Sherman Criner is the co-founder and co-editor in chief of The Lemur and a rising fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in History and Public Policy. He is interested in political history, theology, and classical ethics.
Following the death of Pope Francis, millions of Americans, Catholic and not, mourned. And then, of course, one American, seemingly on cue, “truthed” an AI-generated image of himself as the pope.
It is difficult to know whether to sigh, laugh, or withdraw, as I have increasingly found myself doing, from the world of online politics as a whole. Perhaps it is best to do all three. In the same way that the Trump team once dismissed grotesque boasts about sexual assault as mere “locker room talk,” we are again instructed not to take seriously the gestures of our most powerful man. As ever, the joke is that he is either joking or simply signaling the virtue of “real Americans,” whomever they may be.
Let me begin by acknowledging what many already believe: that President Donald J. Trump is, for conservatives, a crude hammer by which to build or salvage a political order. But let us not mistake the fact of political efficacy for moral legitimacy. It is one thing to achieve a goal; it is quite another to do so by shameful means. To extort a professor into awarding you an A through blackmail may secure the desired grade, but it would leave your character—and that of future cohorts—in ruins. So too with politics. The right end reached by disreputable means corrupts not only the path but the people who walk it (I’m looking at you, Senate Republicans who denied Garland a hearing but subsequently rushed Barrett’s).
Our problem is not just political. It is civilizational. Americans, leaders and laity alike, are hemorrhaging virtue. We do not blush at crudeness; we celebrate it. We do not mourn our over-indulgence; we meme it. Ours is not a crisis of policy, though policy may reflect it.
Yet, I do not pretend to know whether it was the public that lost its virtue first, or the leaders who led us astray. That chicken-or-egg debate is less useful than we imagine. What matters is that we have become unmoored from the very idea that there is a moral standard to which we might aspire. What is needed is not theocratic enforcement of goodness, church communities will suffice, but an embodied model of it. We need not mandates to read the Ten Commandments in public schools, Sharia law courts, or compulsory prayer before basketball games. We need leaders who embody the virtues Americans aspire to. However, it seems ever more likely that we have already created the idols of our own destruction.
To understand what we have lost, it may help to revisit an earlier republic that attempted, successfully in some respects, to take public virtue seriously. Among the Republic’s many innovations was an office known as the censor. This was not a mere bureaucrat or accountant, though he did keep the census. The censor was the moral arbiter of the Republic, charged with maintaining public virtue, overseeing the Senate’s membership, and judging the behavior of citizens. He could remove senators for scandalous conduct. He could censure public immorality. He was, in essence, a symbolic conscience of the Republic.
This is not to suggest we resurrect a Roman-style censorate. Constitutional scholars still debate the precise limits of religious establishment in American public life, and for good reason. The American dream, in its original form, was one of religious freedom and tolerance, as marked by the journey of the Puritans on the Mayflower. Hence, the notion of a federal church or moral authority is largely prohibited by our history and temperament, though some, like Justice Clarence Thomas, make a rigorous historical case for state churches. But we may still learn from the Romans the importance of visible, cultural standards of virtue. The censor’s power was not his sword but his stature. He represented what a Roman ought to be. He modeled, however imperfectly, the Republic’s conception of honor.
A more modern analogy might be found in constitutional monarchies that distinguish between a head of government and a head of state, like the United Kingdom. The former—usually a prime minister—governs in practice, wields political power, and engages in the rough business of legislation and administration. The latter, often a monarch or ceremonial president, serves as a symbol of national unity, embodying the cultural and moral ideals of the people. Though largely powerless in a legal sense, the head of state plays a vital role in articulating and exemplifying a nation’s highest values. The American presidency, in theory, combines both roles. In practice, we have reduced it to the former. We expect governance and forget symbolism. We have lost the sense that leadership requires not just effectiveness but dignity.
This is not to say that King Charles is the perfect embodiment of English virtue, but he is, in a more general sense, representative of an aspirational national character. We Americans, by contrast, have lost the appetite for such a figure. Our celebrities are profane, our politicians theatrical, and our influencers algorithmic. We have outsourced our public formation to those least capable of modeling restraint. And we reap what we sow. Our political culture rewards brashness for strength, vulgarity for authenticity, and conviction for cruelty. Now, there are far more pernicious problems that underlie this symptom of indency, but the mere existence of these issues does not necessitate fatalistic surrender to them. Today is the time to seek reform.
But, to ask what should replace this vacuum is to ask a deeper question: what is virtue? Admittedly, though I have my own conceptions of the summum bonum, or the highest good that each individual ought to accord themselves with, it is not within the scope of this piece to convince any of you that my view is more aligned with reality. Rather, as is self-evident from daily life, political discourse, social media, and, well, human history, we all have some intuition of what we ought to do—irrespective of objective truth claims, secular metaethics, or religious doctrines.
As C.S. Lewis once observed, “Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.” And that, in the end, is why the question of virtue cannot be ignored. If we are to emerge from this cultural slog—if we are to restore not only competence but character to public life—we must first recover the idea that leadership is, above all, a moral calling.
It is not enough to support those who are merely capable of winning. Doing so only tightens the shackles of immorality around the American conscience, further submitting us to our basest instincts. When in doubt, we would do well to heed Ben Franklin’s warning:
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
In other words, freedom without virtue devolves into a soft despotism that manipulates our appetites. Thus, we must seek leaders who strive not only for victory but for virtue. A people cannot be great if they pursue power while scorning goodness. Until we recover that aspiration, our constitutional republic will go on trading its dignity for a cheap, “based” punchline.
By Sherman Criner
