The Moralistic Style in American Politics



Greg Weiner, “The Moralistic Style in American Politics,” National Affairs, No. 41, Fall 2019.

 As an addition to the above, Weiner suggests that a “moralistic politics is prone to stalemate because it disdains such instruments of effective political practice as barter and compromise.  Its insistence on its own correctness, elevated to the urgency of the moral plane, makes compromise not merely imprudent but indefensible.  Because of its tendency toward a monomaniacal focus on single issues to the exclusion of others, it cannot engage in horse trading.” 

When it comes to the current president, who engages in a moralistic politics, there are any number of ironies.  Perhaps the most obvious is the self-perception as a “deal maker,” which tends to imply “barter and compromise” – a  pragmatism that “sees shades of gray and operates in a world of contradictions and tensions” – and, as a consequence, aims for the so-called “win-win” solution to a problem.   The current president, however, is not a deal maker.  He is a competitor.  He operates in a world of winners and losers, in which there are no “mutually acceptable outcomes,” and the ethic articulated so succinctly by Vince Lombardi prevails – “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”  Several things follow, not least a corresponding world view built around “strength and weakness.”  To win, one must not only be strong, but stronger in whatever it takes to win, and since winning is everything, strength provides its own moral and ethical justification.   Moreover, for those who build their identity around being a winner, and the current president clearly builds his identity around being a winner, to lose is intolerable.  One can take the path of perseverance, again as Vince Lombardi so succinctly put it, “it’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up,” or “winners never quit, and quitters never win.”  Or one can take the path of delusion, convincing oneself that, were it not for the perfidy of others, I would have won (e.g. were it not for “millions of illegal voters, I would have won the popular vote).

I mention this, in part because, as Weiner recognizes, pragmatism and a pragmatic politics do not preclude morality.  It can “make tradeoffs and build coalitions to address the problem in question,” and while “a morally informed purpose” may be impossible to achieve completely, once and for all, one can nevertheless strive to make things “better,” if not ideal.  I mention this also, in part because, again as Weiner recognizes, a pragmatic politics is defined by the give and take of compromise, to include moral compromise, a condition the moralist views, not as the path to something “better,” but an unacceptable corruption of the ideal. The moralist is, in this sense, not only apolitical, “hovering above and sneering down on those faced with the hard choices of governing,” but in its moral certitude, it forecloses any “meaningful moral deliberation,” and in this sense moralism is actively anti-political.”  I mention this finally, in part because morality itself implies an aspirational standard, which transcends the self and to which one aspires.  The pragmatist accepts moral imperfection as an inescapable condition of life, knowing that, as Weiner put it, “the actual statesman can almost never achieve one moral end without impairing another,” and so “must rank and balance them” and make choices between them.  The moralist rejects moral imperfection as an inescapable condition of life.  The moralist knows, with certainty, that moral imperfection can be eliminated “if only everyone would …”  It doesn’t matter what fills in the ellipsis because little in history or experience suggests that “everyone will.”  Winer quotes Madison who suggested that disagreement in “sown in the nature of man,” and I would even go so far as to suggest that willful perversity is also  sown in the nature of man, the impulse that made Milton’s Satan compelling and all too human.  “If only everyone would,” however, does reveal the authoritarian temptation behind the moralist, the active use of the state’s monopoly on violence to insure that “everyone must” or suffer the consequence of their willful perversity.  It reveals also the moralist’s veneration of the “strong man,” the one willing and able to compel obedience.

It is difficult to see our current president as a moral leader in any sense of the word, until one recognizes that his morality is self-referential.  The current president does not aspire to the ideal.  In his world, he is the ideal, and as such he is the transcendent moral standard to which others should aspire.  He perceives no standard outside himself – no ideological or theological ideal – to which he must aspire, although for others there is the clear and compelling standard of his will.   He knows, with tautological certainty, that moral imperfection can be eliminated from the world if only everyone were obedient to his will.  It is clear, of course, those who resist his will are “evil,” and that he is engaged in an all-out war against “evil.”   As Weiner put it, “the metaphor of war, which pits friends against enemies and thereby delegitimizes opposition.”  In his world, there are those who support him and those who don’t, and there is little or no gray in either support or opposition.  One is either all in with one’s support or one is out, and it is common practice for him and his supporters to use the word, “democrat,” as a pejorative adjective, not only delegitimizing but dehumanizing opponents.  One suspects that some, even many of his supporters find his self-referential morality disquieting – those who hold to a conservative ideology or Christian theology, both of which demand a form of fealty, not to a man, but to ideal – but the current president has occasioned some rather startling mental gymnastics to relieve the cognitive dissonance that results, the Christian right’s equation of the current president and King Cyrus being a case in point.   The current president is the “strong man,” the “chosen one,” elected by men and sanctified by God, the witting or unwitting providential instrument of God’s will on earth, a characterization that the current president relishes if for no other reason than it feeds a messianic narcissism.

Which brings me back to the final point in the previous post.  In short, not unlike Nixon, Trump “sensed an historical opportunity to transform the Presidency – to consolidate within the White House all the powers, as against Congress, as against the electorate, as against the rest of the executive branch itself, that a generation of foreign and domestic turbulence had chaotically delivered to the Presidency.”[1]   What this means ultimately, as Drew puts it, “unless our political system undergoes a radical change, we could be on the brink of having no check on the president, no matter how radically he defies the Constitution.” 


[1] Schlesinger, Imperial Presidency, 216.  There are differences, of course.  Trump might well “flinch from face-to-face argument,” but he is perfectly willing to engage on Twitter. 

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