"I trust the wisdom of people. And I'm confident - especially after having traveled Texas for two years - people are good, fundamentally, and if given the choice to do the right thing, they will. To do the good thing, they will," he said, referring to his unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign while giving a walking tour of El Paso and its Mexican sister city, Juarez.
People are not fundamentally good. Nor are they basically evil. Human nature is irreducibly mixed. If people were fundamentally good we wouldn't need laws or government at all, or lawyers, judges, courts and prisons. If they were basically evil the possibility that is America never would have presented itself to history, and monarchy would still be called for. America is the gift of English dissenting Protestantism.
All our political problems remain spiritual ones. There is no freedom without self-control.
