight doesn’t mean storming gates or skipping security checks. ICE policy allows members of Congress to tour facilities — even unannounced. But it does not allow them to create security threats, bypass screening, or lead mobs onto federal property. Those procedures exist to protect staff, detainees, and lawmakers alike.

This was not oversight. It was lawlessness, pure and simple.

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Since President Trump restored control of the southern border, anti-border Democrats have become unhinged. No longer able to rely on waves of illegal crossings, they’ve begun imitating the tactics of the very criminal aliens they once defended — storming barriers, resisting authority, and attacking officers.

Now, that’s the legacy of the modern Democratic Party.

But legal consequences alone aren’t enough. Congress must act.

The House should censure all three lawmakers involved. Censure is not a punishment; it’s a statement of principle. And lawmakers have been censured for far less than leading an assault on federal agents. The House has a duty to uphold the integrity of its own body. That means sending a message: If you behave like a thug, you’ll be treated like one.

Our republic will not survive if America’s elected leaders are allowed to act like this. They not only committed crimes in public but then hid behind their Article I powers as a shield.

America’s founders warned about this.

In "Federalist 1," Alexander Hamilton posed a choice: Would Americans build a government based on “reflection and choice” — or surrender to “accident and force”? That question remains. If lawmakers now claim the right to break the laws they swore to uphold, we’re no longer living in a constitutional republic. We’re living under mob rule.

And if we let this slide — if Congress fails to hold its own accountable — then we’ll have no one to blame when the next mob storms another federal building under another political banner.

Democrats love to remind us: “No one is above the law.” Fine. Then prove it.

Mark Twain Gets the Chernow Treatment

Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens) continues to make news, whether in unabashed reverence by comedian Conan O’Brien as he accepted this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, or in defamation by countless school boards who have banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which uses the "n-word" 219 times.

The post Mark Twain Gets the Chernow Treatment appeared first on .

Trump’s trade tactics echo founding-era common sense



Prominent voices on the left and within movement conservatism have argued that President Trump’s approach to foreign trade is strange, unorthodox, and even un-American. This is not surprising. After all, doctrinaire commitment to free trade — and doctrinaire distaste for protecting American industry — has been the dominant view among elites of both major political parties for at least a generation.

Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that Trump’s actions on trade appear as a wholly irrational disruption of a system that, according to our political elites, does not need to be discarded.

Hamilton would find it perfectly sensible of Trump to hold that other nations should give America something of value in exchange for access to our vast market.

This view of the matter, however, is based on an incomplete understanding of the American political tradition. Trump’s approach to trade policy has deep roots in American history, as we can see if we cast our gaze further back than we are accustomed to doing. It does not go too far to say that America’s founders would find Trump’s approach to international commerce perfectly intelligible and respectable.

The most obvious way to link President Trump to the founders is to invoke the justly celebrated name of Alexander Hamilton. The “Report on Manufactures,” Hamilton’s most famous state paper during his tenure as George Washington’s treasury secretary, laid out policy objectives that are essentially the same as those being defended by Trump and the members of his Cabinet who are responsible for trade policy.

It was necessary, Hamilton contended, to exert the government’s authority to promote American manufacturing to counteract the “artificial policy” of other nations that sought to exclude or disadvantage American goods. The ultimate aim of such a policy, he explained, was not the “vain project of selling everything and buying nothing” — it was instead to secure America’s vital national interests.

Hamilton argued that national “independence and security” are the “great objects” of all governments, thus requiring each country to “possess within itself all the essentials of national supply,” especially “the means of subsistence, habitation, clothing, and defense.” Having such goods available within one’s own country, he continued, “is necessary to the perfection of the body politic, to the safety as well as the welfare of the society.”

No strange departure

It is hard to see much daylight between Hamiltonian trade principles and President Trump’s desire to have the products necessary to American security and prosperity built in the United States.

