WASHINGTON DC -- Got your attention with that headline, didn’t we?

The thinking goes like this: Conservatives are for smaller government, and Clinton is diminishing the
presidency every day. QED. We tried this thesis out over the weekend on folks in town for the Conservative
Political Action Conference (aka, nerve center of the “vast right-wing conspiracy”). We didn't get many takers.

We don’t really want to comment much on this astounding civic spectacle, and so in the best Clintonian fashion it is time for us to…change the subject. People who want to take a thoughtful approach to these confusing times
should run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore for a copy of Angelo Codevilla’s latest book, The Character of
Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (Basic Books, $27). The
epigrammatic power of this book appears on every page.

The “character issue” in Codevilla’s hands is about a lot more than mere private peccadilloes. It is not simply
that we have forgotten the words of Creon from Sophocles’ Antigone--“He that is a righteous master of his house will be a righteous statesman”--that give the present moment its portent. Rather, we need to recognize that the current opinion that “character doesn’t matter” isn’t the fault of one person, but represents the culmination of a generation of change that has effectively transformed us into a wholly different nation. “We have changed enough to change countries,” Codevilla writes, and “a generation from now we might well live in yet another kind of country.”

“Liberal democracies,” Codevilla reminds us, “are more subject to changing their character radically than any
other kind of regime.” That is because liberal democracy emphasizes choice. In recent years the idea of choice has lost any notion of natural constraint, so that today the horizon of choice is bounded only by “preference” and “consent.” In such a world liberals are unable to give any reasonable account of why they might be troubled by presidential licentiousness, which is why the polls are so contradictory at the moment. Conservatives and
libertarians, meanwhile, are prone to reducing behavior to a matter of mere incentives, as if behavioral problems could be solved with a new income tax credit.

Even before the events of the last two weeks, Clinton was widely pointed to as evidence that, in the post-Cold War world, the presidency is naturally a less heroic office than it used to be, as if our expectations for the office
could justifiably slip. Never mind this non sequitur; Codevilla reminds us how the Roman Empire began its long
downhill slide only after it had finally vanquished its mortal enemy Carthage. Did we win the Cold War only to
give up on the healthy introspection about our civic life that is necessary to ward off decadence? Clinton may be
doing us a favor by raising the issue so acutely, though we suspect the question will remain urgent long after the
he exits the national scene.

--By Steven Hayward