Remember the “Moral Majority,” the so-called “Christian” political movement founded by Jerry Falwell in the late 1970s? Of course we also remember the “Silent Majority”—you know, people like those white Southerners protesting against people not like them having the same rights they did. Falwell claimed that America was losing its “moral” compass, at least according to his definitions. There was already a “conservative” Christian organization at the time called the “Christian Voice,” but evangelical Protestant extremists called it a “sham” because it was mostly led by Catholics. Interestingly, The Moral Majority’s headquarters was in a city called Lynchburg—you know, named after a planter named Charles Lynch who dabbled as a “justice of the peace” meting out irregular “justice.” Not exactly “subtle.”
The Moral
Majority allegedly believed in the “Christian conception of moral law.” But Ronald Reagan, who most benefited from the political aspect of the evangelical movement, for his
part didn’t give a rat's behind for the "morality" of the Christian Right, and didn't give it any more attention than it deserved,
other than seeing its leaders as little more than helpful campaign surrogates to drum-up
votes (kind of like Trump). The Moral Majority's "moral" agenda didn't play all that well with the public, which is why by 1989 it collapsed because its political agenda had already been realized and its usefulness was over.
Falwell’s son, Jerry Jr., was asked why he supported a demonstrably immoral man like Donald Trump in 2016. He laughed when it was suggested he was being a hypocrite: the “greater good” was more important than adhering to a “moral code.”
To him, Trump was "good" because he had created jobs and made payroll, which was not exactly true; Trump's "business" was real estate, and he "employed" just enough people to keep things upright, and paid them only if they "pleased" him. In Christianity Today, Russell Moore noted that
Unlike some other Trump evangelical supporters—with whom I disagreed but whose positions were reasonable and understandable—Falwell didn’t try to measure the business leader’s intemperate and crass attacks on people with some other objective, like judicial nominations, for instance. Instead he often mimicked such attacks, right along with the cartoonish and bullying tone of them.
Falwell Jr. was confronted with scandal himself, so he wasn’t “inclined” to judge Trump’s moral deficiencies—in fact Falwell Jr. asserted that he wasn’t a “perfect” follower of Jesus even though he was the chancellor of his father's Christian school. I suppose it could be said that Jesus didn’t spend his off time watching live porn (in the case of Falwell Jr. it was watching his wife having sex with another man). Of course many others of the Christian Right had their lapses—Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart for example. But unlike those two, there were no profusion of phony “tears.” Falwell Jr. expressed no remorse, he was only “human”—and this of course is the excuse people give to Trump for all his moral, ethical and criminal failures.
A 2020 op-ed in the Religion News Service by Anthea Butler pointed out that
It’s time to stop pretending that 21st-century evangelicalism is still a movement that believes in sexual morality and values. It is a political movement with religious people who vote a certain way in order to get the judges, perks and favors that can be given to their leaders through political and economic power. It’s about personal pleasure at the expense of making life miserable for others by legislating a morality that some leaders don’t believe in, nor bother to practice.
Count Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in that group of "Christian" hypocrites, like the ones who made a pilgrimage to Trump's hush money trial in support of an liar, forger and adulterer. For Republicans, morality has nothing to do with their partisan policy aims: it is simply the “ends”--meaning maintaining power--justifying the “means.”
In an opinion piece for The Hill, Moti Mizrahi points out that what is “lawful” does not always align with what is moral--for example Jim Crow laws in the South--and what people think is “right” is not necessarily “moral”:
An ancient philosophical argument known as the Euthyphro dilemma clarifies the point about the difference between morality and the law. In Plato’s dialogue “The Euthyphro,” Socrates asks, “Is the holy holy because it is loved by the gods, or do they love it because it is holy?”
In other words, does religion command a particular action because it is morally right, or is that action morally right because religion commands it? Suppose religion commands X. Is X morally right because religion commands it or does religion command it because it is morally right?
On the one hand, if doing X is morally right because religion commands it, then whatever religion commands is morally right. This would make morality arbitrary, as morally wrong actions would become right, and vice versa. Not to mention the fact that different religions command different, often inconsistent, actions.
