American Political Culture in a Tailspin of Moral Decline

What happens to a culture when everything that parents, teachers, clergy, judges and other conveyors of cultural norms tell children NEVER, NEVER to do — to lie, cheat, steal, hate, hurt, abuse and disrespect — what happens when a large minority of voters and their leaders not only turn a blind eye to such social sins, but side with people who practice and condone them with shameless abandon?

What happens to a culture — to a whole way of life — when one side of a political debate considers their goals so important, so morally superior, so absolutely right that they think it honorable, and even courageous, to use any means possible, even dirty crooked ones, to achieve them? What happens when those means include the blatant fabrication of an entire alternative reality based on self-supporting lies, whole systems of deceit, in which a politician or a news outlet with the “right views” can get away, for a while, with uttering virtually any falsehood?

What happens? The foundation of trust and probity upon which every culture depends begins to crumble. Politics becomes a sick joke, particularly in the eyes of the young. Reason in debate is replaced by the malicious, the fabricated and the absurd. And in the United States, in its current condition, ruthless power brokers and big business can make literally billions of dollars selling citizens products that could outright kill them, from automatic weapons that can turn any gathering or quiet shady street into a slaughterhouse, to cancer-causing tobacco products, to addictive painkillers, or fossil fuels that are turning a human-friendly climate into the lethal weather of an alien planet.

We’re seeing here now every day what happens to a country when its moral infrastructure is sabotaged by greedy narcissists, draconian demagogues, righteous bigots and rapacious opportunists.

If you’re Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, you make a deal to cough up three quarters of a billion dollars to avoid a penalty twice as large in a defamation lawsuit brought by a voting machine company defending itself against your big lie of a “rigged” election that came close to ruining its reputation.

If you’re a New York Republican congressman, like George Santos, you might get elected to office, and become an overnight media celebrity, by lying about everything in your life. You might even be marginally accepted by the dignitaries of your august conservative political party, but eventually have to plead not guilty to indictments charging you with fraud, money laundering and making false statements to Congress, crimes you’ve already admitted to and shrugged off as mere peccadilloes.

If you’re former president Donald Trump, you’ve become the universal cartoon character of a sleazy dealer, the grubby huckster and tarnished mastermind of every conceivable kind of underhanded political movida. You might even be re-elected president despite fact checkers at the Washington Post documenting that you’ve told over 30,573 untruths during your first term in office, including a slew of defamatory and misogynistic rubbish about a woman who accused you of raping her, rubbish that will cost you $5 million to sweep under the carpet.

If you’re the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, you protect your branch of government from the oversight of outsiders by allowing associate justices, and perhaps even yourself, to take clandestine emoluments that amount to bribes and are strictly forbidden to members of Congress and to White House appointees and staff.

If you’re the Republican Party, you have a long history of using virtually any nastiness and dirty trick to keep power, including a documented and televised armed insurrection at the US Capital to overthrow a Democratic president-elect before he can take office, an insurrection you can’t wriggle out of, despite having the gall to deny over and over again that such an insurrection ever took place.

But if you’re all the rest of us, chances are you see that these fantastic and odious goings-on are tearing the country apart.

How can families raise children to be upstanding, fair-minded citizens in such a culture? What are kids to think when charlatans and con artists become elected leaders, when millions of people, habituated to the hoodwinking dazzlements of propaganda advertising, draconian bigotry and public relations schemes, vote caricatures of bunko artists into public office? You have to ask yourself, is American culture close to being infected by an incurable virulence of deception and deceit? At this point, how can you think it’s not?

What’s brought us here? It could have something to do with a grandiose puffery of moral self-righteousness. The GOP considers its economic policies of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, it’s hatred of government, its misogyny, its xenophobia directed at immigrants, its evangelical sanctimoniousness, its gun fetish, and its throw-them-in-the-deep end rugged individualism to be so sacred they’ll do virtually anything to have such policies prevail. This “anything,” we know, includes all manner of dirty tricks, or what Nixon Watergate operative Donald Segretti called in 1972, “ratfucking” political enemies.

Although sleazy and illegal chicanery has tainted players of all political persuasions throughout our history, it’s hard not to see the modern GOP as the major inheritor of America’s worst competitive instincts. These take various forms of an ersatz, homegrown Machiavellian frame of mind that embraces tactics some scholars say have “criminal value” in the zero-sum game of politics as warfare. In other words, they commit actual crimes in the service of that they consider to be the “greater good.” Such tactics occupy a moral low ground that so down and dirty it’s often hard to believe it’s even happening.

When politics in a democracy becomes immediately associated with the sordid, the laughable, the outrageous and the criminally vile, the body politic can begin to feel a kind of mental nausea. Public life becomes repugnant. Good people stop paying attention. They also stop running for office. We all become vulnerable to big-promising extremist reformers who know how to exploit confusion, disillusionment and chaos. It sets the stage for electing ruthless and talented people with an operational sophistication for governing, who can turn democracy into a dictatorship, undermining a whole system of justice, and eventually erasing all dissent without most of us even knowing it.

Are we setting the stage for such a horror now? Is this what happens when some people dismiss politics as meaningless while others play it like the life and death struggle it really is? Have we become so addled by disinformation that we’re ripe for the taking by even some pipsqueak American Fuhrer who not only has some of Trump’s gall and theatricality, but is marginally ruthless enough ruin our social safety net, inflate our tendency to racial and gender bigotry, get us into more wars we don’t know how to win and stall all vital action on climate change until there’s absolutely nothing we can do to save ourselves from catastrophe? Are we, in fact, allowing ourselves to become terminally inane?

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it