Nowadays when you mention the book Profiles in Character to Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and, as it happens, the coauthor of Profiles in Character, he immediately cracks wise.
“You mean you actually found a copy?” he says. “A major opus. A big bestseller. How much did you pay for it? A buck? Nothing? Or did they pay you to take it off their hands?”
Jokes aside, the book offers an interesting footnote in the evolution of Jeb Bush. He ran for governor in 1994 as a “head-banging” (the odd description is his) right-winger. Four years later he ran as a conservative who “wanted to open his heart to people.” What happened in between, from head-banger to heart-opener, is reflected in Profiles in Character.
After losing his first gubernatorial campaign, Bush fell in with a financial firm and founded the ferociously fricative Foundation for Florida’s Future, a think tank devoted to state politics and public policy. Lacking intellectual pretensions himself, Bush has always liked to surround himself with think tank types. He had earlier sat on the board of the Heritage Foundation. One of Heritage’s signature initiatives in the mid-’90s was The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, overseen and publicized by the conservative superstar William Bennett, who had worked as Ronald Reagan’s education secretary and George H.W. Bush’s drug czar.
Bennett’s index was uniformly depressing: a series of upward slopes showing 30-year increases in crime, divorce, abortion, drug abuse, drop-out rates, teen pregnancy, and—to use a phrase that these days sounds as fusty as a Wesleyan hymn—out-of-wedlock births. The index seemed to capture something gloomy in the conservative temperament of the day, as it became clear that the economic renaissance of the Reagan years had not reversed the culture’s steady march to libertinism, its “social regression,” as Bennett called it. Bennett found his own answer to the crisis not in Reaganite tax cuts or business deregulation but in an issue that at first blush seems far beyond economics or government policy: the revival of character through the cultivation of virtue. His massive collection of moralizing fables and legends, The Book of Virtues, became one of the great publishing successes of the 1990s.
Virtue back then was much in demand, at least as a political topic, even when the word itself wasn’t used. Entire school districts gave themselves over to elaborate “character education” curriculums, complete with block-letter banners and wall posters exhorting the children to practice honesty and compassion, giving elementary schools the feel of a Maoist reeducation camp run by Barney the dinosaur. Prodigious wonders were ascribed to character ed and its emphasis on virtue: President Clinton advocated it as a means to prevent shootouts among the young scholars in high school. Even the first lady, Hillary Clinton, briefly explored the relationship between personal virtue and public policy in a curious concoction she called the “politics of meaning.”
“We were real interested in what Bennett was doing with his index,” Bush says now, “and we [he and his coauthor, a young think tanker named Brian Yablonski] wanted to do something like that for Florida.” Bush had come to believe that his ’94 campaign’s exclusive emphasis on policy was misbegotten—boring to voters and somehow off the point. Their compilation of data for their state was every bit as depressing as the numbers Bennett adduced for the country at large. Over the previous decades, while Florida’s state population had doubled, juvenile crime had risen more than 350 percent; out-of-wedlock births, 300 percent; divorces by 322 percent; children on welfare, 333 percent; and so on. Not every trend line was going up, however: SAT scores in Florida had declined by 62 points in 25 years. And the government’s growth had outpaced the growth of the population—an increase of 287 percent in the number of full-time government employees. “Our social structure buckles,” Bush and Yablonski wrote.
Thanks in part to Bennett’s influence, this picture of cultural decline was common to conservative politicians in the 1990s. But Bush and Yablonski’s rendering was unusually vivid. They devoted a chapter, “Fourteen Days in May,” to chronicling the goings-on in Florida over one randomly chosen two-week span in 1995.
Day One: “The body of a nude and beaten ten-year-old boy is found floating . . .”
Day Three: “A Volusia County public-school teacher was arrested for sexual battery for coaxing a sixteen-year-old boy . . .”
Day Four: “In Clearwater, law enforcement officials discovered one of the worst cases of elder abuse . . .”
Day Seven: “Police in Sarasota arrest a former dentist for paying a hit man to kill his wife . . .”
Day Ten: “[T]he forty-year-old pastor was found by her husband today in the closet of their home. She had been murdered . . .”
Welcome to the Sunshine State!
