I’ve read and reread Pieper’s greatest hit (Leisure) and a few of his other works, but I’ve just found this one—published under the Nazi regime, in 1941—and it’s simply splendid.

Some quotes below, as I read. Virtue is the utmost of what a man can be; it is the realization of the human capacity for being.

Most contemporary moralistic critiques of politics are unwittingly Machiavellian. They accept Machiavelli's strict binary of "noble but ineffective" versus "effective because immoral," and pride themselves on choosing the "anti-Machiavellian," "noble but ineffective" side

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https://twitter.com/NateAFischer/status/1702884339875266993

But to accept the frame that your enemy has proposed is already to have surrendered. Moralists who pride themselves on choosing the "noble but ineffective" route in politics fail to realize that there is an alternate, and superior, way to view the relation of morality to politics

What @herandrews @Byzness @PerfInjust @TheWorthyHouse et al. have in common is the desire to remedy our decline by thinking beyond today's political dogma, which dogma relies on a history of cartoonish villains as the only alternative to the One Good Thing
providencemag.com/2023/05/christ… @herandrews @Byzness @PerfInjust @TheWorthyHouse Reexamining the alternatives to liberal democracy requires bringing sobriety and realism to our study of history and political ideas.

I haven't seen any of them "idealize" dictatorship—what I've seen in them is the realism so lacking in Whiggish apologists for liberal democracy.