Redefining Morality
To the "what happened to you?" crowd I ask: what happened to YOU?
Above: a guest smiles as a host on Russian state media compares the genocide of Ukrainians to deworming a cat.
Lately on Twitter I have seen the resurgence of a tired form of criticism, commonly made by Trump fans against us Trump critics. I am speaking, of course, of the old “what happened to you?” question, usually coupled with an assertion that Trump “broke” the Trump critic. I have myself been a target of this kind of mindless drivel, but this piece is not about me, so I’ll cite an example of someone targeting Jonah Goldberg with the same kind of nonsense:
Blah blah blah. The funny thing is: the very people who ask “what happened to you” seem not to realize that nothing happened to us . . . but that a very significant question remains:
What happened to them?
Because these people, who often (like the guy above) deny being Trump fans, are very obviously Trump fans. Or, if they are not, then they are the sort of non-Trump fans who never criticize Trump with vigor, always find a “whatabout” whenever Trump’s failings are discussed, and inevitably save their nastiest commentary for anyone who is a real Trump critic.
These people all voted for Trump, and will again. Nothing Trump has ever done really bothers them all that much. His immorality merits nothing more than a shrug. Were these people always this morally callous and disinterested?
What happened to them?
On Sunday, David French addressed the phenomenon of Republicans adapting themselves to Trump’s version of morality. French cited some recent examples of prominent Republicans acting like pigs to play to the base — you know, like Matt Gaetz declaring to cheers that “]n]obody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb” — and observed:
Many millions of Republicans aren’t just Republicans on Election Day, they’re Republicans every day. And Donald Trump placed every-day Republicans in a constant dilemma. Did you point it out when he did evil things? Or did you mainly remain silent, trusting in the notion that no matter how bad Trump was, his opponents were worse?
Or, even worse, did the tension between Trump’s actions and your own morality grow so great that you started to redefine morality itself? How many people made the migration from supporting Trump in spite of his character to supporting him because of who he was? I can think of countless folks, in both public and private life.
French calls this phenomenon “discipling,” and uses his piece to argue that Christians must reject Trump. I am less interested in talking about what Christians should do than I am in discussing the redefinition of morality in response to politics generally. Evangelicals, by and large, have made their peace with supporting one of the most immoral and godless men ever to hold public office in this country. They should repudiate Trump, but they won’t. We all know this.
Instead, I am interested in this concept of “redefining morality.” It’s a concept that applies to believers and non-believers alike, and Trump is merely the most recent and by far the most extreme example of the phenomenon.
When I read French’s piece, I was reminded of a quote from War and Peace, in which Leo Tolstoy provided this insight into the mind of Napoleon:
And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and conscience darkened of this man on whom the responsibility for what was happening lay more than on all the others who took part in it. Never to the end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.
That quote is not just an insight into Napoleon, but an insight into human nature itself — and it has application to Donald Trump and his most fanatical followers. A world leader acts contrary to truth, goodness, and humanity. Does the world reject him as a result? No: half the world praises him and his actions. And so, he cannot repudiate his actions. Instead, he must repudiate truth, goodness, and humanity.
It follows that his followers must do the same. For they know what goodness is, in their hearts. We all do. To excuse evil, we have to repudiate that which we know is good.
And we all do know what is good. C.S. Lewis opens his apologetic Mere Christianity in this way:
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"—"That's my seat, I was there first"—"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"— "Why should you shove in first?"—"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"—"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise.
It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Lewis calls this the Moral Law and says it is implanted in us by God. He takes on several arguments against that proposition, and I find his defenses compelling. (If you don’t, read the book and experience his defenses for yourself.) Deep down, we all know what is right and what is wrong. We also often tend to do what is wrong, because we are human beings. I believe the principal goal of our exisence is, or ought to be, to strive to live a life where our actions match what we know to be right.
Politics interferes with that project in an almost unique way.
Politics makes people insane — indeed, insane enough that they are willing to discard their entire world view (to the extent they have one) in service of their political views.
As an aside: I saw this firsthand when I was pursued by a man named Brett Kimberlin, who spent years attacking me for purely personal reasons. Specifically, although Kimberlin had tried to redefine himself as an elections rights activist, Mandy Nagy and I had dared to point out publicly that he was, in fact, a violent criminal who had been convicted of setting off several bombs, one of which had blown the leg off of a Vietnam veteran, leading him to commit suicide. Kimberlin did not like that, so he did his best to destroy us. (He failed.) He is evil but cunning, and one of the ways that he managed to enlist people in his cause was by pretending that his crusade against us was really a political one. It wasn’t a story about a violent criminal and bloggers who dared tell the truth about that violent criminal. His version was a story about a noble man of the left, once wrongfully convicted of crimes he totally didn’t commit, who was simply trying to point out the insanity of a group he labeled as radical right-wingers. (It didn’t help that our group of Kimberlin critics was infiltrated by Ali Alexander, a grifter who truly is a radical right-winger, as his involvement in the January 6 coup attempt shows.) By converting a simple personal feud into a phony political dispute, Kimberlin snookered many influential leftists into believing he was the Real Victim. (Hi, Marcy Wheeler!)
