As we celebrate Christmastime amid an unnecessary and indefinite government shutdown and the worst December for the stock market since 1931, I’m reminded once again of my longstanding prediction: The Trump presidency will end poorly because character is destiny.
I’ve said it so often, I occasionally need to be reminded that I didn’t coin the phrase. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus did, when he observed “ethos anthropoi daimon,” most often translated as “man’s character is his fate.”
Character is one of those topics, like culture or morality, that everyone strongly supports yet also argues about. When James Q. Wilson, one of the greatest social scientists of the last half-century, turned his scholarly attention to character, many of his colleagues in academia were repulsed. Even though every one of them surely believed in some notion of good character, it was assumed that to talk of it, let alone seek a definition of it or a plan for how to cultivate it, would be an exercise in lending aid and comfort to the moralizers of the right.
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