Saving Washington, D.C., as President Trump is valiantly attempting to do, is not just about rescuing it and other cities from the ravages of rampant crime.

It’s about salvaging freedom itself.

It’s about whether humans are capable of long-term self-governance.

That’s still an open question – which is amazing, as the United States approaches its 250th birthday anniversary next year.

Rest assured, our enemies in foreign capitals would like nothing better than to see freedom fail.

And it very well might.

Holocaust survivor and legendary philosopher Viktor Frankl long suggested a Statue of Responsibility on America’s west coast, to serve as a mindful bookend to our Statue of Liberty on the east coast – because freedom without responsibility can devolve into mere chaos.

Frankl “warned that freedom threatens to degenerate into mere license and arbitrariness unless it is lived responsibly,” as Frankl disciple and renowned author Dr. Alex Pattakos wrote in 2019.

Frankl, Pattakos wrote, “took exception … to what appeared to be a commonly accepted view [in America] of equating freedom with a license to do virtually anything one wants. To Frankl, freedom without responsibility was an oxymoron.”

Our Founders wrote at length about the pursuit of virtue – and how a self-governed nation can only survive with virtuous citizens. Meanwhile Socrates saw the very foundation of virtue as being self-mastery, self-control. And, by extension, responsibility.

Alas, what we see in America’s streets, stores, restaurants, classrooms and, much too often, its parenting is the opposite of virtue, the utter absence of responsibility.

Benjamin Franklin warned: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

Thus, the dire need for law enforcement to step into the void of American personal responsibility to at least impose accountability – in the form of a larger police presence and more robust arrests and prosecutions.

Of which our nation’s capital must only be the start.

But law enforcement can only do so much. At some point, Americans must be shocked awake to the desperate need for individual responsibility – from one’s earliest ages.

Parents and teachers must educate current and future generations in the pursuit of self-control and the ironclad requirement of virtue in order to remain free.

President Trump’s long-needed clampdown on D.C.’s lawlessness – and city leaders’ callous indifference in allowing unchecked, unhealthy homelessness and drug use in the parks and streets – pulls the reins in on freedom for a time. But American society only has itself to blame, for decades of reckless liberal leniency toward crime and criminals and public degradation.

Pattakos wrote in March that Western societies are experiencing “a sense of lawlessness, a lack of moral standards and values, and a lack of meaning.” He notes “mounting evidence pointing to the breakdown of social order across Europe and North America. …

“Increases in criminal behavior, including both random and nonrandom acts of violence against others (e.g., physical, verbal, psychological, sexual, socio-economic), looting, robbery, break-ins, carjackings, defacing and destroying public and private property, etc., have reached near epidemic levels in the United States.

“To be sure, such acts of lawlessness are alarming and, if not curbed, don’t bode well for the future of a nation that, paradoxically, was founded on the rule of law.”

This is therefore a test – a historic test – of whether a free people can remain free for long when they exhibit diminishing amounts of individual responsibility and stretch society’s limits of delinquency and debauchery.

“On a societal level,” Pattakos argues, “the most serious manifestations of lawlessness and civil disorder demand responsible action from institutions officially charged with establishing and enforcing order, stability, and safety in the public domain, and for enacting and implementing public policies to safeguard the public interest.”

Ultimately, he writes, Frankl’s exhortation to individual responsibility must also be heeded to save Western civilization.

He’s right.

Indeed, the key to a free society’s success in self-governance is individuals’ ability to first govern themselves.

May the attempted federal housecleaning of our ailing capital be a call to once again govern ourselves – and to have less need of masters.