The Politics of Virtue versus The Politics of Consequence

The trajectory that history has taken us down over the past decade has removed any doubt from my mind that a positive future for humanity is at extreme risk. The liberal democratic values that I took for granted growing up are no longer on a solid foundation. But one might wonder if we are indeed near the “end of history” — just not in the way Francis Fukuyama meant when he wrote The End of History in the early 1990s.

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a raging epistemic crisis. A rising chorus of people are arguing that it is time to question everything. Question everything we’ve been told by them. By them, it is generally meant to mean the elite. The elite encompass intellectuals, subject matter experts, politicians, business leaders, scientists, and the entire narrative of history itself. Everything is up for grabs, and it doesn’t seem likely that this trend is going to change directions any time soon. In fact, it seems set to accelerate. Many, including in my friend group, among colleagues and even in my family, believe this is a good and inspiring thing. It is a necessary thing, because they have become hopelessly corrupt and everything they do or say is in doubt.

Whether or not COVID-19 was actually dangerous at all, and whether or not we should have attempted as a society to do literally anything about it is in question. Whether or not Putin and Xi Jinping are really the bad guys is in question. Whether or not the 2020 US Presidential Election was conducted with integrity is in question. You already know where I’m going with this — literally everything of any consequence to society is in question. It is increasingly seen that the smart money is to doubt that any of these things are true, and that we should take to social media and search for heterodox viewpoints, and take them very seriously, as a matter of course.

Here’s the thing: there are many sympathetic reasons that allow me to understand and empathize with all of this. Be it the “noble lie” about masks at the beginning of the pandemic, or the breathless belief by many that Donald Trump was literally on the Kremlin’s payroll. But my capacity to understand where people are coming from when they take these positions of maximal doubt, does not mean it is matched by my belief that these contrarian takes are meritorious.

You’ve heard this all before. You’re either convinced this is a serious problem, or you’re convinced that this collapse of trust is completely justified and virtuous. But I’m not writing this piece to convince you about what you should think about these issues. I’m writing this piece because I think we are headed nowhere. We are descending into the depoliticized abyss, and it’s the place where democracies go to die.

My personal take is that the more important issue at the heart of everything we see happening is not misinformation or propaganda — although they are endemic to the problem. My take is that we have descended into what I call the politics of virtue. Which doesn’t sound all the bad. But I’m going to make a case that it is, in fact, very bad.

The way I define the politics of virtue is one where the goodness or appropriateness of action is primarily judged by a measure of moral authority. What do I mean by this? Let me demonstrate with a slightly absurd scenario — which I promise will make sense.

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A man is walking down the street, making his way home. As he’s walking he hears a commotion in an alleyway. He peers down into the alley, and there, slightly obscured by a garbage dumpster, he sees a man kicking a woman on the ground, who is crying hysterically and trying to yell for help.

The man begins quickly jogging towards the scene to intervene. But as he approaches, a woman calls out to him from behind. “Hey you!”

He turns to the woman behind him. “I know you. I saw you in the news. You’re the that guy who was just released from prison for domestic assault! What are you doing?”

The man explains to her that he’s going to help the woman. She looks completely dumbfounded by what he’s saying. She says, “what makes you think that someone who literally just got out of prison for beating women, has any moral authority to be playing the hero now?”

Just as she says this, the man who had been beating the woman, joins in the conversation, agreeing with the woman. “She’s right. You’re no better than me. Besides, I just found out that she was cheating on me, and did you know that my wife hits our kids when she gets angry? ”

Feeling outnumbered, the man sinks his head and walks away, leaving the situation to continue without his interference.

—

This is obviously an absurd scenario. But it’s almost morally identical to the conversation that many make about Russia’s war against Ukraine. The morally-compromised bystander is the stand-in for the United States in this case. The woman is the stand-in for Ukraine, and the man committing the assault is obviously Russia. The woman stranger plays the role of those arguing that America has no business doing anything about this.

The United States is not a virtuous country. It has done evil. It has no moral standing to involve itself. It should stay at home and repent. The consequences to Ukraine, like the consequences to the woman are completely orthogonal. Additionally, an argument not quite captured in this scenario involves the idea that the US actually provoked Russia into it, further compounding on top of the deficit of moral standing. America should just pack up and go home. This is the politics of virtue.

The politics of virtue takes many forms. In some of the more extreme forms of cancel culture, where someone’s actions in the distant past are used to debit the moral standing of a person, regardless of their moral character in the intervening period.

It’s also manifest in connections to identity groups, where high virtue is uncritical conformity to a narrative that belongs to the group. In this frame, intellectual honesty and free expression within the group is the casualty.

The bottom line is, in the politics of virtue, what matters most is not whether the action being taken, will lead to some better consequence normatively. But what matters is whether the person has any business even trying to act. The politics of virtue represents a descent into deep cynicism and deep distrust. The ultimate currency one can earn in the politics of virtue is to demonstrate through engaging in the ritualistic rejection of persons and institutions lacking in credentials of virtue. Only after a cleansing of these unclean people, can we begin to think about moving forward.

Now, the politics of consequence would prefer the bystander, despite his troubled past, intervened, and brought an end to the woman’s suffering. It would prefer to live in a world of redemption, by allowing those who have made bad choices to start making good choices today. It would prefer that institutions that have erred or acting immorally, begin acting better and morally consistently today, as opposed to demanding they suffer extinction for their crimes.

The trouble, for those such as myself who wish to live within a politics of consequence, is that I’m losing that fight.