Without Virtue, Freedom Fails
It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.
–Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)
A Cultural Mirror
Today, political conflict in the United States is more than a social crisis—it is a cultural mirror. In recent years, violent attacks on elected officials, community leaders, and ordinary citizens have elicited not only sorrow but also troubling signs of approval. On major platforms such as Reddit, TikTok, and X, thousands expressed reactions ranging from mourning to celebration after Charlie Kirk’s murder.
At the heart of this trend is a civilizational challenge: a steady breakdown of the civic virtues that once sustained Western democracy. While algorithms, ideology, and partisanship may nurture division, the real concern is that we have quietly dismantled the scaffolding of our moral architecture.
Indeed, from the time of America’s founding, political differences were expected and, for the most part, respected. Although I can recall families, friends, and neighbors arguing throughout my life, mutual understanding was upheld as a civic requirement until recently. Reliably, public intellectuals praised diversity of opinion as a bulwark against extremism. And few citizens could have imagined danger lurking at a university campus, a town hall, or a local gathering where open debate had been encouraged.
Unfortunately, this world is rapidly vanishing. According to U.S. Capitol Police, threats and assaults on public figures have tripled in five years. Pew Research surveys indicate growing distrust in cultural institutions, and polling shows that the number of citizens who justify political violence is rising. These findings do not merely present isolated opinions; they reveal early signs of normalized aggression.
To understand why, we must look beneath the political surface to what earlier generations took for granted. Standard policy responses such as tighter gun laws, stricter speech codes, and more vigorous content moderation cannot repair what is decaying. What has emerged is not a regulatory failure or even a constitutional crisis. It is an inevitable consequence of neglecting the moral anthropology that a liberal democracy presupposes.
An Ignored Anthropology
From colonial self-governance to Alexis de Tocqueville’s civic associations, the American experiment treated public virtue as an essential part of its infrastructure. The contemporary decline of this tradition—once maintained in schools, churches, volunteer organizations, and homes—explains why regulatory fixes now fail to restore order.
For that reason, we must reconsider a foundational question: what kind of citizen does a free society presume? Every society answers this with its own underlying anthropology, and the Western tradition provided a remarkably demanding response. It held that human beings are rational, moral, and spiritual by nature: free agents capable of deliberation, bound by duties that order society, and oriented toward goods beyond themselves. This vision made character formation not optional but pivotal. Clearly, more than any other form of governance, liberal democracy requires individuals to embrace accountability, exercise self-restraint, and employ ethical judgment.
Nevertheless, contemporary politics tends to downplay this legacy. Across much of the ideological spectrum, personal behavior is treated more as a matter of private preference than an expression of civic responsibility. Yet neutrality cannot be morally neutral; it is itself an ethical posture, and a thoroughly destabilizing one. This is because a natural-law understanding of the human person as being endowed with inherent dignity, moral agency, and obligations that precede the state is all but forgotten.
As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre warned in his 1981 work After Virtue, modernity has “lost any public framework for the virtues,” leaving citizens without common standards or expectations. Likewise, philosopher Charles Taylor shows in A Secular Age that every judgment involving human rights rests on a set of moral premises. Thus, when autonomy is presented as the supreme good, key civic virtues like truthfulness, justice, prudence, restraint, compassion, self-sacrifice, and courage are inevitably weakened.
While procedural neutrality was intended to protect citizens against governmental coercion, it has come to enforce an amoral creed. What was meant to protect individual conscience now undermines it.
When Nature Was Rejected
However, this devolution is not entirely surprising. An ideological split during the Enlightenment resulted in rival anthropologies that remain influential to this day. Its moderate representatives—John Locke, Montesquieu, and the English common-law tradition—stressed divinely ordained rights, human dignity, natural law, and strict limits on state power. They retained the traditional form, holding that both reason and virtue were indispensable to democracy. Rooted in the classical liberal tradition, these intellectuals inspired the U.S. Constitution.
