How does one fight evil without becoming evil? That is the issue so far as I see it.

The role of the ordinary man is simply to survive, relying on evil to destroy itself like a ravening beast ripping its own body apart. If you were the average decent European during World War 2, unless luck gave you some special opportunity to fight the Nazis, the best thing you could do was simply to survive: to evade in your body and in your mind. Hitler and Stalin, truth to tell, did most of the rest to themselves.

But when you actually have the power to resist — as the Greatest Generation did — your problem becomes subtly different. A terrible burden, some would even call it a responsibility, falls on you to engage evil at the risk that it too may pull you down into moral damnation. As Tolkien might say, Power is a perilous thing. His metaphorical solution was to entrust power — and only temporarily — to entirely ordinary men who would put it away when the need was past and return to their gardening. The mystique of Cincinnatus and George Washington was that, like Sam Gamgee of LOTR, they could apparently see no use in it.

To recognize people who lust after power is the first skill of political discernment. And unfortunately, since America became globally pre-eminent after World War 2, a permanent class has come to see the exercise of power as their right; and the opportunity to remak the world according to their vision as their vocation. That temptation was held in check for as long as culture was anchored in the simple, while society itself was dominated by the Cincinnatuses. Today we no longer want to till the earth. We want to be cool.