BOURGEOIS NORMS.

It's very simple, according to columnist Jeff Jacoby:  "Lose your virtue, lose your republic."  His complaint is immediately about the destructive effects of the current unchecked president on Constitutional order.

The Trump phenomenon isn't an aberration our constitutional machinery can correct. It is the failure the Founders anticipated when they warned what happens after virtue collapses and applause replaces judgment. The Constitution still exists on paper. What is disappearing is the public will to enforce its meaning. A republic does not fall when a strongman declares himself unchecked. It falls when millions hear him say it — and approve.

Mr Jacoby has been on record as opposing previous presidents declaring themselves unchecked, to the approval of members of their factions.  Donald Trump, though, is the system.  Years of posturing by people claiming to be sophisticated about either the obsolescence or the oppressiveness of bourgeois norms made the current pass possible.

The British statesman William Gladstone praised the US Constitution as "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man." For more than two centuries, the self-correcting durability of the constitutional framework the Framers devised has rightly been regarded as a masterpiece of statesmanship.

But now the checks and balances on which that system depends are failing. For built into the constitutional architecture was an assumption of public virtue. It was not designed to contain a president who would openly declare himself restrained only by his own (nonexistent) morality and whose outrages would be endorsed by a major political party.

Where are the academic, or libertarian, or Republican, or Democrat voices calling for a restoration of bourgeois restraint?