No matter where one looks these days, there is an explosion of anger over the decline in political ethics and the dominant role now played by moral relativism in American governance.
Consider two of today’s more serious commentators.
Rahm Emanuel is a former White House chief of staff, ambassador to Japan, congressman, Chicago mayor, and is a reasonably moderate Democrat. Still, in assessing President Donald Trump and his administration today, he perceives a “permissive culture of self-dealing in public and private-sector finance” that is absolutely “nefarious.” To him, Trump’s friends and family “simply use the president’s time in office to enrich themselves.”
On policy, he finds that Trump has been “peevish and nasty — a man driven by a revenge” that “looks, from a distance, a lot like graft.” One “can quibble over whether smoking guns tie the president personally to any corrupt act,” he concludes, but he “cannot hide” “the enrichment of the president’s family and friends while he’s in office.”
Emanuel concedes that earlier scandals have occurred, but they were subjected to “pounding” congressional and media scrutiny. “That’s no longer the case” in this “scandal-a-day environment” when it is not necessary “to convince the public that there is corruption” but only requires the opposition to make the political case for a return to earlier standards.
Or consider an analysis from the other side of the political spectrum by Gerard Baker, a 30-year journalist who was editor-in-chief and now is a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal and writer for some of the world’s most pre-eminent news organizations. He chides his own Republican party, which “once liked to think of itself as committed to values and principles” but now has become the most cynical exponent of the “idea that everything is relative.”
When confronted with evidence of “some new infamy by their president,” many Republicans choose to “avoid the unrewarding path of moral consistency.” Such moral relativism allows one to establish the moral value of everything by “judging not on the basis of whether they are intrinsically right or wrong, but by the lesser standard of whether someone in a similar position might have done something similar.” And this allows allies to avoid censure for not criticizing one of their own. “Over time it dulls the conscience to any moral hierarchy” of values, which is “never a legal defense and shouldn’t be a moral one.”
Moral relativism by public figures “is as old as time itself,” Baker concedes, but when it becomes “the controlling ethical architecture of public behavior, we are in serious trouble.” Just consider the so-called justice system, “in which the president essentially gets to decide who should be in prison. If you’re a political enemy, we’ll come up with a crime to fit your punishment. If you’re a friend, we will annul you.”
How high up the moral hierarchy are today’s actions? Emanuel specifically charged: 1) “some” among “Trump’s friends, family and acquaintances “enrich themselves.” 2) Retribution determines who Trump will “sic the Justice Department” upon. 3) Trump’s actions generally support what looks “from a distance a lot like graft.”4) His presidential pardons free influential people, from crypto to foreign sources who can “gift” him and his family in return. (RELATED: Karma Comes Calling for John Bolton)
Baker is more concerned with the general relativism of Trump supporters’ moral equivalence, the “influentials” who make excuses for their party and friends. He specifically mentions the Binance chief executive’s pardon, followed by a “lucrative financial partnership for the president and his family.” He is concerned with the president “selling” the East Wing of the White House and the president “making personal laws and dispensing arbitrary justice.” (RELATED: Burisma, Meet Your Brother Binance)
How do these charges compare historically? Chester Arthur was a president known for reforming a spoils system that sold governmental appointments to political and financial allies. In judging the moral hierarchy for presidents then and today, his biographer Zachary Karabell noted that in the Gilded Age, what has been charged against Trump today seems qualified or even relatively tame, mostly then considered legal, and was considered “honest graft.” Today, he says, the “bulk” of the Trump money “appears to have come from various cryptocurrency enterprises launched mostly by his sons” and “hundreds of products — Bibles, guitars, perfume and more — for sale at the Trump Store and other outlets.” A jumbo jet gift to the presidency from the Qatari government and “allegations” about pardons would fit right into the early-day picture.
What about more recent history? Lyndon Johnson’s closest assistant was caught in a “Bobby Baker Scandal.” Richard Nixon had a Watergate scandal that led to his own resignation. George H.W. Bush had several sons and a brother accused of improper family business dealings. Bill Clinton had his Whitewater, Lewinsky, Travelgate, Filegate, and Impeachment scandals. George W. Bush had his Halliburton, Blackwater, and attorney general resignation scandals. Barack Obama had Internal Revenue Service actions against conservative political organizations. Admittedly, there were also the relatively straight Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, but even the former had an out-of-control brother and the latter a largely divided White House.
It is now simply impossible to keep private parties out of government decision-making.
Gerard Baker is certainly correct that government should be judged by objective rather than relativist standards. But government is also different, especially today’s nationalized, centralized, bureaucratized, complex system that dominates any major private social activity. It is now simply impossible to keep private parties out of government decision-making. No one can fully understand what the enormous bureaucracy does, including other bureaucrats. The only internal government oversight process is an appraisal system that does not and cannot work. And any employee can go to the media to undermine their political superiors.
Even Trump critic Fareed Zakaria concedes that the “finely tuned mechanism” of the Constitutional separation of powers and the limited presidency “had seized up” “by the 1960s,” culminating in “the constitutional crises of the Vietnam War and Watergate.” “Wars, economic crises and the media’s tendency to nationalize and centralize attention created a one-way ratchet for increasing, unchecked presidential power.” So, should one not conclude that the problem today is not President Trump, but the apparatus handed over to him by decades of progressive policies?
The real solution today is to go back to the Founders and limit what the national government does. Government today basically influences every major business and social act. As long as this is so, there will be deals and favoritism and power. The only solution is the Founders’ one, for the government to do less, which will result in better decentralized government decisions and their greater moral consistency. One might start with the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8.
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Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
