COURAGE CAN SAVE US: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future

Review

SECTION ONE What does it take to hold a democratic republic together when its institutions are under strain from within? Rye Barcott's answer is specific: find the people who already know what it costs to serve something larger than themselves. 'Courage Can Save Us' profiles a cross-section of Democratic and Republican politicians who came to electoral office after careers in the military or the FBI. Barcott's argument is that this prior formation — the discipline, the chain of command, the experience of consequence — produces a different kind of elected official, one capable of acting on conviction rather than calculus. The book is not a polemic for either party. It is a series of portraits, and its implied reader is anyone who has grown tired of asking why public life seems to attract exactly the wrong people. Barcott, himself a veteran and the founder of a civic organization, writes from inside the world he is describing. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book affirms that the human person is ordered toward the common good by nature — the capacity for self-sacrifice documented in these profiles is not manufactured by ideology but drawn out by genuine formation. Each subject's decision to enter civic life after military or law-enforcement service reflects the CCMMP's premise that persons are constituted for contribution to a community larger than themselves, a claim rooted in Aquinas's account of political life as an expression of rational nature. - **Fallen**: The implicit backdrop of the book is the disordered state of contemporary political culture — a culture shaped by concupiscence in its civic form: the disordered desire for status, re-election, and tribal approval over genuine justice. Barcott's subjects are interesting precisely because their prior formation interrupted the ordinary pathway into politics, which is to say the ordinary pathway of disordered ambition. - **Redeemed**: The book does not invoke grace, but it does propose a kind of natural redemption: that persons who have been formed by sacrifice can re-enter broken institutions and partially restore them. From a CCMMP perspective, this is a genuine good operating at the level of acquired virtue — the Thomistic distinction between infused and acquired virtue matters here, because Barcott's argument holds without requiring theological premises, yet points toward something the theological account of virtue formation would recognize. - **Justice (sacrifice)**: The profiles are essentially case studies in the virtue of sacrifice ordered toward justice — people who accepted physical and professional risk for the sake of a community they did not choose. The Thomistic account of justice as giving each their due finds a concrete analogue in the lives Barcott documents. - **Prudence (civic wisdom)**: The book functions as a study in political prudence — the subjective virtue of wise participation in civic affairs. Military and FBI formation trains exactly the integral parts of prudence that Aquinas identifies as necessary for sound judgment: memory of past consequences, foresight of future risk, and circumspection about present circumstances.

✓ Strengths

• ✓The book centers the irreplaceable value of service before self — military and FBI veterans who enter politics carry habits of sacrifice and institutional loyalty that counter the careerist logic dominating modern civic life.
• ✓By profiling both Democratic and Republican figures, the book implicitly argues that courage in public life is a virtue of character, not a partisan platform — a move consonant with the CCMMP's insistence that moral dignity belongs to persons, not ideological categories.
• ✓The military and law-enforcement background of Barcott's subjects supplies concrete formation in prudence-strategic-wisdom: these are people trained to assess risk, weigh incomplete information, and act under pressure — habits that translate directly into the Thomistic account of prudentia in civic affairs.
• ✓The book's thesis — that courage can save democratic institutions — invokes the classical and Catholic understanding of fortitude as a cardinal virtue ordered to the common good, not merely personal bravado.
• ✓Profiles of real, named individuals function as moral exempla in the tradition of virtue ethics, offering the reader concrete imaginative models rather than abstract prescriptions — a pedagogically sound approach to virtue formation.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The book's account of courage and civic virtue operates entirely within a natural-law register and makes no explicit theological claim; readers seeking integration with sacramental or redemptive categories will need to supply that framework themselves.
• ⚠Barcott's framing risks implying that institutional service (military, FBI) is itself a reliable school of virtue — a claim that Catholic anthropology would qualify, given that institutions can form both virtue and disordered loyalty depending on the ends they serve.
• ⚠The bipartisan profile structure, while editorially fair, may inadvertently flatten moral distinctions: political prudence must be ordered to genuine justice, not merely procedural courage, and the book's description does not indicate whether it interrogates the specific policy positions of its subjects through that lens.