Most Republicans, "Christian" or not, have
exactly zero credibility in instructing us in morality. In Congress they have no
appetite for compromise with those who represent a majority of the country, instead have
nothing but time to waste the money taxpayers pay them sowing chaos and
engaging in carnival sideshows light on facts but heavy on Fox News-friendly bombast
that is mostly smoke, with the only “fire” coming out of the foul mouths people like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and James Comer.
In 2017 Republicans in the House eliminated the Office of Congressional Ethics, replaced, as the New York Times reported, with “a new Office of Congressional Complaint Review that would report to the House Ethics Committee, which has been accused of ignoring credible allegations of wrongdoing by lawmakers.”
Thus while George Santos might cause some embarrassment by fibbing about his resume, and a Democrat like Al Franken was “persuaded” to resign over a high school-level prank from years ago, Republican Gaetz was allowed to slide from under one of his underage sex partners while Greene saw nothing wrong with turning a sham committee hearing into a porn review for the half-time entertainment of her Republican colleagues in between their failure to move downfield in their attempts to manufacture “evidence” about Biden family ties to Ukrainian energy officials.
No, Republicans prefer to expose their immorality by continuing their attacks on Anthony Fauci with nonsense conspiracy theories from the usual sources (Jordan, Gaetz) in another attempted frame-up for partisan political reasons. Republicans are not interested in the public well-being; COVID-19 was an unknown quantity that was responsible for killing tens of millions around the globe, including more than a million here, and probably many more that went unreported, like in Florida where Ron DeSantis did his best to undermine local policy initiatives and instructed the state department of health to delay or alter the reporting of deaths. Yet Republicans, rather than examine their own immoral behavior downplaying the virus, choose to attack and undermine the efforts of those who did what was possible to deal with the pandemic.
Rather than talk about their own lack of moral behavior, Republicans complain about why their crimes are receiving any kind of scrutiny at all. But we already know what “weaponizing” the Justice Department is. Was Bill Clinton “weaponizing” the justice department when he instructed Janet Reno to appoint a special prosecutor who was a Republican to investigate Hillary and himself in the Whitewater scandal? Or was Trump weaponizing the Justice Department with the John Durham investigation, which was a $6.5 million taxpayer waste that found no illegality, led to acquittals in the only cases tried, and its final report was nothing more than paraphrasing an IG’s earlier report?
While without explanation a special prosecutor was appointed for the Hunter Biden case (which was initiated by the Trump administration), we see Aileen Cannon now adding to her partisan nonsense by taking up the question of why it was “necessary” to appoint a special prosecutor in the Florida documents case when we all heard Trump’s lies about having any top secret files in his possession, and how he “stored” them.
We know that Trump’s friendliness with dictators makes him a pay-for-play suspect, since the CIA felt obliged to withdraw two of its best covert agents in Russia because it was believed that Trump had betrayed their names to Putin. But none dare call it treason, or wonder why it would be dangerous to allow Trump to keep classified documents knowing that he can use them for "business purposes."
Meanwhile CNN pointed out that despite Republican complaints about the “weaponization” of the Biden Justice Department in order to "police" their lack of morality, they neglect to mention that as many Democrats as Republicans have faced judicial scrutiny; besides Hunter Biden, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey is also under indictment. It is already mentioned the Al Franken was forced to resign for the most trivial of reasons, emblematic of the fact that while Republicans view morality as an annoyance to their own behavior, Democrats tend to eat their own, especially over even the faintest allegation of gender “impropriety.”
They also forget that the Trump
administration not only weaponized the Justice Department for political gain for
instigating the Hunter Biden case, but Trump also attempted to enlist the aid of
Ukraine to find “dirt” on Joe Biden prior to the 2020 election in exchange for
releasing already approved aid that he was illegally withholding. Republicans,
of course saw nothing wrong with that. Why not?
But wait, are not non-politicians, like billionaires, secure enough to look at the world through the eyes of "right"? Well, that depends on what you mean by "right." Who does this sound like?
Treating employees like dung. Taunting and ridiculing opponents. Refusing to be held accountable or be bound by norms or even laws. Bullying adversaries. Demeaning critics. Craving attention. Self-promoting. Making gobs of money. Impetuous. Unpredictable. Autocratic. Vindictive. Utterly lacking in empathy.
