Can Liberty Survive Without a Soul? by Donald Devine

By Donald Devine, The American Spectator, April 23, 2026

Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. …

The deeper crisis isn’t political failure — it’s the loss of a shared sense of the good.

It takes a serious intellectual to confront the fundamental questions. The number one problem today, Michael Lucchese has argued, is our “inability to connect the case for liberty to a larger, transcendent vision of life’s ultimate purpose.” The “liberal spirit of toleration” necessary for liberty, which “the West cultivated for 250 years or more,” is now so weakened that it seems Alexis de Tocqueville’s “darkest prophecies” for freedom’s future are coming true.

Today’s only hope is to “embrace a public philosophy that identifies both liberty and virtue as spiritual goods worth preserving.” But developing such a philosophy “only works when the institutions that make it up are free to embody a coherent account of the Good Life and shape their members according to it.” “The preservation of liberty” is “not simply an economic or political concern, but first and foremost” is “a moral one.” ….

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