Yes, politics makes people insane, and it causes them to repudiate truth, goodness, and humanity. And this has definitely happened to the most avid of the supporters of Donald Trump. Indeed, it has happened almost by definition. He is so patently immoral, to support him means you have to put morality and humanity aside.
I recently read a column by an old friend of mine whom I will not name, who is very smart and politically knowledgeable, but who appears to have drunk deeply from the limitless well of GOP Kool-aid. (If you’re reading this, I’m not talking about you; he or she does not subscribe to my newsletter.) Again, my point is not to target a particular person (whom I like on a personal basis), so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here. The column was garbage, but it’s the kind of garbage you see in much right-wing media these days. The fact that it is so representative of mainstream Republican opinion is my point: indeed, that is the entire problem. The piece is basically a broadside against the January 6 committee. Liz Cheney, whom I view as a heroic figure, is portrayed as a hypocrite trying to make life difficult for conservatives, I guess because Liz Cheney hates conservatism or something. I don’t think I have ever heard this person acknowledge that Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election, much less acknowledge that he is an immoral human being who is unfit for office and should never be near power again.
If you can view the events revealed by the January 6 committee and decide that the committee is the problem, you are the problem.
If you had talked to me ten years ago, and had told me that this friend of mine would one day be writing a column in defense of those who participated in an attempt to steal a presidential election, I would have thought you crazy.
But that’s what Trump does to people. As French says, many of these people probably voted for him because they thought him the lesser of two evils. But people like to justify their vote. They like to believe that what they did is right. And so, they make excuses. If the person they voted for turns out to use the office of the presidency for personal financial gain, they will say everyone does it. Some will tell you they respect the cops, even as they beat the cops — with signs declaring their respect for cops! They will repudiate truth, goodness, and humanity. They will redefine morality so that it means “whatever Donald Trump does” even though deep in their hearts they know the Moral Law is inconsistent with his every action and utterance.
If you have ever wondered how an entire nation can bring itself to back national policies that support genocide; if you have wondered how Russian citizens can defend Vladimir Putin to their own Ukrainian relatives whom Putin is slaughtering; if you have wondered how Chinese citizens can cheerfully take a role as prison guards in concentration camps where men are gang raped for the crime of starting a school to teach Uighur children in their own language; if you have ever wondered how German citizens could support a government that dehumanized the Jews and treated them like cockroaches to be exterminated; then you have wondered about how politics can make people insane and ignore the Moral Law. (No, I’m not comparing Trump to any of these people or things; if you’re unable to comprehend an analogy, I’m really not interested in hearing from you.)
But people who ignore the Moral Law still make arguments about how they are obeying it. As C.S. Lewis notes, people pretend to conform to the Moral Law even when they do evil. Comparing the victims of genocide to worms helps provide a moral justification for eradicating that people from an entire country:
And this happens everywhere. If you think human nature causes people to behave this way in Russia, or China, or Germany, but could not cause people to behave this way in our country — we are different, after all! — then I commend to you this line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago:
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.
This is, I stress, an aspect of human nature, not conservative human nature, or Republican human nature, or German, Russian, or Chinese human nature — but human nature generally. If you are of the left and think that your fellow travelers are immune, try studying the history of leftist totalitarianism and tell me just how very different from right-wing totalitarianism it is.
I don’t have an easy solution. I can’t control what the monsters in any given government do. All I can control is my own rhetoric, and make sure I do nothing to give them aid and comfort. I can’t control others’ insanity, but I can control whether I allow politics to drive me insane. I choose not to allow that.
I think most of you are with me. That’s why you’re reading this. It’s good to know folks like you are still around. There are dozens of us.
DOZENS!
P.S. I am still working away on my post about the history and precedent of the Independent State Legislature Doctrine. It’s a pretty daunting task but I have made some significant progress. Stay tuned for that.
After hearing from exactly the sort of chucklehead that this post is about, I have deleted the chucklehead's comments and instituted a new policy: comments may be left by paying subscribers only, even on free posts like this one. If "Gen. Chang" wishes to berate me here, he is going to have to pay for the privilege. In the meantime, he has received a dishonorable discharge.
Probably the most regrettable transition I've seen in the Trump era was Glenn Reynold's transtiton from a man of the libertarian right to an ardent and uncritical supporter of Donald Trump. Winning, it turned out, was everything.
The classic essay on the problem you raise -- and one ironically suggested by Professor Reynolds, pre-Trump -- is "Who Goes Nazi?" by Dorothy Thompson, Harper's, August 1941.
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/