This being so, the Republicans are still struggling to find national leadership both in Congress and among state Governors. While social conservatism does not lack prominent voices, the most articulate and effective seem to be coming from outside the world of professional politicians, a matter of some discomfort to party managers. Together with familiar talk radio "shock jocks" and the new Tea Party activists, both of whom are a liability as well as an asset, is a newly prominent line of well-educated commentators and academics, many of them religious, though not in the manner popularly associated with the Evangelical Right.
Among the leading figures of this group is Robert George. Swarthmore, Harvard and Oxford educated, George occupies a distinguished position at Princeton, holding the McCormick Chair of Jurisprudence that was occupied in earlier times by Woodrow Wilson, who went on to be President of the University, Governor of New Jersey, two-term US President and Nobel laureate. Very unusually for that traditionally Waspish environment, George is an orthodox Roman Catholic.
Well-known as a scholar, lawyer and public commentator, he has acquired a new status as a leader of American intellectual conservatism, the heir to William F. Buckley Jr, Richard John Neuhaus, Irving Kristol, and Ralph McInerny, who have all died in the past two years. Indeed, if the verdict of a major profile recently published in the New York Times Magazine is to be believed, George is the leading American voice of thoughtful Christian conservatism. But any images of eccentricity or fogeyishness would be out of place: "Robby" George is youthful, stylishly dressed and fully up-to-speed with the electronic information culture.
George has had considerable influence outside the academy, having been a member of both the US Commission on Civil Rights, and the President's Council on Bioethics. But his centre of operations is in Princeton's elite academic environment and it was there that we talked about his ideas and his hopes for America.
Central to his work is the task of understanding and helping others to appreciate what he describes as "the profound, inherent and equal dignity of every human being and all that follows from that about how we should lead our lives, and govern ourselves as communities". According to George, this takes us to a true humanism that identifies principles of conduct (including justice and human rights) by considering the various fundamental and irreducible aspects of human wellbeing and fulfilment.
I haven't yet come across anything by Professor George to alleviate my doubts about his understanding of the American federal system. There are those on the "left" who critcize his American Principles Project as being another Republican website.
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