Modernity with Restraint

                     Disraeli                   F.D.R.       Churchill                J.F.K.                                                                                               


Anglo-American democracy, the remarkably sober and decent politics of “the English-speaking peoples” as Winston Churchill famously called them, represented that non-ideological current of modernity that remained faithful, however imperfectly, to constitutionalism, common sense, moral decency and the living embers of classical and Christian wisdom. If rights had priority, duties were not forgotten.   .   . The English-speaking peoples embodied that rarest of things, modernity with restraint, natural rights tethered to natural law, invigorating principle to sound prudence, material progress to a proper sense of limits and a well-grounded suspicion of utopian delusions.

.   .   . liberty has been confused with a project for complete “liberation” from all limits and restraints.   .   . Abortion-on-demand has been sacralized by the progressive-minded and is seen by them as a “positive good” of the first order, like slavery with the southern slavocrats of old. Western democracies, from Belgium and Canada to France, compete to legalize and liberalize euthanasia, betraying the primordial task of the medical art “to do no harm”.   .   . unrelieved victimization makes almost everyone whiny and resentful when they are not violent and aggressive.

[We] need to restore and reinvigorate the crucial moral foundations of a once liberal order. Freedom without self-limitation and deference to the ends and purposes informing human freedom cannot begin to overcome [today’s] totalitarian impulse[. The other side] openly wars with the idea of the Good itself[. W]e must patiently, but vigorously, recover .   .   . principles that undergird American liberty and Western civilization.   .   .

— Daniel J. Mahoney, American Mind


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