In recent months, a consensus has emerged among the conservative dissidents of the Trump era: We’ll continue to oppose the president when his policies and practices are counter to our principles, they say, but also be sure to publicly give credit whenever he stakes out an agreeable position on any issue that matters. During the campaign, obdurate opposition served the purpose of challenging his candidacy and elevating his competitors, but now, with Trump sitting in the Oval Office, the thinking goes, it smacks of sour grapes—and, given that he does do things with which we agree, it amounts to cutting off our noses to spite our faces. So, serve as the loyal opposition as necessary but join the cause when possible.
It is a coherent approach. It is the pragmatic one. But it is unsatisfying and unsettling. And with each casual lie, crude insult, attack on the media, slight of the intelligence community, and example of grotesque servility to Russia’s dictator, it increasingly appears morally misguided.
The first problem with itemizing and compartmentalizing is that actions can’t be treated as discrete. In politics, they are the direct result of a system’s arrangements and a leader’s philosophy. They reflect the larger enterprise. We deceive ourselves by separating quiet streets from the oppressive police state that brought them about. We shouldn’t laud an initiative to aid the impoverished if it’s part of a Rawlsian undertaking that continuously impinges on liberty. Support for modernizing an outdated social convention is irresponsible if the larger agenda aims to replace all traditions with state-controlled institutions. In other words, we have to be mindful of a position’s pedigree and its role in a broader program. If President Trump has a modus operandi, it is the control, manipulation, and distortion of information: hiding his tax returns, meeting with Putin alone, firing the FBI director investigating him, lying habitually, undermining the media, pitting staff against each other. We are being purposely obtuse if we don’t assess his executive actions in this context. Our constant need to cordon off specific Trump actions from others is a red flag waving in the wind.
Almost every leader in history has had some redeeming characteristic or some defensible initiative. Even profoundly objectionable figures and the profoundly objectionable systems they created were often able to persist because they provided some good to some number of people—the making-the-trains-run-on-time argument. But time judges unkindly those who cheered the timely trains. Some of history’s most ghastly arrangements have been defended by relentlessly pointing to some number of their benefits and turning a blind eye to their costs. This does more than debase debate, it does long-term harm: It serves as a conscience-protecting strategy exactly when our consciences shouldn’t be protected.
But even when we openly acknowledge the price of bad leadership, questions about duty and justice may not be well served by creating a list of positive and negative effects. That’s doubly true when the stated purpose of the exercise is to find areas of agreement. On virtually any matter, we can populate the positive side. Stealing stimulates a rush of adrenaline, makes you look tough, and provides some immediate profit. The danger lies in falsely equating the value of the ticks in both columns. Obviously, items carry vastly different weights, a fact that is easily lost when we take great pains to offer praise—Yes, Trump defended racists in Charlottesville and endorsed the morally compromised Roy Moore in Alabama, but, in fairness, he is speaking out on the opioid crisis.
Worse, the line separating the columns artificially quarantines the negatives. It treats as separable the indivisble effects of an activity. In actuality, a sound moral system would recognize that some negatives infect all associated positives. The desire for peace with Russia is not a plus when purchased with sycophancy to a despot. We must substantially discount the upside of attempts at normalizing relations with North Korea when a brutal dictator is legitimized by appearing in a photograph alongside our head of state. It is shrewd for a bad actor to ask that we detach his various choices from one another and focus on the positives of each. We needn’t, and shouldn’t, acquiesce.
A leader’s choices produce credits and debits, and these must ultimately be reconciled. Even a strictly utilitarian approach to Trump demands that we do more than note the existence of different entries; we also have to tally them up, to have an accounting. That means we need to evaluate the positives in light of the negatives. It’s not enough to give credit in isolation—well, unemployment has remained low. The banker isn’t impressed by a bunch of deposits if your withdrawals exceed them; he’ll still send the repo man.
Though this point may seem obvious, it’s worth underscoring. The nature of the four-year term allows us a delay in the reckoning. And the nature of our polarized, binary parties encourages us to avoid any accounting detrimental to our team. The itemize-and-compartmentalize approach focuses our attention on the entries, not the balance. The problem in the case of the Trump administration is that its moral debits are skyrocketing. Material and irreparable harm is being done to our nation, our institutions, and our norms, as well as to conservatism and the Republican party. It is instructive that Trump is not unfamiliar with the use of bankruptcy proceedings to avoid the consequences of accumulating financial debts. He seems to understand profits as bankable and losses as expungeable. But since the rest of us will foot the bill for his administration’s moral profligacy, we don’t have the luxury of confining our attention to just one line of the ledger.
