Whatever happened to virtue?
Whatever happened to virtue?
Virtue fueled the Founding Fathers’ achievements. Now a Washington heir is talking about Arnold Palmer’s penis size
To me, one word best explains our current noxious political environment: “virtue.” By this I mean the severe deficit of it.
I’ve been reading up on the American Revolutionary period, especially biographies of the Founding Fathers. One theme that comes through loud and clear is the importance they place on virtue.[1] Most famous may be Benjamin Franklin’s list of 13 virtues for personal conduct. Virtue informed and infused the ideas in the documents and institutions they created at our nation’s founding. There is a reason why the Constitution is concise and general rather than lengthy and hyper-prescriptive. The Founding Fathers assumed that the people governing under the Constitution’s authorities and limitations would be virtuous enough to respect its spirit as well as its letter.
Of course, the conduct of politicians in the early republic quickly departed from the noble, with the pamphleteers and gazetteers throwing mud or worse. Even then, political enemies as bitter as Adams and Jefferson were willing to engage in frequent correspondence for the rest of their long lives.
Fast forward to today. Social media is a cesspool of anonymizable personal attacks as doxxing and swatting grow common. Merely saying something that is perceived as objectionable to a political movement will earn a person threats online and to their person. Librarians, teachers and election workers have quit rather than face incessant attacks from people who have come to believe (and have been given license by their favorite politicians) that threats of violence are legitimate political speech.
I am not equipped to analyze this trajectory. But I do cite three incidents to exemplify it:
In October 2008, in response to a woman claiming his political opponent (Barack Obama) was an “Arab,” Republican candidate John McCain cut her off by grabbing the microphone and said, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that just I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what the campaign’s all about. He’s not [an Arab].”
In July 2015, Donald Trump mocked McCain for being a POW and proceeded to call him a “loser” and other disparaging remarks even years after McCain’s death.
In October 2024, Trump called his opponent Kamala Harris “a shit vice president” and, in making his case to the American public to serve again as president, proceeded to talk about golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis size.
That arc says it all.
Trump didn’t invent public unvirtuousness, but he normalized and legitimized it, as he has done with white supremacy, bigotry and antisemitism.
I don’t have the space or the energy to list all of the twice-impeached, liable-for-sexual-assault and convicted felon Trump’s personal transgressions and unlawful conduct. Perhaps worst of all is his lack of shame and inability to acknowledge mistakes. But it is a fact that millions of voters in Republican primaries and 223 sitting Republican Members of Congress want a man with that record to be president again. Collectively, the Republican Party has installed unvirtuousness at the core of its political identity. That makes me sad.
What to do? First, those of us who still think virtue deserves a central place in our civic life can use the democratic process, while it is still available to us, to prevent a contemptibly unvirtuous man from being in position to codify contemptible unvirtuousness as the government’s operating principle.
It’s not like there isn’t a template for not being a presidential douchebag. In the cover piece for the latest Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes about the immeasurable virtue of George Washington, who set valuable precedents, more in restraint than in action, that have sustained our democracy. Most of his successors have wisely followed this path. One defiantly refuses to.
But addressing the underlying problem is much more daunting. Social scientist Arthur Brooks offers some well-reasoned thoughts in America’s Crisis of Civic Virtue, despite his odd need to defend capitalism. There’s lots more out there if interested.
Personally, I think restoring societal virtue has to start inside each of us. I get this attitude from one of the two great philosophers[2] who have influenced me the most. John Lennon wrote:
You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We'd all love to change your head (ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead (ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
Many years ago, a colleague called me a mensch. I said thank you even though, feeling like an like an idiot because I do have Yiddish-speaking relatives, I didn’t know what it meant. But when I looked it up it made me happy. As someone who aspires to not be a dick, I welcomed the complement.
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff was dubbed “First Mensch” when his wife was formally nominated to the president. Jews in his state call Tim Walz their Minnesota Mensch.”
Is JD Vance a mensch? You can ask his Haitian constituents who live in fear for their personal safety after Vance falsely them accused of eating pets. Is Donald Trump a mensch? You can ask E. Jean Carroll. Or the Americans he calls “animals” and the “enemy within” he wants targeted by the U.S. military.
I am far from a perfect person. I have faults. It sounds pompous to say I try to be virtuous. But I try to be a decent person and not a dick. I can go to bed without a guilty conscience on that count.
Virtue is not a left/right or liberal/conservative thing. I have conservative friends who are genuinely good and decent people. But some of them are voting for Donald Trump. I wonder if they go to bed with a guilty conscience. And I wonder what it means if they don’t…
[1] Journalist Thomas Ricks recently wrote a book on this very topic, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country, which I haven’t read but look forward to learning from.
[2] The other is Franz Zappa, who taught me never to blindly accept what any institutions tells me to do, whether it is governmental, political, corporate or religious.