Saturday 1 September 2012
The story that the GOP told this week was informed less by the ideas of the American founding and more by the nineteenth-century myth of the self-made man. When the Founders thought about a moral or virtuous republic they thought about it not only in terms of individual liberty, but in terms of sacrifice. Their vision was not only about pulling oneself up from poverty and the working class, but about living in a benevolent community in which people will sometimes temporarily lay aside their rights and interests in order to serve their neighbor, their community, and the common good. The GOP’s Moral Creed ☀
