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“We are more than a government,” writes New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. “We are a nation, a people bound by shared bedrock virtues.”
In his new book, “Stand” (to be published March 24 by St. Martin’s Press), Booker tells us that, at a time when America is splintered in many areas of public life, virtue is a strategy that can awaken our sense of common cause.
Read the introduction below, and don’t miss Faith Salie’s interview with Cory Booker on “CBS Sunday Morning” March 22!
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Introduction
This book is about virtue.
I know how that might sound—lofty, abstract, even detached from the crises we face.
Our nation is fractured. In our communities, and even in our families, tribalism drives us not merely to disagree with but to despise one another. Politics has become an obsession with enemies. Demagoguery is ascendant. Authoritarianism threatens our constitutional principles.
Corruption is being normalized. Hope feels scarce. What we are against preoccupies our attention, while the deeper question of what we are for is left unanswered.
So I can already hear someone objecting: Dear God, Booker, our country is in crisis and you want to talk about … virtue?
Yes.
Virtue is not a luxury or an end in itself. Virtue—the disciplined practice of our highest ideals—is the strategy through which we as a nation survive and prevail.
It is how we fight. It is how we win. It is how we heal.
The ten virtues I have selected for this book—agency, vulnerability, patriotism, truth, humility, community, creativity, perseverance, grace, and vision—are practices I have wrestled with in my own life. Over the next ten chapters, I explore how these virtues were the keys to success, survival, redemption, and renewal in the lives of individuals and the life of our country, and I argue why each is desperately needed in this moment. From George Washington to Conan O’Brien, from suffragist Alice Paul to disability rights activist Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, from Abraham Lincoln to John Lewis, I have looked to the stories of leaders from our past and present, along with lessons I have learned the hard way in my own life, for instruction in our time of crisis and challenge.
In this book, I argue that many Americans who came before us, and many among us today, have consistently proven that virtues are practical: They expand our power, deepen our sense of belonging, and equip us to endure and ultimately prevail. Virtue is a strategy that wins elections, moves legislation, and shapes government priorities. But, most importantly, virtue is a strategy that transcends: awakening our sense of common cause, reigniting our shared convictions, and rekindling the belief that our destiny is bound together. In turn, virtue makes the practical work of governing effectively all the more possible.
In the early days of the Civil War, when the survival of the United States of America itself hung in the balance, Reverend Samuel F. Colt, a Union army chaplain, captured the essence of the conflict in a piercing question: “Are we a Nation? Or, Have we a Government?”
His question was definitional: Who are we? What do we believe in? What do we stand for? What binds us together beyond laws, policies, or our government’s delivery of services?
Our founders, imperfect geniuses as they were, sought to create not only a government but a nation rooted in virtue. They studied and drew from Enlightenment philosophers and debated history and human nature. They knew that the government alone could not bind us; only shared values, rooted in the best of humanity could. Those ideals inspired what was written into the Constitution, and the very idea that our Constitution must be amended and our nation improved by future generations who could redeem their shortcomings and address their imperfections through collective struggle and the democratic process. They also knew, and showed us, that virtues are not self-fulfilling or inevitable. They require constant work.
And so, again and again, in every era of our history, Americans have made the deliberate and difficult choice to turn toward virtue to meet their greatest challenges and to rise to the call of our country to make ours a more perfect union.
Now it is our time.
We are more than a government. We are a nation, a people bound by shared bedrock virtues. These virtues are not irrelevant relics. They are disciplines of survival and instruments of triumph.
I know many are feeling scared, angry, hurt, and hopeless right now. It is in times such as these that we again face a difficult choice. There is the inevitable temptation to sacrifice virtue for convenience, to exchange our highest ideals for the false promise of expediency. But we can’t abandon our virtues now and hope to pick them up later—sacrifice our binding virtues and there may be no later for our nation at all.
I was raised as a child of the civil rights generation. From my parents and grandparents and their friends, I heard stories of heroism—ordinary Americans of all backgrounds who became the foot soldiers of a movement. People who defied impossible odds with courage, sacrifice, and struggle. Amidst their trying time, when people were drenched in hurt and hope was hard to find, they demonstrated great virtue. For them, virtue was a difficult but ultimately rewarding choice. It became an invaluable weapon of resilience, a shield against oppression, and a compass that guided them forward.
My parents quoted something so often in my childhood that it almost lost its meaning for me. Now that I am older, it compels me and imparts a renewed sense of urgency.
It is a refrain familiar to us all: “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.”
The virtues within our history are not soft sentiments or moral niceties.
When things get difficult, they keep us upright.
They are a constellation by which to steer through dark times.
In the midst of a storm, our virtues are our defiant, deeply American insistence on standing: for ourselves, for one another, and for the nation we love and share.
Excerpted from “Stand” by Cory Booker. Copyright © 2026 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
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