If that sounds like Trump, you may be forgiven, but Robert Reich was referring to Elon Musk, who like Trump is suffering from powermadness and psycopathy. We know all about him; the EEOC sued him and Tesla for “routine stereotyping, racial insults and hostility since at least 2015,” with one case ending in a $3.2 million judgment. Of course Tesla claims it doesn’t “tolerate” racial discrimination, but knowing its leader, we know it does.
Musk is a far-right conspiracy-mongering fanatic and is working to help Trump win the election (with the help of Russian intelligence) so that he can get a position in the Trump administration to personally oversee a “data-driven project to prevent voter fraud.” Reich notes that voter fraud is relatively non-existent, but conspiracies don't need facts to be "real." Musk thinks that Democrats are “importing millions” of illegal aliens in order to vote in elections, even though there is zero evidence of this. Musk, the child of apartheid South Africa, believes that fascist-style authoritarianism is preferable to what he calls “a permanent one-party deep socialist state” under Democrats.
Reich notes that like Trump, Musk's business acumen is all about making himself rich and not helping working people. Trump was infamous for refusing to pay contractors for work done and conned investors into his personal vanity projects that he put no money of his own in, so once his various companies went bankrupt due to his business incompetence, it was always someone else, not him, who lost their shirts. Like Trump, Musk is hardly a "job creator," having fired half of Twitter's employees, including one who had the audacity to point out that Musk was to blame for falling revenues:
Musk’s concern about the dwindling number of people seeing his tweets prompted him to convene a group of engineers to discover why his engagement numbers were tanking. When one of the company’s two remaining principal engineers explained it was likely due to waning public interest in Musk’s antics, Musk fired the engineer.
Musk as head of Tesla recently laid off 14,000 workers: “They discovered they no longer had jobs only when their keys to the parking lot no longer worked. In order to receive severance, they had to agree not to participate in any lawsuit or mass arbitration against the company or publicly defame Tesla." And this after the Tesla board voted to approve a $56 billion pay package for Musk. In other words, don’t criticize him. Musk, of course, has a thin skin like Trump but can really dish-out the most juvenile and fact-challenged insults.
But wait, we would expect the U.S. Supreme Court to be the adult in the room and be a reliable arbiter of morality, right? Hardly, if the far-right extremists on the court are any example. The Yale Law Journal points out that in a number of rulings by the Roberts court, like Percoco v. United States, Ciminelli v. United State, Skilling v. United State, McDonnell v. United States and Kelly v. United States, corruption by political and business interests is just a matter of “opinion”—and that of a corrupt-to-the-core conservative wing that doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word “corrupt."
The current court continues to deliberately hold-up decisions on the “presidential immunity” issue that has nothing to do with actions related to policy, or even actions before and after a presidential term, as if someone like Trump should be completely immune from any offense related to his efforts to conceal his own election fraud crimes. What is “moral” about that? The Court is even weighing-in to “justify” the potentiality of invalidating the convictions of many if not most of the January 6 insurrectionists, which again shows that “conservatism” has nothing to do with moral behavior or thought, but in outcomes that serve a partisan political agenda.
The Founding Fathers allowed Supreme Court justices lifetime appointments in the belief that since their position would not be threatened, this would preserve their independence. This “independence” was a more threatening state of affairs to those on the right, since history had shown that many conservative justices over time moved left, or moved with the times. Although his court-packing scheme failed after the conservatives on the court blocked many of his New Deal programs, FDR’s landslide victory in 1936 and the virtual elimination of Republicans in Congress that year convinced those justices that they would be making things worse for their party if they continued to declare New Deal programs “unconstitutional” and further anger the “masses.”
But as the Jacobin points out, corruption can stop this “slide” toward “liberalism”:
In light of that, the money and gifts flowing to conservative justices can be seen not merely as cheap influence-peddling schemes to secure specific rulings in individual cases. It can also be seen as a grand plan to deter the ideological freedom that lifetime appointments afford. In short, the largesse from billionaires and Leonard Leo — who helped assemble the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority as President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser — creates personal financial incentives for justices to remain doctrinaire ideologues and resist any deviation from the conservative line, even if they might once in a while have an inkling to dissent.
As Michael Tomasky pointed out in The New Republic, today’s conservatism is corrupt by nature, and thus so are the justices to the right on the Court:
They don’t believe in the law or any particular judicial philosophy, no matter what they tell us or themselves. What they do believe in is a set of policy outcomes that a huge network of right-wing activists desire. They believe, in other words, only in ideology. So their only real loyalty is to that ideology, not to the Constitution or the law or any particular set of jurisprudential principles. And when their only real loyalty is to an ideology, and not the law or principles or tradition, then anything goes—both judicially and ethically.
