Source: The Weekly Dish
by Andrew Sullivan
“For the ancients, thymos always had to cede to reason to be exercised properly, and always, as for every virtue, in moderation. The consequences of unrestrained thymos could be disastrous, as Socrates taught, and Alcibiades, who rashly got Athens into a war it could not win, proved. So no, the West is not defined by ambition, nor by ‘the unapologetic pursuit of national power.’ For most of the last two thousand years, after all, ‘national power’ did not exist. Christendom did. The West is defined by reason allied with Christianity, which eventually gave us the liberal order. Rubio wants to replace that with unconstrained passion allied with the will to power. God help us. But that just reveals how virulently anti-Christian the American right has now become.” (10/09/26)
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-floundering-anglo-american-right