The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture. I’m not talking about the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick. I mean he has no Republican values either. He has no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision, sense of history. He doesn’t care about the life of the mind OR the life of the senses. He is not mandarin, not committed to inquiry or justice, not hospitable. He is not proper. He is not a bon vivant who loves to eat, drink, laugh. There’s nothing he would die for....She goes on for a while longer. It is clear that she loathes the man, of course. Still, at least some of this criticism is warranted. It can't be that he has no values, but he does not seem to have many strong values. He loves winning, and he loves 'big, beautiful' things that are associated with himself. He would like America to be one of those things.
He has no sense of military valor, and is openly a coward about war. He would have sorely lacked the pagan beauty and capacity to fight required in ancient Greece. He doesn’t care about his wife or wives; he is a philanderer but he’s not a romantic hero with great love for women and sex.
That is a kind of patriotism, in that it implies a willingness to take on the country's problems in order to make her bigger (economically) and more beautiful (as he sees it). He will want to win at this project, but I'm not sure he cares exactly how he wins, or exactly what he wins -- for example, I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up endorsing single-payer health care if he decides he can win that battle and thereby claim credit for having done something 'big' and 'beautiful.'
Or is that wrong? His administration has so far adhered much more strongly to conservative actions, the health debate aside, than his history or his language would suggest. Is that coming from him, or from the people he has chosen? Is there a core moral vision that he has hidden for some reason?
11 comments:
She describes a perfect leftist. Why no love then?
He seems to me to justify policies based on their (expected or promised) outcomes rather than working from first principles and then developing policy based on those. He foresees good results which he believes will prove the wisdom of the policies.
It's not how we're used to seeing politicians operate—and it's not how I reason about politics—but it's far from clear to me that it's ipso facto inferior as a method.
Maybe more to the point, Trump is supposed to be our employee, not our exemplar. If his qualities make him a good employee then that's as much as we can expect. Wanting him to also display kindness, evangelical family values, propriety, pagan beauty and so on is going beyond the remit of his job description. He's not a king and not supposed to be. We don't have those here, and for good reason, and this longing for a king whom we can admire as showing all the royal graces is not only pointless, it's a grave sin against republicanism.
Well, partly. I see your point, of course, about him being an employee and not an exemplar.
On the other hand, political office entails a kind of honor. I mean, any political office -- judge, policeman, legislator, President, whatever. The office requires a special respect, i.e. an honor, because it involves authority. If you don't respect the people who have authority over you, you're not likely to respect their decisions or rulings or orders. Then, either you can't do the job you were hired to do, or you have to resort to main force -- which, in addition to being ugly, isn't a terribly effective way of performing the role of President. If people won't obey, you have to expend resources trying to make them obey. It's more costly, less effective, and even Federal police and military forces can only be so many places at once.
You can see the effect this is having on Trump's capacity to execute his office -- i.e., to perform as an employee. His executive orders keep getting overturned in court in part because the judges don't respect him. They don't respect his character enough to believe he has good faith in his legal filings, and they treat him accordingly.
So even accepting that the right standard is 'employee' and not 'exemplar,' I'm not convinced that his lack of moral character doesn't matter. It seems to be damaging his ability to perform in important ways.
His executive orders keep getting overturned in court in part because the judges don't respect him. They don't respect his character enough to believe he has good faith in his legal filings, and they treat him accordingly.
Hmm. I don't think for a moment that that's true, actually. They don't respect his office because they don't think he holds it legitimately, and they don't think he holds it legitimately because the Wrong People put him in it. I never got the impression this had anything to do with his character.
(Of course, they also disagree strongly with the policy approach he's taking—they don't like the idea of limiting immigration based solely on what's good for the United States, and consider this an unacceptable justification for measures like his moratorium. But if they accepted him as legitimate holder of the office, they'd likely at least look for a larger figleaf of legal justification for vacating an executive order he has statutory authority to make.)