The nationalist character of Hamilton’s thinking about trade policy, moreover, did not emerge after the founding as some strange departure from its essential principles. Rather, such nationalism was evident earlier, especially in the prominent part Hamilton played in the debates over the ratification of the Constitution.

Writing in "The Federalist Papers," Hamilton observed that one of the great advantages of a union of states under one government was the power it would confer on the nation to “oblige foreign countries to bid against each other for the privileges of our markets.” Elsewhere in “The Federalist Papers,” Hamilton suggested that the restrictive trade policies nations sometimes pursue are not properly viewed as “injuries” but simply as “justifiable acts of independent sovereignties consulting a distinct interest.”

Hamilton, then, would find it perfectly sensible of President Trump to hold that other nations should be willing to give America something of value in exchange for access to our vast market. His arguments similarly anticipated Trump’s frequent remarks that while other nations will inevitably act in their own interest, they likewise must understand that we intend to act in our own interest as well.

The preceding argument is enough to show that Trump’s thinking about trade policy has venerable roots in the American political tradition. After all, who is more American than Alexander Hamilton?

We can go further, however. Trump’s approach broadly represents not just the Hamiltonian strain of American economic nationalism but the common sense of the founding-era generation itself. Indeed (and as I have observed elsewhere at greater length) the authority to regulate trade with foreign nations was included in the Constitution precisely for the purposes for which the Trump administration is now wielding it.

Regulating commerce was uncontroversial

In his massive and highly regarded "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,” Joseph Story — John Marshall’s great colleague on the early Supreme Court — observed that the power to regulate foreign commerce was so obviously necessary in a complete and effective government that it was hardly even a matter of controversy at the Constitutional Convention.

Commerce, Story suggested, is important to “the prosperity of nations.” Nevertheless, the prosperity of American commerce had been thwarted by the restrictive policies of other nations during the time America was governed by the Articles of Confederation, which conferred on the government no authority to regulate America’s foreign trade.

On Story’s telling, before the Constitution was adopted, American commerce “was regulated by foreign nations with a single view to their own interests; and our disunited efforts to counteract their restrictions were rendered impotent by a want of combination.” Under the Constitution, however, the government of the United States has the power to control access to the entire American market and hence has the ability to retaliate against the excessively self-regarding trade policies of other nations.

The Trump administration is simply using this constitutional power in an attempt to secure an arrangement that is more mutually beneficial for the United States and our trading partners.

Just as the founders anticipated

Story’s understanding of these matters was by no means idiosyncratic or partisan. On the contrary, essentially the same views were expressed by James Madison, the “father of the Constitution.”

Writing to James Monroe in 1785, Madison expressed his personal wish that “no regulations of trade, that is to say, no restrictions or imposts whatever, were necessary.” “A perfect freedom” of trade, he continued, “is the system which would be my choice.” Nevertheless, he immediately added, for such a system to be “attainable, all other nations must concur in it.” And if any other nation imposed restrictions on American trade, Madison continued, it would be appropriate for America to “retort the distinction” — in other words, to impose retaliatory restrictions of its own. Indeed, Madison held that to question the propriety of such economic retaliation would be “an affront to every citizen who loves his country.”

Similarly, in the preface to his notes on the Constitutional Convention, Madison observed that the lack of a commerce power under the Articles of Confederation had “produced in foreign nations ... a monopolizing policy injurious to the trade of the U.S.” and further suggested that the appropriate response would be a “countervailing policy on the part of the U. States.” Such a policy became possible because the new Constitution included a power to regulate trade with foreign nations — the power the Trump administration is wielding to secure more advantageous trade relations for America, just as the founders anticipated.

None of this is to say that the founders would have approved of the specific steps the Trump administration has taken in the last several weeks. No one can pretend to know how they would apply their principles to the changed circumstances of the present. Nor is it to say that the founders would approve the extent to which the Congress has delegated its foreign commerce power to the president. It is to say, however, that Trump’s aims, and the kind of tools he is using to achieve them, would be unobjectionable to those who founded our nation and established our form of government.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.