Every time a talking head on cable news frets about which side has “moral authority,” I can’t help but chuckle.
What “moral authority” do either Republicans or Democrats think they own at this point? Certainly none with the public. Both major political parties are generally loathed as cheats, creeps, and cranks.
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And deservedly so. The quality of the individuals who rise to political prominence in the greatest nation on earth is conspicuously low. Perhaps it has always been this way, and only the advent of social media has made their behavior impossible to conceal.
Certainly, Graham Platner is far from the first to seek elected office with a graveyard’s worth of bones stuffed in his closet. After all, the current president of the United States once bragged that he could grab women by their genitals because of his celebrity.
And sexual indiscretions are only the beginning. Self-dealing, bigotry, and paranoid lunacy are downright common to the character of American political leaders.
When it comes to prioritizing honorable comportment over political expediency, neither party has a leg to stand on. And certainly no “moral authority.”
The difference between today and the days before Bill Clinton‘s desecration of the Oval Office or even Trump’s Access Hollywood comments is that we used to at least pretend to care about the personal virtue of our leaders. Now we don’t even bother with the pretense.
In the past, even the appearance of impropriety could tank a campaign. Today, the virtue standard only applies when it gets absurdly bad — when candidates face highly credible charges of rape that magically surface days before a dropout deadline.
The Democratic leaders pretending to be appalled by the allegations now facing Platner weren’t bothered by his other moral failings — the Nazi tattoo, the Kik profile, and other allegations of physical abuse to a woman — because they weren’t seen as politically fatal. The character of the man never entered into their calculations.
And they are breathing a sigh of relief. Now they can ditch this loser and install someone with a marginally better shot at beating Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in November. That’s all that mattered to them in the first place. No one is fooled by any of this.
Conservatives shouldn’t wait for the next terrible revelation to surface about one of their own favored politicians to reassert the virtue standard. The coming post-Trump era offers the opportunity to reset. And they should take it.
The nomination of Ken Paxton for Senate in Texas should never have happened and should be the last black eye on this scorecard. Paxton was impeached by his own party’s legislature, accused by his own former deputies of bribery and abuse of office, and his divorce filing revealed that he had multiple extramarital affairs. A political party that nominates and raises funds for such a man has no credibility on morality.
And that’s a major problem. America needs at least one political faction that understands self-government was never supposed to be compatible with rule by the shameless. Moral character isn’t just a nice thing if you can get it. It’s a necessary ingredient in the American experiment.
It’s especially important for a movement that still fancies itself the guardian of traditional manhood. Virtue is manly, and turpitude isn’t. The Right, now dominated by the faux-manly men of Podcastistan, seems to have completely forgotten this. They’ve confused swagger for strength and dominance for excellence — which is exactly how a man with Paxton’s record ends up on a ballot instead of laughed off one.
Conservatives should be held to a higher standard because they, by virtue of labeling themselves as such, believe that character, tradition, and the accumulated wisdom of the past matter. You can’t be a conservative and use women or abuse your office for self-enrichment.
And because, at this low point, owning up to past failures in judgment and resetting the standard for honorable comportment would feel refreshingly — even counterintuitively — rebellious. The attempt to live a virtuous life is an exhilarating adventure, a call to the kind of true excellence upon which our culture stands or falls. A life of squalor, on the contrary, is boring and small, the stuff of men too small to understand the difference.
This could be a potent political formula in a jaded age. Somebody should try it.