Too frequently modern day conservatives seek freedom from government without accepting personal responsibility for societal imperatives. Liberals, on the other hand, increasingly seek freedom from personal responsibility by transferring as many problems as possible to impersonal bureaucracies. Faced with an impoverishment of public philosophy, America needs a new vision, a new emphasis on quality in public life, an understanding that there is a crisis not only in ghetto values, but leadership ethics. No society can thrive or dare contemplate leading the world if moral values are shortchanged. No government which derives its original legitimacy from the consent of the governed can maintain that legitimacy if its governors do not operate under the same ethics and rules of conduct as the governed.
Leadership is the conjunction of good ideas and good character.
One without the other dispirits society. Citizens can credibly debate whether an activist government advances social justice or denies the same by stultifying incentives and tilting investment priorities. We must embrace as the profoundest of obligations the necessity of ridding the country and the world of our most debilitating weakness, racism, and our most self-destructive behavioral pattern, violence. America needs a new social compact that eschews violence and demands problem solving based on an assumption of individual worth. There is always a tension in a society such as ours that is based on firmly held ethical and religious values but which protects as a fundamental right diversity of perspective.