Trip-Wire
Reflections on Week Three
For most of us, myself included, there can come a time during an argument when we realize we’ve maneuvered ourselves into an impossible stance, when we’ve stretched the facts, found ourselves defending positions we don’t believe, twisted ourselves into self-righteous knots, become ridiculous. When we just stop. Because we can’t do it any more.
That trip-wire is called honor. Or shame, its Siamese twin. Or self-respect. Or simple decency.
Alas, there are those — like Kelly Ann Conway and her boss, or Anne Coulter, or Rush Limbaugh — who have no idea what I’m talking about. Who have no limits. Who will say anything, absolutely anything — spout utter nonsense, deny there’s a nose on their face when their red-veined nose is an inch from yours — to win.
Some of this, as researchers have shown, has to do with group identity. In a recent piece in The New York Times, David DeSteno, an expert on the psychology of emotion, hypocrisy and moral judgment, points out that “it’s not about the true facts, or about how honest you believe a group is, or what the group’s past behavior is.” It’s about being a member of a club. “Just being a part of a group, any group,” DeSteno says, “is enough to excuse moral transgressions . . . your moral compass shifts.”
Doesn’t it, though.
Let me be clear: None of us is immune to the potentially compromising pull of group loyalty, that fierce, partisan joy that fires up soccer fans worldwide and allows Patriots fans to excuse their team’s ethical lapses. The issue is limits. Where you draw the line. And what’s at stake. For the quarterback to be accused of illegally deflating the footballs is one thing, after all, for the star receiver to be accused of rape is quite another. Where’s the limit? How much is too much? If, say, one of the assistant coaches on your beloved team is found guilty of being a serial child molester and it’s revealed that the head coach knew of his crimes and did nothing, is that enough for you to step out from behind your loyalty and declare it wrong?
I mention all this because the ethical compromises encouraged by group loyalty offer one way to understand the behavior of the Republican majority in Congress, though there’s a vital distinction to be made: Unlike the average football fan, our representatives are under a special obligation — specially selected and honor-bound, like members of the judiciary, to resist the temptations of partisanship — to struggle for objectivity, and to concede the opposition’s truth, however inconvenient, for the sake of the people. In that much-overused phrase, they have a sacred trust, and if those words sound quaint to you, or naïve, show me what else besides integrity we have to lean on. Self-interest as a spur to righteousness ain’t cuttin’ it.
If it’s not a natural law of some kind, it should be: The greater the trust, the greater the sin in violating it. If I’m exposed as a liar at work, I’ve failed as a man, a husband, a father, but however great in personal terms, the damage beyond my circle is limited. If Senator X lies, if he twists the truth in the name of partisanship or self-interest, he’s failed in all the above ways, yes, but he’s also failed as a representative of the people, as someone explicitly hired to do what’s best for the nation.
What would you call that if not ‘unpatriotic?’
Before I get stuck in a tar pit of my own making, let me say that I know as well as the next man (or woman) that ‘patriotism’ has a troubled history, that it’s been used through the ages to justify all manner of outrage as well as to stifle dissent, compel uniformity and so on. In fact, it would be hard to find an atrocity, committed by our government or any other, that wasn’t enabled by the misuse of that word. All too often, patriotism cloaks the barrel of a gun.
That said, a rational, questioning, critical patriotism — the desire to do right not only for one’s family but for one’s community and, in the largest sense, for one’s country — strikes me as a natural extension of personal integrity. One might hope, of course, that this inclination to ‘do right’ wouldn’t stop at the borders but expand outward into a desire to ‘do right’ by the planet we all inhabit, but that’s a subject for another day. For the moment, given that we continue to live in a world of nation states, I’d argue that an informed, skeptical patriotism is the rudder of any democracy that aspires to the name, correcting the course of empire as necessary.
Which brings me neatly back around to our current ship of fools and sell-outs — the Republican majority in Congress. To call them stupid is unjustified — and much too kind. Alas for them, they’re not stupid. They know precisely what they’re doing. They’ve known for the better part of 18 months. They’ve known all along that they were supporting the candidacy of an unbalanced, thin-skinned child neurotically dependent on attention and capable of more-or-less anything. They knew this, and we know that they knew it, because now and then, back when it looked like he might go down in flames and that telling the truth might benefit them, they said so. But then the man-child stomped and lied his way to the nomination and (with a little help from his friends), the Presidency, and their beliefs had to be revised in the light of new events. The man they had rightly called a disgrace, a buffoon, an existential threat, was now on their team. Which was a game-changer.
Invertebrates of this magnitude are one of the wonders of the world. In the blink of an eye wrong became right, lies became truth. The buffoon who had shamed and ridiculed them, shouted them down and lied about them, was suddenly their champion. Why? Because, as the champion himself put it, he’d won. Because their self-interest now lay in a different direction and if that meant eating their own words with an extra large spoon, well, get them the spoon. Honor? Integrity? Truth? Fuck ’em. The country be damned.
So now the child wanders the halls of the White House, poring over interior decorating brochures, watching TV in his bathrobe, hallucinating terrorist attacks in Europe that aren’t reported by the press because the European press, don’t you see? — is in on the plot. Now and then, like Alec Baldwin’s increasingly accurate parody of him on SNL, he gets on the phone to some foreign leader and rambles about his huge popularity while firing off threats, pausing only to ask his aides what the New START treaty is. Surrounded by sycophants and professional liars who tell him whatever he tells them to tell him, manipulated like a gullible puppy into following whatever bone-on-a-string his owners want him to follow, he’s the Boss now. Everybody tells him so. With all dissenting voices effectively purged (because dissent equals disloyalty), who would there be to disagree?
The Mitch McConnells and Paul Ryans over on Capital Hill see all this. Everybody sees it. Helen Keller could see it. It ain’t subtle. Whatever reservations we may have had about earlier presidents — and there were plenty to be had — this president is something new under the sun: A man so manifestly unfit for the position he’s found himself in that he might breach the threshold from horror to humor — Sideshow Donald Does the White House — were it not for the powers he’s unleashing, the disaster he’s capable of bringing down on our heads.
Let me say it again: The dishonorable gentlemen from Iowa and Kentucky and Wisconsin, etc. all know this. There’s not a sliver of an excuse. There’s nothing to discuss. Trusted to do what’s right for this country, they’ve failed, to a man, to do their duty. If Donald Trump were an enemy of this country — as he manifestly is — you’d call them collaborators.
A bucket of tar and a pillowcase of feathers would be appropriate; short of that, finding them guilty in the voting booth will have to do.
