front porch and empire: the blessings, and limits, of limits

​Ideally, a polity will have not just a common understanding of what humans are, and are for, but also an accurate one; ideally its understanding of justice, as instantiated in its laws, will likewise be accurate, and its laws will be patterned after the natural law. The true political common good is the virtuous life of the people, pursued together, under the discipline of law that impresses justice in their souls. 

That is not a thing that a family alone can do, any more than a family alone can live commodiously. We can get corn and lobster locally, at the lake house; we harmonize on Sondheim while washing dishes; we make and enforce rules for the kids. But for caviar and full-scale Broadway productions and the civil magistracy, we need to go back to the City. To be drawn up into the proper life of the polity, and finally to the political life of the Kingdom of God, is what completes the smaller and incomplete political life that we experience in our families and in smaller communities.
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America is not a family; New York is not a family; the Empire is not a family. All scales of true polity are ikons of the Kingdom of God according to different manners; the imperial scale is an ikon of its grandeur, its magnificence, its universality. The Kingdom of God is not cozy. 

Here.