But even the ledger approach has two major flaws: one related to the past, the other to the future. Both are traditionally addressed by elements of the conservative disposition—which, unfortunately, is currently in abeyance.
The first problem is that in assessing the effects of immorality, it is impossible in real time to account for costs. We typically reap immediately the benefits of, in the language of game theory, “defection.” Whether lying or embezzlement, infidelity or illicit drug use, hiding income or abusing welfare programs, social offenses can seem utterly inconsequential in the immediate term. It can even be difficult to imagine how they could prove corrosive to society at large. And certainly, in the moment, we have no means of assessing their costs.
But conservatives have always known that prior generations grappled with these very same types of problems. They are simply expressions of the human condition. The conservative appreciates that our predecessors, through ages of trial and error, developed laws and conventions in response. It is precisely because we know the long-term dangers of certain categories of behavior but lack the capacity to quantify or explain them that we have social rules against things like mendacity, lassitude, and lasciviousness and in favor of selflessness, judiciousness, and initiative.
It is no coincidence that such rules are consonant with the instructions of our faith traditions—from the Ten Commandments to the Golden Rule and beyond. For the purposes of public action, it is immaterial which came first, secular conventions or religious commands. What matters is that they tell us the exact same things in the exact same way: Follow these rules of behavior, even if they seem quaint or troublesome, because they reflect the wisdom of authorities that you cannot subject to cross-examination—countless previous generations or the Almighty. These precepts aren’t ancient, now-useless vestiges waiting to be shed; they’re robust features that have stood the test of time because of their immeasurable wisdom.
Of course, there’s a certain adolescent glee in deriding and dismissing old, stuffy things like modesty and prudence—in laughing off Trump’s Twitter taunts, congenital dishonesty, and breaches of protocol. Stop being so dramatic, they say: None of that really matters—we got tax cuts! They cry Gorsuch as if it were downright silly to handwring when the plus-side entries are tangible bonanzas and the minus-side entries are intangible norm-breakers like “attacking the media” and “insulting longtime allies.” But we are only able to scoff at the violation of longstanding conventions if we believe standards of behavior are just polite society’s decoration, the moral frippery of prigs. But norms are our community’s load-bearing walls. Undermine them too often, and the edifice will collapse.
The second flaw of the moral ledger is that it appears perfectly designed, at least during the Trump era, to facilitate our slowly succumbing to temptation. If we’re prevented from invoking a NeverTrump-style “This entire endeavor is off the rails,” we’re consigned to making a series of episodic mini-assessments. We might celebrate a positive and then balance it against a recent negative. Even if the cost is higher than the payoff, as long as the debit isn’t too large, we won’t be seriously chastened. The pleasure of four drinks on a Tuesday night doesn’t make up for the pain of the Wednesday morning hangover, but they’re roughly comparable. So maybe next time it can be five drinks. Then six. Like the frog that steadily acclimates to—but ultimately dies from—water rising to a boil, we can be oblivious to the gradual escalation of costs.
Few tragic figures go from saint to scourge overnight. Instead, they engage in a long pattern of compromises that grow in size: riskier affairs, a few more pills, increasingly shady deals. So long as short-term rationalizations are possible, decline can proceed unabated and largely unnoticed. This is why But Gorsuch is so insidious. It is the pro that excused so many cons: the growing attacks on the media, the callous border policy, the belittling of the intelligence community. Have no doubt that But Kavanaughwill justify an even more alarming set of behaviors. Should another seat on the Court open, we could find ourselves But Barrett-ing into the abyss. Trump himself alerted us to this path when he proudly noted, back in January 2016, that his behavior to that point had produced loyalists who’d support him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. What even worse sins, we have to ask ourselves, would his behavior since then compel his supporters to disregard?
Perhaps when dealing with officious neighbors or prickly colleagues, finding silver linings in dark clouds is practical, a kind of survival technique for just making it through the day. When the stakes are low, itemizing and compartmentalizing may be sensible. But given the enormity of the stakes, placing a gold star on the president’s occasional successful assignment is unwarranted and unwise. The road to Hell is paved with a piecemeal, situational approach to morality.
