Three snapshots of the state of politics in 2024:
• Last week, Dave Williams and the increasingly isolated leadership team of the Colorado Republican Party urged Coloradans in a social media post to “burn all the Pride flags” and evoked a notorious anti-gay slur in a mass email that said “God hates Flags.”
Attorney General Phil Weiser quickly noted that it can be a crime to burn a Pride flag, depending on the circumstances, which means the head of the state GOP appears to be calling on people to commit a hate crime.
• A report last week showed that a Democratic super-PAC is spending at least $84,000 in ads to support Republican candidate state Rep. Ron Hanks in Colorado, because they think he will be easier to beat in the 3rd Congressional District. Which means the state’s Democrats may play a role in helping advance an election denier to Congress. (But who cares if it’s unethical if it might help the party?)
• And lastly, as the reaction to Donald Trump’s 34 convictions played out last week, not a single one of the critics of the case argued that Trump didn’t do what he was convicted of. No one argued that he didn’t sleep with a porn star four months after his wife gave birth and that he did not have Stormy Daniels paid to keep quiet, or that he didn’t falsify his books to hide the payment. All of that boorish behavior was almost irrelevant in the reaction to the verdicts, which focused on tactics, lawfare and party politics.
How did right and wrong get so lost in our practice of politics? It’s almost as if morality is irrelevant now — the battle between parties is so pitched neither side believes it can afford the luxury of morality. As David Brooks said in a recent column entitled “How We Got Mean”: “It’s fine to elect people who lie, who are corrupt, as long as they are ruthless bastards for our side. The ends justify the means.”
Not that people in politics haven’t been doing immoral things for a long time, but now they seem to do it on purpose to gain social media followings, and to do so conspicuously with impunity.
Nothing is more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities, writes Dov Seidman, the author of the book “How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything,” than “when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority. Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will never unite us.”
We apparently have lost so many of the moral checks and balances we used to have that politicians appear to be able to do whatever they want ethically without consequence.
Columnist Thomas Friedman made an interesting analogy recently, comparing the loss of some of the basic moorings in our society to the loss of mangroves on an island coast. Mangroves filter toxins and pollutants through their extensive underwater roots; provide buffers against giant waves; create nurseries for young fish to safely mature because their cabled roots keep out large predators; and they literally help hold the shoreline in place.
“Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves, as well,” Friedman wrote, “all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.”
Societal shame is one of those mangroves. Politicians used to bow their heads in disgrace and resign when caught in scandals that violated societal norms. But now, we can’t agree on what those norms are.
Another mangrove is religious observance, which used to be the source of much of our shared ethical framework but has been declining for decades.
This is my favorite: “Locally owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our national politics,” Friedman wrote. “A healthy local newspaper is less likely to go too far to one extreme or another, because its owners and editors live in the community and they know that for their local ecosystem to thrive, they need to preserve and nurture healthy interdependencies — to keep the schools decent, the streets clean and to sustain local businesses and job creators.” We’ve lost thousands of those newspapers, of course.
Other mangroves include civil discourse and engaging with those you disagree with, which have suffered greatly since we all went “remote”; a sense of civic responsibility if you are an officeholder that requires higher moral standards than when you’re not; and a strong focus on moral education.
Much of the reason why politicians get away with this kind of behavior, I would argue, is that we’re just not doing much moral training these days. Kids are growing up without an objective set of agreed-on ideals or a moral order, so they are morally inarticulate and morality is left to each individual to figure out for themselves. We all have our own private religion now.
The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and a team of researchers asked young adults across the country in 2008 about their moral lives. One of their findings was that the young folks had not given the subject of morality much thought. “I’ve never had to make a decision about what’s right and what’s wrong,” one young adult told the researchers. “My teachers avoid controversies like that like the plague,” many teenagers said.
I’ve never really bought Machiavelli’s argument that rulers should strive to maintain or expand their position at all costs, even if immoral acts are necessary.
The politics that is most successful, most uniting, most inspiring, I’ve found, is just the opposite: politics infused with moral authority.
When Ronald Reagan said to Mikhail Gorbachev, “Tear down this wall,” he unleashed a moral storm that brought the entire Iron Curtain crashing down across Europe.
When Nelson Mandela starting writing letters to the world from his jail cell about the immorality of apartheid, the world rose up and forced South Africa to tear it down.
The 80th anniversary of D-Day is perhaps the best of all reminders of what happens when politics and morality align.
We sacrificed many American boys on the beaches of Normandy, not because a political party told us to or because we necessarily wanted to, but because our fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers knew in their bones it was the right thing to do. The Greatest Generation rushed to do its moral duty without hesitation. In our cramped moral state, would we do the same today?
The scale of our moral achievement on D-Day throws into stark relief the smallness of our politics now: World War II was the pinnacle of a time when statecraft was soulcraft.
When politics is animated by true moral authority in our country, in other words, we can literally save the world.