We Can Do Better, America: The Case for a New American Party by Adam Graham

Author:Adam Graham [Graham, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-15T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Foundation for a New Party #2:

Character and Ethics

In 2011, in a Brookings Institute survey, 30% of Evangelical Christians deemed private unethical behavior irrelevant to a politician’s job performance. That number jumped to 72% as Evangelicals changed their position to support Donald Trump for President. Catholics and Mainline Protestants also underwent jumps to this position, though less pronounced.

One religious argument for abandoning all concerns about character is Trump was not running for pastor. Have we considered all of the implications of this? Do we truly want to live in a country where we only expect the clergy to have good morals, ethics, or decency? We’ve taken “don’t judge” to such an extreme, we can’t call out unethical behavior in anyone but the clergy. From school teachers to bank employees to small business owners to the President.

If we remain the sort of country we’ve become, we cannot long sustain liberty. As John Adams wrote in 1798, “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People.”

The right is far from the only side that has been inconsistent on the character issue. We’ve seen the left show concerns about Donald Trump’s sex life they never showed about Bill Clinton. Even when Clinton was credibly accused of sexual assault or rape.

Clinton’s sexual misconduct and Obama’s breaches of Presidential protocol and democratic norms have been cited as defenses of Trump’s behavior. This poison is a logical fallacy popularly called whataboutism. There’s no real attempt to justify the conduct, only to show the hypocrisy of the person calling out the misconduct. This doesn’t work so well on conservative Trump critics. Many a Trump backer will try to attack us with, “You liberals didn’t say anything when Obama did this.” However, we are conservatives, we did call out Obama, too, and we are being consistent.

Whataboutism surrenders moral high ground and lowers the bar for our elected officials. What Republicans let Trump get away with, the next leftwing President will get away with. What Democrats let the next leftwing President get away with, the next rightwing President will get away with. Whataboutism creates a downward spiral. It leads to less ethics, more abandonment of American principles, and more government abuse of America’s citizens

We need to be consistent in demanding leaders of good character and in insisting on ethical conduct while in office. The main indicator we have of how faithfully our leaders will perform their public duties is how they honor their private ones. A man unfaithful to his wife will also be unfaithful to his constituents and to his country. It is important to take a broad view of character and not limit our concern to only fidelity in marriage, though. We should ask how they treat other people in their lives.

Even had Donald Trump been innocent of any sexual wrongdoing, his business practices are a character issue.

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