Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Barbara McQuade served as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017, prosecuting public corruption, terrorism, and cybercrime cases before becoming a law professor and legal analyst. In *The Fix*, she turns that prosecutorial lens on the American democratic order itself, arguing that a set of specific institutional vulnerabilities — in law enforcement independence, electoral administration, and the norms governing executive power — now pose genuine risks to national security and self-governance. The book is not a memoir; it is a brief written by someone who spent years building cases and who now applies that same evidentiary discipline to a political argument. Her intended audience is the civically engaged general reader who senses that something has gone wrong in American institutions but wants a structured account of what, exactly, and why it matters. McQuade's prosecutorial background gives the book an empirical texture that distinguishes it from most political commentary: she is interested in the specific legal architecture that holds democratic accountability together, and in what happens when that architecture is tested. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book rests on an implicit affirmation that human beings are capable of building institutions that serve justice — that law, when functioning well, is a real achievement of practical reason ordered toward the common good. This maps onto the CCMMP's Created-state premise that the person is social and rational by nature, and that political community is not merely a contract but an expression of that nature. - **Fallen**: McQuade's argument is most anthropologically interesting when it implicitly acknowledges that institutional safeguards exist precisely because human beings are prone to self-dealing, abuse of power, and the rationalization of injustice. The Catholic account of concupiscence — Aquinas's analysis in *Summa Theologiae* I-II of disordered appetite as the persistent condition of the post-lapsarian will — would actually deepen her diagnosis: the problem is not uniquely partisan but structural to any fallen human exercise of power. - **Redeemed**: The book's prescriptive chapters gesture toward restoration through law reform, civic education, and renewed institutional norms. From a CCMMP perspective, this is a thin but real analogue to the Redeemed state — the conviction that damage to a social order can be repaired through deliberate, reasoned action. The theological register is absent, but the moral structure of 'diagnosis, consequence, remedy' is present. - **Prudence (foresight)**: McQuade's core move is temporal — she asks the reader to think about what a democratic order requires before the moment of crisis arrives. This is a straightforward exercise of the integral virtue of foresight as Aquinas describes it in *Summa Theologiae* II-II: the capacity to order present deliberation toward a future end by anticipating what current choices will produce. - **Justice (truthfulness)**: The book's insistence that public officials have a legal and moral obligation to speak truthfully about evidence, investigations, and threats draws directly on the classical account of truthfulness as a virtue of justice — owed not just to individuals but to the political community as a whole. SECTION THREE Haidt[^1], in his conversation about *The Anxious Generation*, observes that democratic threats are real but that he 'doesn't know what to do about them' — a candid acknowledgment that diagnosis outpaces prescription in most contemporary political commentary, which is precisely the gap McQuade's legal-procedural approach tries to close. Adizes[^2], analyzing how technocratic growth in the administrative state endangers democratic culture, offers a structural complement to McQuade's argument: where McQuade focuses on specific legal norms, Adizes identifies the organizational lifecycle dynamics — the drift toward bureaucratic rigidity and loss of entrepreneurial legitimacy — that create the conditions McQuade describes. The Adizes passage on corruption as the product of disruptive change ('(E) destroys old (A) and no new (A) has been established'[^3]) is particularly apt: it suggests that McQuade's 'fix' may require not just legal repair but a renewal of the institutional culture that sustains procedural trust. ## References 1. Haidt, Jonathan (n.d.). *The Anxious Generation* (video transcript/interview). — 'The democracy ones, those are bad. I don't know what to do about them.' 2. Adizes, Ichak (1988). *Corporate Lifecycles: How and Why Corporations Grow and Die and What to Do About It*. Description of Organizational Lifecycles. — 'What will endanger democracy is the growth of (a), big government, technocracy.' 3. Adizes, Ichak (n.d.). *Mastering Change: Introduction to Organizational Therapy*. — 'Corruption is the result of disruptive change. (E) destroys old (A) and no new (A) has been established.'
✓ Strengths
- ✓The book exercises prudence-civic-wisdom by drawing on the author's prosecutorial experience to name specific institutional and legal mechanisms that she argues are being strained — grounding the analysis in professional expertise rather than partisan sentiment.
- ✓McQuade's attention to what she frames as erosions of the rule of law engages the virtue of justice-truthfulness: the argument that public officials have an obligation to communicate honestly with citizens about institutional threats is a defensible application of Aquinas's account of truth-telling as a social good.
- ✓The foresight dimension of prudence is engaged when the book asks readers to consider what a functioning democratic order requires before it is damaged — anticipating consequences rather than merely cataloguing grievances.
- ✓The author's willingness to name what she sees as specific threats rather than vague 'polarization' exercises prudence-alertness, attending to particular circumstances rather than retreating into abstraction.
- ✓The book implicitly affirms the dignity of civic participation as a sphere where persons act as moral agents — consonant with the CCMMP premise that the human person is social by nature and that political life is a legitimate arena of practical reason.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book operates entirely within a secular-liberal framework. There is no engagement with natural law, subsidiarity, or Catholic social teaching as resources for diagnosing democratic health — categories that would sharpen and ground several of McQuade's central concerns.
- ⚠The partisan valence of the argument — a Democratic-appointed former prosecutor diagnosing threats emanating primarily from one political direction — will strike many Catholic readers as selective. Prudence requires attending to the full range of institutional disorders, including those that predate or cross partisan lines.
- ⚠The CCMMP's Fallen state analysis would press the book to examine how disordered desire for power operates across all institutional actors, not only the ones McQuade identifies. Without that anthropological symmetry, the diagnosis of 'the fix' remains incomplete.