George Weigel on "Changing the Game"

From Weigel's recent piece at First Things:

[T]he sickness in our political culture is serious and it reflects the pathogens that have been at work for some time in the general culture.

What are they?

• A raw individualism that conceives “freedom” as radical personal autonomy because it thinks of the human person as a twitching bundle of desires, the satisfaction of which is the full meaning of “human rights” and the primary task of government.

• A lack of commitment to the common good, which shows up in everything from bad driving habits to declining volunteerism to tax cheating to declaring a pox on politics and sitting out elections.

• The vulgarization of popular culture and entertainment, which has so deeply wounded our politics that they’ve become another form of reality TV, producing a spectacle that should shame us into a collective examination of our consciences as consumers.

• The confusion of “success” with sheer wealth by individuals, businesses, and corporate boards, which empties economic life of its vocational nobility and inculcates a counter-ethic of beggar-thy-neighbor competition that’s a grave danger to markets and a threat to the capacity of free enterprise to help people lift themselves from poverty.

• A grotesque misunderstanding of “tolerance” and “fairness,” rooted in an even more comprehensive delusion about what makes for human happiness, which isn’t “I did it my way.”

The list could be extended ad nauseam, but perhaps the basic structure of our situation is in sharper focus. We must rebuild American political culture so that, at its presidential apex, it is far less likely to produce such a mortifying choice as the one created by this election cycle. That requires the rebuilding of our public moral culture. And that is a task for several generations, which must begin now, at the retail level.

A tall order.  But this sounds right.