It may feel like the walls are closing in on Matt Gaetz, but a recent survey of GOPers in his heavily Republican district shows that fewer than 19 percent think he should resign. These numbers, however, flip if he is proven guilty of sex trafficking.
Regular readers of this column will spot a couple of recurring trends: Republican voters have become less religious and more partisan, and politicians have learned it’s better to ride out the storm. As a result, the only effective way of policing or deterring behavior is via the legal (rather than the political or the electoral) process.
Meanwhile, another trend has emerged in recent years: Donald Trump attracted rabid boosters who had a vested interest in lowering the bar on ethical and moral standards (see Gaetz), and he created a permission structure that spawned other imitators (see Marjorie Taylor Greene). If you don’t believe me, you can take their word for it. “We’ve got a president now who doesn’t care for puritanical grandstanding or moralistic preening,” Gaetz boasted to Vanity Fair last September. “This is a good time to be a fun-loving politician instead of a stick-in-the-mud,” he continued. “I have an active social life, and it’s probably easier in the era of Trump.”
Let’s be honest, there was no bait and switch. No false advertising. Aside from employing a few euphemisms (“fun-loving politician”), he was who he said he was. If being a poser is the postmodern unpardonable sin, then Gaetz skates—at least, politically. Gaetz found Trump’s depraved “anything goes” style to be liberating and some Republicans apparently find their honesty refreshing, but don’t be surprised if the end result is a gaggle of egomaniacal politicians flaunting their conquests on the House floor. If Gaetz survives, the lesson will be that preemptively telegraphing your vice is a sort of Get Out Of Jail Free card.
When it comes to living up to high standards, we are better off trying and failing than with this.
This principle is true of nations, as well. Thomas Jefferson was in many respects a plaster saint, but his hypocritical words provided a “promissory note” that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. would later cash in. Granted, even after a bloody civil war and the civil rights movement, it’s still not fully realized; just look at the Derek Chauvin trial. But would we have been better off if Jefferson, realizing his own shortcomings, had decided not to declare, however hypocritically, that “All men are created equal”? I think not.
Likewise, we should not allow our own imperfections to prevent us from expecting others to adhere to certain standards. According to The Washington Post, when Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently criticized China’s human right’s abuses in Anchorage, Alaska, China’s top diplomat “detailed the United States’ own human rights problems, citing recent Black Lives Matter protests.” When it comes to China’s acts of genocide against the Uyghurs, should America just look the other way because we are a flawed nation?
At least some people endorse this “judge not lest ye be judged” theory of foreign policy. When Trump defended Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murdering of journalists by saying, “You think our country’s so innocent?” he wasn’t just suggesting a moral equivalence; he was laying the groundwork to sweep his own sins under the rug.
Put another way, Trump defended Putin for the same reason Gaetz defended Rep. Katie Hill. The idea is that if you give other people a pass, this might inoculate you and garner indulgences when the morality police come gunning for you. Conversely, if you hold anyone to any standards, you are setting yourself up for an epic fall whenever your own personal peccadilloes are exposed. (Of course, no standard is better than where the GOP is headed. We’re in a race to the bottom where kudos is doled out for living down to Trump’s narcissistic standards.)
As a flawed Christian, I am all too familiar with this dynamic. I am, by definition, a hypocrite. Like every believer, I sin. I drink (occasionally to excess), curse (sometimes on this website), and (like one-term president Jimmy Carter) have lusted in my heart for women who are not my wife. And that’s just on a random Tuesday morning. Unlike Trump, I confess my sins to the Almighty and repent. Every day, I try to be a little more like Jesus. (In the immortal words of Jerry Reed, I’ve “got a long way to go and a short time to get there.”)
As to politicians, I don’t expect any of them to adhere to all (or most of) the tenets of my particular faith; but would we be better off with a completely nonjudgmental, standards-free electorate?
In four short years, Democrats went from Gary Hart being run out of the presidential race after pretending to be something he was not (“If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored”)—to electing Bill Clinton (who, I have argued, taught Republicans the wrong lesson and helped pave the way for Trump). Is it a coincidence that other Republican populists (Pat Buchanan, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum, for example) were much more devout and much less successful than Trump?
People like Gaetz supported Trump because he made it easier for Republicans to fly freak flags with impunity. You don’t have to be a sociologist to recognize that this trend reflects a changing America and a changing Republican Party—one that has defined deviancy downward.
Do we really want a Republican Party where anything and everything is permissible? That seems to be where we are heading in the post-Trump era, if we haven’t arrived there already.
