Only a fool or a pundit would predict the outcome of the 2012 American Presidential election. I’m not much of a pundit, but I am a fool, so here are my predictions. I call it the Rock, Paper, Scissors election (and yes, I have registered that name). It works like this.

The Endangered Virtues essay series is an online volume, written by members of Hoover’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society that rests on several shared convictions: that the American constitutional tradition is a source of wisdom about the mutual dependence of liberty and virtue and the tension between them; that the tradition places primary responsibility for the cultivation of the virtues on which liberty depends not on government but on the institutions of civil society, particularly the family and faith but also on education, work, and civic life; that in recent decades and owing to a variety of causes—social, cultural, economic, and political—those virtues and the sources that sustain have been exposed to danger and are weakening; and that renewing the virtues and the sources that sustain them is an urgent task.

In our previous segment we discussed the political backdrop of George W. Bush’s project of "compassionate conservatism" and promised that in this installment we would explore the intellectual one.