Robert Reilly

“They taught that freedom is not divorced from nature; it is rooted in and limited by nature. Virtue is conformity with what is naturally good. That is why freedom, rightly understood, is freedom to choose the good. It is not license or licentiousness, which is unnatural and unreasonable, in other words, against nature. Only a virtuous person is capable of rational consent, because only a virtuous person’s reason is unclouded by the habitual rationalizations of vice. Vice inevitably infects the faculty of judgment. No matter how democratic their institutions, morally enervated people cannot be free. And people who are enslaved to their passions inevitably become slaves to tyrants. Thus, the Founders predicated the success of the republic on the virtue of the American people. If there is any one thing on which the Founding generation agreed, it was this. Without it, the republic would fail, and it is why it is failing now—not because of the Founding but despite it.”
― Robert Reilly, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding