A one-sided ledger (Gwen Moritz editor’s note)
I was moved, then, by Andy Smarick’s thoughtful essay called “The Moral Ledger” published by the conservative — but often Trump-critical — Weekly Standard last Monday. Smarick, a director at the conservative/libertarian R Street Institute in Washington, warned his fellow conservatives against compartmentalizing Trump’s liabilities as if they didn’t count against his assets.
This, of course, is exactly the yes-but rationalization that conservatives criticized when Democrats and feminists rushed to Bill Clinton’s defense when it turned out he had lied about his inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky. (Imagine the rhetorical mess Republicans would be in if they couldn’t point to Bill Clinton to rationalize Trump’s payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.)
And it can be applied to any political leader if we decide to ignore one side of the moral ledger — and has been. “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,” Smarick wrote. “But time judges unkindly those who cheered the timely trains.”
[…]
Smarick laments that Trump has lured the Republican Party away from its traditional, conservative appreciation for norms and conventions, drawing a straight line from Trump’s approach to business to his approach to politics.
“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,” he wrote.
“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.”