In contrast, the anthropology conceived by radical egalitarian thinkers—Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Jacobins—motivated the French Revolution. They envisioned human nature as a blank slate, corrupted only by social influences. In holding that individuals could be remade, they believed government should actively remake them. History shows how these convictions shaped disastrous utopian projects, from the Soviet Union and communist China to newer regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Quite unlike the Jacobins, the American Founders made democracy for imperfect creatures. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, in The Roads to Modernity, captured this contrast well: the American Revolution was tempered by religion and virtue; the French, by ideology and terror.
The Essential Conditions of Liberty
A society’s political stability always reflects its underlying anthropology; alter this, and its moral architecture will shift also. A republic that misunderstands human nature will soon misapprehend what democracy requires. The liberties we cherish—of speech, conscience, religion, and self-defense—were never envisioned as abstract rights. They were cast in a framework that united freedom and duty.
John Adams wrote in 1798 that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In his Farewell Address, George Washington called religion and morality the “indispensable supports” of social prosperity. A decade earlier, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was written as a guide for admitting new states to the Union. It declared that “religion, morality, and knowledge” are necessary to good government. And Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, warned that “no government can be securely maintained without the principle of virtue.”
Conspicuously, in none of these statements do we hear a call for religious conformity. Rather, they appeal to a shared morality—rooted in natural law and accessible to reason—that any Western society can cultivate. They understood that citizenship involves binding commitments, and when this sense of obligation falters, all rights become negotiable.
Modern leaders have recognized this truth as well. As political scientist James Q. Wilson observed, “The central problem of social order is not the structure of government but the character of those who live within it.” And in Justice, philosopher Michael Sandel argues that “Liberty does not consist in the absence of restraint but in the exercise of moral agency.” This is not nostalgia; it is reality.
Reason and Science Provide Confirmation
Nonetheless, representing the radical stream of the Enlightenment, skeptics have long dismissed “civic virtue” as outmoded theology. Still, contemporary science supports what Western anthropology has always maintained: any healthy person can live as a free and responsible moral agent.
On the level of individual capacity, neuropsychology demonstrates that while genes and environment inform behavior, they do not determine it. Because the brain is rewired by experience and habit, it remains impressively elastic. Various studies and literature affirm that fostering spiritual values such as gratitude, compassion, peace, service, endurance, discipline, hope, and purpose strengthens one’s happiness, mental health, relationships, and civic contributions.
Within the broader social sphere, behavioral economics indicates that private faith and reputation function much like invisible cultural currency. A large-scale experiment by Ederer and Schneider found that moral communication—chiefly making promises—increased trust and trustworthiness between participants by about 50 percent. Studies in evolutionary psychology and game theory confirm that reliable cooperation depends far more on relationship quality than on genetic self-interest.
Thus, at both the individual and social levels, human flourishing increases where moral formation is expected and nurtured.
The Moral Frontier Ahead
Today, the United States is not suffering primarily from ideological division and partisanship but from a notable decline in civic virtue. Although enacting new laws can restrain wrongdoing, it will never reform human hearts. These realities align with the West’s traditional anthropology, which asserts that individuals are capable of reason, accountable for their choices, and answerable to principles that transcend state authority.
Society’s gradual acceptance of political aggression—evident in how violence against opponents is increasingly met with approval—serves as a cultural mirror. More specifically, it reflects how key civil liberties, such as freedoms of speech, expression, and religion, depend on a citizenry committed to associated values.
Even so, we cannot expect public virtue to be inherited merely as an ideal. It will require families that model gratitude and personal discipline, schools that teach Western philosophy and ethics, local associations that cultivate mutual responsibility, and religious communities that sensitize individual conscience. To rebuild our moral architecture, these various institutions must be revived. For as political analyst Yuval Levin notes in A Time to Build, “Our institutions form the character of the people within them.”
In the end, we cannot expect to preserve a liberal democracy until each generation learns to embrace its civic responsibilities. As from the beginning, the survival of our distinctive liberties rests on the quality of people we are actively forming. For, without virtue, freedom fails—not by force from without, but by erosion from within.