Says the Father to the Son, in Paradise Lost, after the Son has offered himself to die for the sins of mankind:

Nor shalt thou, by descending to assume
Man’s nature, lessen or degrade thine own.
Because thou hast, though throned in highest bliss
Equal to God, and equally enjoying
Godlike fruition, quitted all to save
A world from utter loss, and hast been found
By merit more than birthright Son of God,
Found worthiest to be so by being good
Far more than great or high; because in thee
Love hath abounded more than glory abounds,
Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy manhood also to this throne:
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign
Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man,
Anointed universal King.

Here, Milton suggests, is the secret of true greatness, not that of show, of “the tedious pomp / That waits on princes,” of “close ambition varnished o’er with zeal,” nor of self-abasement and flattery, which is but the mirror ambition, for, as Satan will say, “who aspires must down as low / As high he soared,” and his own minions, cowed and deceived, bow to him “with awful reverence prone,” that is, face down on the floor of Hell. If we would be truly great, we must be good: it is not a sufficient condition, but it is necessary. So at least says Milton, whose titanic work, I have not the slightest doubt, helped to form the political imaginations of the Republicans who founded the United States.

We Americans used to take some pardonable pride in our goodness. The boys who died at Omaha Beach were fighting on behalf of other people, other nations, not their own, as Germany posed no great threat to us. Our folklore told the legend of the boy George Washington, who could not tell a lie, and of the shopkeeper Abraham Lincoln, who walked several miles to return one penny to a customer he had unwittingly overcharged. In several of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, Hitchcock was an Englishman who loved America, it’s the innocent, incorruptible, and fearless American—Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent, Bob Cummings in Saboteur, Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much—who saves the international day, with some help from good and decent Europeans, but also as against the decadence and treachery of the worst Europeans. Our virtues were pluck, self-reliance, cheerfulness, and the confidence that comes from knowing that, whatever your personal failings might be, you were fighting on the side of the angels: see James Whitmore’s near-lame tobacco-spitting sergeant in Battleground.

We were sinners, no doubt about that, and we knew what our two worst sins were: racism and rapacity. To say that we did nothing to fight them is unfair. You can see them nagging at the consciences of our best writers and filmmakers. As early as the decades after the Civil War, you have Americans like Helen Hunt Jackson, after careful research and much travel, ringing out against government treachery and rapacity in dealings with the Indians, in A Century of Dishonor. Meanwhile, the novelist George Washington Cable earned for himself much loathing from his fellow southerners for championing the cause of colored people, both in his novels and in such articles as “The Freedman’s Case in Equity,” which I have read in my own copy of The Century Magazine, along with an intemperate rejoinder from a white southerner, and Cable’s subsequent dismantling of the critic’s argument and alleged facts.

“All too little,” one might say, “and too late.” But when and where do we find people who are energetic at correcting their errors and repenting their sins? Mostly we find people who are energetic at condemning other people’s sins, and “apologizing” for them, and that puts on a nice show and costs the showman nothing. In our time, it is hypocrisy in the Biblical sense, a Pharisaism that parades hatred of one’s ancestors (conveniently not around to defend themselves, and mostly they are still other people’s ancestors and not yours) as love for those whom your ancestors are alleged to have harmed. But what are the worst sins of America now? What should we be repenting of right now? Irreligion and spiritual torpor; all the sexual sins lumped in a great mass of selfishness, to the point of bloody murder; sins of detraction, slander, and tale-bearing treachery; sins against the innocence of children, including the deliberate choice, one way or another, to deprive children of a father or a mother; the rejection of objective moral truths; the rejection of objective beauty. Do not wag your finger at your forebears for their sluggishness. Look to your own first. There is plenty of it to look at.

I want very much for my country to become good again. I do not look for leadership to come from politicians, except insofar as they can repudiate or repeal bad policies that restrain or even punish goodness and decency. Politicians in a democratic republic reflect not just the people who vote for them, but the whole of the populace; think not only of the sharp differences between Adams and Jefferson in the election of 1800 but of their commonalities, mostly for the good; or think of the Christian commonalities between the personally meek industrialist McKinley and the firebrand agrarian Bryan in 1900. What the phenomenon implies about our current duo, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, I will not say, and perhaps nobody can say until some distance gains us perspective. I am going to vote for the candidate who does not bear ideological hatred toward what my Church teaches, my nation’s history, my sex, the common liberties of ordinary people, the decencies that make for a strong family life, and the Christian schools and charter schools I want to see multiplying across the land. It’s a low bar to clear, that’s for sure.

I’ve long said that our young people are starved for beauty. They are also starved for goodness. They are given no guidance as to where to find either one. In place of beauty, they get the flashy and the grim. In place of goodness, they get, in public life at least, political “virtue,” personal ambition, and, if they are fortunate, an American sort of friendliness that now has worn thin. The springs of goodness are still there, I believe, because God has not withdrawn his grace from the nation, but they are to be found in the small, the local, the homely, and even the private; where it is still possible to have a conversation, to read a good book, to help a neighbor, to sing a song that actually has a melody, and to say, with Job, the honest truth, “I am but dust and ashes.”