Making Citizens

The great civilizations of antiquity have never needed a majority to survive. They have always required just a quorum of men who knew what they believed and acted on the courage of their convictions. A few hundred trierarchs at Salamis, a few thousand hoplites at Thermopylae, a Roman handful who backed Scipio when everyone else wanted to sue for peace—a hearty few have helped preserve their respective ways of life in times of turmoil.

The American Founders understood this...

Today’s America, however, no longer forms leaders. It manufactures influencers and administrators. Its schools churn out credentialed mediocrities fluent in therapy and management but strangers to duty, tragedy, or honor. The republic’s elite, once shaped by Scripture and Cicero, is now shaped by LinkedIn...

The old republic assumed that man could govern himself. But that kind is nearly extinct. The rot began not in Washington but in the schools that teach resentment..

The remedy isn’t nostalgia for Christendom or some museum exhibit of “Western Civ.” It’s the formation of character: the slow, deliberate business of making a person who is capable of governing himself, and therefore a polity...

To drink from the classics is to recover the very virtues that our republican way of life demands. The Greek starter kit was simple enough: logos—reason ordered toward truth; aretē—excellence for its own sake; sōphrosynē—self-command; and the polis—responsibility in common. The classical man read Plato for justice, Aristotle for virtue, Thucydides for tragedy, Polybius for institutions, and Marcus Aurelius for the schooling of the will...

In the classical world, greatness and restraint were inseparable; you ruled others only after ruling yourself. These are the minimum requirements for civilization...

The West once married classical ideals to religious conscience. Joined together, they produced moral seriousness yoked to intellectual ambition; pulled apart, they rot into sentimentality or cruelty. Our present elites manage the worst of both: moral vanity without belief, cleverness without character. They mistake empathy for virtue and activism for sacrifice...