None of this has anything to do with his character flaws—real, alleged, or simply assumed because he's Trump. Had a president been elected who was a populist, unpopular to the point of loathing with the aspirational class, explicitly opposed to large-scale Muslim immigration, and a Republican, yet the faithful husband of one wife lifelong, a morally serious Catholic, and a bon vivant (to take just a sampling from the quoted author's buffet of desirable characteristics), the courts would have no more respected the legitimacy of his exercise of the powers of office than they do Trump's.
...because they don't think he holds it legitimately, and they don't think he holds it legitimately because the Wrong People put him in it.
Some of them fantasize that the Russians put him in the office. But when I read the court orders that have come down, it sounds as if they really doubt his good faith. The arguments sound like, "Yeah, you're the President, and the President has certain powers, but you seem like the kind of low character who would use them in illegitimate ways. Oh, you say you're not going to do that, and you've constructed an order that facially appears not to do that, but we're going to assume that you'll do it anyway because your word clearly isn't trustworthy."
... yet the faithful husband of one wife lifelong, a morally serious Catholic, and a bon vivant (to take just a sampling from the quoted author's buffet of desirable characteristics), the courts would have no more respected the legitimacy of his exercise of the powers of office than they do Trump's.
I wonder. I've watched Mike Pence being mocked for taking his marriage vows very seriously, of course. Clearly, they disdain that too. I'm not sure I believe that they wouldn't take his word seriously, though, in a way that they don't take Trump's seriously.
...the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick.
I suppose, then, that she considers James Madison to have no liberal enlightenment. After that, she must be writing satire.
His executive orders keep getting overturned in court in part because the judges don't respect him.
No, his orders keep getting overturned because the judges don't respect the law, and they don't respect their own oaths of office. The Hawaii judge, for instance, based his ruling on matters wholly absent from the EO he stayed. The Washington judge based his ruling on nebulosities while carefully ignoring the actual law before him--no mention of it.
Eric Hines
Unfortunately, Grim, you seem to think that those judges are acting in good faith, and THEY ARE NOT. It is the worst sort of abuse of the courts and the entire legal system, because it is obvious that it isn't the law that matters to those judges, it is politics.
As Glenn Reynolds and other have noted, all that is doing is creating contempt for the institution.
...all that is doing is creating contempt for the institution.
Not in guys like me. It's creating in us contempt for the man presiding in the court, not for the office of the court. Many of us dumb Bible-toting, gun-clinging, irredeemably deplorable inmates of flyover country can make the discrimination.
Eric Hines
The problem I'm talking about doesn't stop with the President. It extends to every level. You have to respect the judges that are placed in positions of authority -- and you clearly don't. They don't respect the President. The President doesn't respect them. People, ordinary people, don't respect one or they don't respect the other -- or they don't respect any of them.
There's a cascade failure coming, if we don't work this out.
Some of them fantasize that the Russians put him in the office.
I don't mean the Russians (which is, as you say, a fantasy—and one I don't actually think anyone takes seriously). I mean the Deplorables. People of (in their way of thinking) low character put him in office. His support comes from the lower orders—racists, sexists, xenophobes, whatever else was on Hillary Clinton's list—and so his election was not legitimate and he's not really the President.
I think this also is the reason for the continued fantasies of putting Hillary in somehow, whether via intimidating the Electoral College into voting for her, or impeaching Trump followed by a "special election", or a fairy godmother tapping Hillary with her magic wand. The only people who voted for him are Those People, and they aren't supposed to count, so his election wasn't a real election and he's #NotMyPresident.
This would not be any better if Trump had absolutely no character flaws, because it's not about Trump so much as it is about who has the right to rule.
Grim, you speak of respect for government institutions, yet I seem to recall that our founders had little respect for the institutions of government, even saying things like
"... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...",
and
"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." -Thomas Paine
They also established a government that by design would have three different loci of power going at each other's throats so that none might become too powerful. That idea built of a justified fear of the apparatus of government- hardly having respect for any of the offices involved. Their political campaigns hardly indicated much repect either (once Washington stepped down)- just look at the election of 1800 for example, that between two of our most esteemed founders. Respect for those in government is a luxury, but certainly not a necessity. Government is, by nature, too wretched an instrument to deserve much in the way of respect.
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