The Corruption of Senatorial Virtue

People have usually attributed the fall of the republican order in Rome to the corruption of senatorial virtue and the expansion of empire. Senators came to seek only private interest in their public office. They neglected the unifying worship of the ancient hearths. They convulsed the republic with factionalism and civil strife. The republic collapsed through loss of virtue - the courage to sacrifice for the public good.

This is from William Johnson Everett's gem of a book, God's Federal Republic: Reconstructing Our Governing Symbol. And with his summary above describing the fall of the republican rule in Rome, transitioning to the Casesars, Bill describes so much of what is going on in modern-day America.

The particular sentence describing the neglect of our foundational principles ("unifying worship of the ancient hearths") points to our ignorance, or contempt, of those concepts like the common good, compromise, and the rule of law that our nation's founders set in place over two centuries ago. Even the structural features of our constitutional government, with its separation of powers and checks/balances, are abandoned in the pursuit of "factionalism" and the expansion of political power. "We have to support OUR president, and select OUR judges."

It's just a little thing, but I believe it is telling. With their social media presence, politicians invest significant energy in telling us the virtuous things they do, in order to gain political approval. It is apparently extraordinary, for example, when a politician supports veterans, as current Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) attempts to remind us on Facebook every week. Supporting veterans with all kinds of services, including health care, and education, and housing assistance, is not some extraordinary virtuous act. Rather, that should be taken for granted, expected, a basic responsibility of the civil society through its government. Yet Senator Tillis, in touting this as extraordinary, is simply, in the words of Bill Everett, seeking only his own private interest.

We should also note Bill's definition of virtue - the courage to sacrifice for the public good. An enlistee in the armed forces is therefore virtuous, compared to those who seek through extraordinary means to avoid military service. Those who stood up to King George III more than two centuries ago, pledging their lives, there fortunes, and their sacred honor, sacrificed for the public good. And those who compromised from very principled (and self-serving) positions a decade later to "form a more perfect Union," acted with that same sense of virtue.

I fear that we are losing that virtue, and that our republic is in imminent danger of collapse.