The Founding Fathers believed in “ordered liberty”—that freedom could not coexist without virtue. George Washington wrote that the “security of a free Constitution” depends on “teaching the people…to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness.” The Founders predicted that forgetting this lesson would lead to despotism, as men who could not rule themselves would come to be ruled by others.
The importance of self-restraint through virtue lies at the core of both America’s founding and conservative thought. Young conservatives should feel proud to own such a rich intellectual legacy—it was Edmund Burke who wrote that “the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.” In times such as ours, that idea is countercultural, and therefore powerful.
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