THANK YOU, DONALD J. TRUMP!
Your Continuously Doing Bad Shows Us the Good
Donald Trump’s years in the Oval have helped the country learn important lessons about what goodness means.
Goodness generally refers to that which enhances a person, situation, or relationship. It points to increased human flourishing. Most often that flourishing involves others and not just ourselves. Therefore, goodness is most often linked with moral behavior.
Of course, one can ask and often does ask, “What’s good for me?” But then we want to know what goes into that notion of “good.” And does that “goodness,” however defined, come at the expense of others and their good? So, always, it seems to me, we ask “What is good?” in a context of how it affects others, which makes goodness a moral concern.
How do we as a society come to know what is good? The simplest way is to look at the evidence. Does this action or way of thinking produce beneficial outcomes? Does it enhance life, make it easier, bring satisfaction, and the like. We must also endure the perspectives of others who can also evaluate the evidence and who can point out to us where we have overlooked other evidence, evaluated evidence unfairly or in our favor, or ignored counter evidence that runs against our positions. In short, we deliberate with others to establish moral merit.
Because our understanding of what is good comes through some kind of communal validation, then we can benefit by looking at what society and our communities consider to be good behavior. Within our own society, I think there are two kinds of good: 1) Traditional or Institutional Good and 2) Renegade or Rebel Good.
1) Traditional or Institutional Good consists of those behaviors (and thoughts, though I am excluding that category in this piece) that society has judged acceptable and even excellent. That judgment has come through the process I described above: interrogation of reasons and evidence and deliberation among all concerned to establish validity. These judgments are often, but not always, codified into conventional moral rules and roles. For example, this is how we changed our minds about slavery or worship or guaranteeing women the right to vote and established laws related to them.
2) Renegade or Rebel Good is how our traditional notions of what is good change. Persons or groups who act contrary to our conventions push us to reevaluate our codes and institutions. The push makes people uncomfortable. The first reaction is often to dismiss the renegades before looking at the results of what they are arguing or how they are behaving. Hippies and the anti-war movement in the 1960s pushed Americans to question their government and the actions of some government institutions. “Question Authority” became a rallying cry for many Americans and not just a bumper sticker.
Enter Donald Trump
Donald Trump is one such renegade. From a Republican perspective, some of his actions don’t seem rebellious. His tax cuts and tax breaks fall within Republican orthodoxy. So, too, his nomination of federal judges.
His trade war with China and his tariffs run counter to this orthodoxy and therefore don’t seem to be “good” traditional Republican policies. That apparent “counter-orthodoxy” is, however, just the beginning of Trump’s rebellion.
Trump has forced us — through his tweets, rallies, and actions — to reconsider what we think is good. That reconsideration involves not just our views of the presidency and the extension of presidential power, (say, the power to punish whistleblowers, to influence judicial proceedings, and to invite foreign governments to interfere in our elections), but also our views of our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, our State Department and the value of diplomacy — indeed, the entire apparatus known as “the deep state.”
Beyond government, Trump has also led us to reconsider through his own behavior certain cultural and social values and good practices:
• Celebrity and power permit sexual assault;
• Extra-marital affairs are no big deal;
• Hush money to porn stars involved in those affairs is not problematic;
• Security clearances for your children and son-in-law are neither dangerous nor imprudent; nor is providing them advisory positions in the White House or using connections to make money for the family business;
• Frequent tax-payer financed trips to one’s own resorts are acceptable, as is encouraging foreign officials and dignitaries to stay at your DC hotel and other properties;
• Robust and continuous lying to people is part of doing business, whatever that business is, including government work;
• Insults directed at political opponents, racial and ethnic minorities, women, the disabled, the media, government agencies, entire countries, and private citizens are part of entertaining his base and part of renegade charm;
• Cruelty such as separating children from their parents at our borders is okay to use as a deterrent to those who may cross illegally;
• Filling the Cabinet and administrative positions with former lobbyists and corporate executives redefines “draining the swamp,” a Trump campaign promise.
The upshot of this renegade good is that some 63 million citizens, aware of much of these Trump “moral” practices, voted for him. Currently around 47 percent of voters approve of Trump’s performance in office, including 83 percent of Republicans.
Of course, the counter to this is that 53 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s performance. In short, they don’t think that his behavior or his policies are good.
