One of the Boudicas of The Rightosphere, Darleen Click, made an interesting comment last week in a post she published over at Protein Wisdom:
…As long as our society is has a majority of people who hew to principles of honesty, responsibility, honor, duty and obligations, we can tolerate (and ameliorate) the few who don’t. If we tip the other way, we get Mexico.
Or, actually – sadly – The United States in 2013 A.D.
The few of old have become the many, with some of those with low-cunning running all of our institutions.
And we’ve all been infected with the Leftist way of thinking to varying degrees.
I do not know if the romance with Leftism Americans have been carrying on for over a Century will come crashing down quickly or whether it will occur because of a rebellion like The Founding, but I do know this: any victory we achieve will not be long-lasting if we begin to rebuild with our Leftist Mindsets still intact. Any sacrifices we or others will have made will ALL have been in vain unless we reject the mutant, corrupt way of thinking that drove us to where we find ourselves now.
In addition to restoring the foundations of government and society laid down by The Founding Fathers, we must restore our own souls to Virtue, to Normalcy. This can only be achieved by a recapturing of that Moral Imagination which infused The Founders and men like Edmund Burke. This apprehension is the only possession we need to overcome The Present Crisis.
So if we mean to resist the wicked things written on the sky, if we are to set our faces against the totalist and nihilist wave of the future, we must renew the sources of our moral imagination. I do not mean that we should repair to doctrinaire ideology; to the contrary, we should abjure the narrowness of ideology and improve our liberal learning – which is something very different from today’s liberal politics. Paul Elmer More once remarked that the able conservative statesman possesses a certain quality of imagination which is of high service at times of crisis. That sort of imagination – and not political imagination only – is what American conservatives must employ if they aspire to erase the wicked things written on the sky.
–Russell Kirk, ‘The Wise Men Know‘, Modern Age – Spring 1985