Bush’s diagnosis of the social regression was the same as Bennett’s. It had been caused by a collapse in virtue, which he defined as “standards of behavior that are fixed and firm in any civilized society.” Among the virtues are “fortitude, prudence, justice, temperance, discipline, work, responsibility, honesty, honor, and compassion.” The loss of virtue was in turn the result of a collapse in the institutions that are designed to instill virtuous behavior and good character: the family primarily, but also churches and synagogues, neighborhoods and civic associations—the “little platoons” that stand as mediators between the individual and the state. “The family and community,” Bush and Yablonski wrote, “are the training grounds for a child before he or she can venture into society as a good citizen.”
In Conservative Hurricane, his indispensable account of Bush’s two terms as governor, the political scientist Matthew Corrigan referred to Bush’s effort to “use government to restore character in Florida society.” This isn’t quite right; Bush was realistic about the relationship between government and virtue. A virtuous citizenry might be necessary for self-government, as many of the Founding Fathers said, but government could do little to produce a virtuous citizenry, as Profiles in Character insisted. “Character is not something that can be legislated,” they wrote. “Any movement to reverse our cultural indicators will come only from individual effort and not government.”
This of course put any conservative politician, circa 1995, in a pickle: Moved to seek office by society’s deepest problems, he hoped to lead a government that he believed couldn’t do much to solve society’s deepest problems. He had to master what might be called the Reagan Turn—the pivot point in a campaign message when the politician, having just told voters that their decadent country is racing straight for the sewer, turns to reassure them that the brightest days of this wonderful land of freedom and opportunity lie just ahead.
Profiles in Character is an exercise in the Reagan Turn. The book abruptly goes from a list of horribles—“If you have made it this far, you are no doubt feeling a bit depressed”—to a series of sketches of individual Floridians who have made their state a more tolerable place and can, by the power of their example, show the rest of us how to do it too. The point sounds more sentimental than it is, because the examples themselves are genuinely moving: the sixth grader who demonstrates the virtue of persistence in starting a program to feed the hungry, the Vietnam POW who stands as a model of courage to the hundreds of kids he counsels, the doctor whose compassion leads him to care for the homeless, and so on.
What is the answer to cultural decay? “They are the answer,” Bush and Yablonski wrote, “because they make us realize we are the answer.”
“We would never say that government is the answer,” Bush said in an interview last month. “To the contrary: Our point was that a self-governing people requires virtue and character. And if you’re in government you can’t ignore that. There’s not a program you can develop through government to develop character. This is a societal, cultural issue.”
On the other hand: “I think people in public life can talk about it, to say that it’s a problem. But this moral ambivalence that exists out there is a real challenge for us. The minute you suggest there’s a better path for large numbers who are struggling, you’re accused of ‘passing judgment.’ That just freezes the conversation. But it’s not ‘judgmental’ to suggest that a baby being brought up in poverty without a dad will have a bigger challenge growing up and the mom will have a bigger challenge economically than if they had an intact family.”
Hearing a politician talk like this is either refreshing or dumbfounding, depending on your point of view. Profiles in Character itself has an antique feel. Talk of virtue and character, here in the second decade of the 21st century, sounds hopelessly retrograde—very 1995. Part of the reason is that the apocalypse was somehow averted: Many of the indicators of social decline reversed themselves, particularly rates of crime, drug use, teen pregnancy, and abortion. At the same time, the “little platoons” and mediating institutions that were supposedly indispensable to reversing the indicators—the traditional family, religion, civic associations—have themselves continued to decline. The causal chain from family and church to virtue and character to good or bad behavior was more complicated than anyone knew.
Still, Bush insists the restoration of virtue is an essential part of the argument conservatives need to make—indeed, that the conservative case for limited government can succeed only if the cultivation of virtue and character again takes its place at the center of the culture.
“All the freedoms that the Founders gave us rest on the assumption that we could govern ourselves,” he says. “But if we can’t, then the demands on government just overwhelm everything”—as government assumes the responsibilities once reserved for private life.
“You can argue for limited government all you want, but if the demands on government get higher and higher because people aren’t as self-governing as we once were, then the dike breaks. You can be for limited government and watch the dike break. But the dike is still breaking.”
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
