The Three Principles of Government

Now that I’m getting into the guts of Montesquieu’s  The Spirit of Laws, it is time to start dealing with the principle that he asserts underlies each form of government. 

Republics (both democratic and aristocratic) require Virtue, meaning the ability to see beyond your own interest to the general interest; Monarchies require Honor, an unwritten code followed by the nobility in protecting their interests from the monarch; Despotisms require Fear.

The first thing that a conservative like me thinks on reading that is: what about today?  We conservatives think in terms of rules. Virtue to us is the life lived according to the rules.  Honor is the instinctive patriotism we all feel.  Fear is what policemen do to criminals.

What do liberals think?

• Liberals don’t believe in government by virtue, and they do not expect it of their followers.  In fact in the aftermath of the New Deal they constructed a political philosophy that asserted that the good state was the precipitate of the competition of interests.
• Liberals don’t believe in government by honor.  Honor, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History is the courage of the soldier staying in line during battle.  But liberals believe that the height of courage is to be an anti-hero that steps out of line.  Dissidence is the highest form of patriotism, and all that.
• Liberals don’t believe in government by fear.  At least they say they don’t, but they use fear freely in controlling their institutions like schools and colleges where conservatives fear to tread.  And now they are jailing people who defy land-use regulations.

So what do our liberal friends believe in?  We looked at that earlier this week in looking at the failures of education.  We determined that liberals believe in liberty, the notion of “I shall,” and socialism, the notion of “You must.”  They do not understand the conservative notion of “We should.”  We also know that liberals believe that compassion for others justifies government compulsion.

In fact, I believe, liberals believe in anything that gives them power.  They appeal to virtue when it suits them, honor when convenient, and fear when they can get away with it.

And I suspect that they do it in all the wrong places.