REPUBLICANS PLAY THEIR PART
But Republicans’ sense of what is good takes on a different meaning. Many who support Trump are willing to overlook his “bad” (not good) behavior — his lies, insults, impulsive proposals, past immoral behavior — to benefit from what they consider good policies that affect them: tax cuts, reduced unemployment, military spending, protection of pro-life and pro-gun positions, and appointments of conservatives to the federal bench. For the rest of the country, Republicans overlooking bad behavior shows at least a tiny recognition on their part that the behavior being overlooked is actually bad behavior.
That recognition, however, is itself bad news, because these Republicans have bought into a purely consequentialist view of goodness. Trump’s bad behavior helps us get what we want. Therefore, in that sense, his behavior isn’t bad, but good; what we want “trumps” what is moral.
So, Trump’s renegade behavior has pushed us to reconsider our conventions on goodness. We the 53 percent who disapprove of Trump still adhere to what we as a society have judged to be good or moral behavior. Those judgments reach back thousands of years to the Greeks and especially to Aristotle. His Nicomachean Ethics provided a map to virtuous behavior, how to attain the virtues and how to use them.
It’s just that today some of us — that is, Republicans — have decided for the sake of personal convictions to ignore those virtues and to overlook what is fully acknowledged as immoral behavior. The moral climate of the country is therefore secondary to our own personal success or to assurances that the programs we favor will continue or expand.
Trump’s renegade behavior, however, has not so far reoriented society’s moral outlook. We can still rely and build on our conventions and institutions. Few argue that Trump’s personal practices are good. Rather, these practices bring us what we want — that is, without them, we don’t get Trump, and without Trump, we don’t get our policies.
Unfortunately, that seems a false formula. A President Pence would support almost the exact same programs and policies. Pence, for all his faults, appears to be a good — moral — man. He does, however, countenance Trump’s bad behaviors, a fact that shakes the foundations of Pence’s own morality, or should. So he must be a consequentialist Republican, one of those willing to overlook Trump’s foibles for the sake of Republican programs.
A NEW RENEGADE GOODNESS
Required now is a renewal of our code of goodness or, more dramatically, a reorientation back to our sense of goodness, decency, or morality. We cannot survive as a unified nation when 47 percent of the country thinks that Trump’s behavior is either good in itself or not-so-bad that it can’t be overlooked.
How do we achieve such a reorientation? It can only happen through the ballot box in November. A landslide Democratic victory, securing both the White House and Congress, can reinforce our institutional and conventional code of goodness.
That reinforcement cannot be merely a Bidenesque return to normality. That time has passed, for two reasons.
The first reason is climate change. This is a political, economic, and moral game-changer. If we accept climate science — not “believe” in it, but accept it based on the evidence — then we must recognize that we have a limited time to act dramatically to save this planet and its species, including our own. The time for moderation on this issue has passed. Good action here means bold and radical action — something like the Green New Deal.
The second reason is there is nothing to go back to. Trump is merely the symptom of an entire rotting political party that has lost all sense of good behavior and decency. With Nixon’s racist “Southern Strategy,” the paint began to peel off the Republican Party to reveal its racist, selfish, xenophobic, and misogynist policies underneath. Reagan tried to add a new coat of paint through supply-side economics, a greed-fueled program sold to those who bought the idea that cutting taxes would increase government revenue and rocket-propel the economy.
Then came the prelude to Trump: the intransigent Republican commitment to enact nothing that Obama proposed and to oppose him at every turn. This required, for example, breaking with institutional norms of good conduct by denying Supreme-Court nominee Merrick Garland a Senate nomination process or warning the public that the Russians were threatening our democracy.
Now Trump. His crusade of crudeness and cruelty in order to secure and perpetuate power has not altered or fiddled with institutional goodness. Instead, it has destroyed that goodness, hollowed out the institutions, and replaced Constitutionally dedicated public servants with sycophants, cadgers, con-artists, and bumblers. With this Republican Party, traditional goodness is gone for good.
So, what now?
Well….
Let’s see whether the renegade good of Bernie Sanders’s political revolution or Elizabeth Warren’s bold plans can produce a moral reboot of our institutions. Not in their traditional form, but in a new moral form that confronts climate emergency, income inequality, and health-care precarity. Can we do well by doing good?