So they throw away principles, both judicial and ethical, with the same studied insouciance. Believe in states’ rights? Well, yes, until the moment that the state of Florida might have recounted votes in such a way that would have elected Al Gore over George Bush. Toss! They believe in precedent? Well, sure, until respecting precedent means protecting the right to abortion. Toss! Believe in disclosing gifts from megarich friends and upholding the standards of integrity that citizens have the right to expect from members of the country’s highest court? Sure, until they become potentially embarrassing, and they realize they don’t really have to disclose them anyway. Toss!
Who then should be the final arbiter of "morality"? Voters? Check out the voters in Colorado's deep-red 4th District, won in a landslide by Lauren Boebert in the primary after she switched to it to avoid a likely defeat to a Democrat in the 3rd District. The redder the district, the less interested they seem to be in moral issues, such as Boebert getting into physical altercations with her ex-husband in bars, being escorted out of theaters for drunken behavior, and why is there no interest in Boebert's son, who appears to have been on his way to becoming a career criminal before his arrest for a “recent string of vehicle trespass and property theft," according to local police.
Unfortunately we can also say
that many, and maybe most, Republican voters have no moral compass in which to
guide them; sure, they love to degrade other people, but they seem to have no interest in examining their own faults, or those of their chosen political representatives, and even that of their religious representatives are political partisan hypocrites preaching anti-liberal hellfire, and who don't have any use for the teachings of Jesus, and yet have the audacity to call themselves "Christians."
One may say it is moral if one “loves” their neighbor, then they look for the good and try to enhance that. But if you are solely motivated by hate, then you look for, or only see, the worst, and enhance that. Where is the "moral" in that? You can neither empathize with or see any common humanity with those you hate (migrants escaping violence, for example). You don’t try to understand their point of view, and you don’t even want to “compromise” so that there will at least be some civility. The world is a "bad" place, and you support a leader who will do the bad things that you wish to do against the “others.” You feel “good” about feeling “bad,” and the only thing that will make you "happy" is that if the “others” will feel worse than you.
The Republican Party is not the party of life.
The Republican Party is morally and intellectually bankrupt. It has no purpose, no platform other than the pursuit and exercise of power simply for power’s sake. It does not seek to govern nor is it interested in developing the civic space or a sense of order. It seeks only control, unadulterated and unaccountable.
The Republican Party dons the mantle of conservatism. Yet its interests and actions betray any sense of conserving or preserving any semblance of social order, fealty to institutions or constitutional humility. Its methods are chaos and dissembling — see Steve Bannon’s call to “flood the zone with s***.”
The Republican Party doesn’t believe in small government. Witness the actions of the governors in Florida and Texas, whose guiding principles seem to be reward friends, punish disagreement and treat anyone who doesn’t toe the line as an existential threat.
The Republican Party doesn’t believe in free speech or freedom of assembly or freedom of conscience. It burns books, squelches inquiry and demands fealty to men — not ideas. From Rush Limbaugh’s first whines about political correctness to today’s screeches of “cancel culture” and “wokeness,” the Republican Party uses finger pointing to squelch honest discussion and debate.
The Republican Party does not believe in liberty. It believes in license — the ability to do what it wants, when it wants, without accountability or responsibility.
The Republican Party is not the party of fiscal responsibility. It cares not for the middle class or working people. Its economic platform, if one can deem tax cuts for the wealthiest a platform, serves the elite. Wealth and opportunity don’t trickle down — they accrete up, becoming consolidated in fewer and fewer hands and fostering corruption and greed. To cover its economic malfeasance it stokes division, hatred, and culture wars. Thomas Pynchon observed, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions then they don’t have to worry about the answers.” And so it is that the Republican media in the guise of “just asking questions” diverts attention from its moral emptiness to sowing anger and fear.
The Republican Party is not the party of life. Despite its pious self-righteousness on abortion, it does nothing to promote the quality of life of the living. It treats mothers, children and millions of working Americans with utter disdain. It coddles gun manufacturers while promoting fever dreams of a dystopic world that feeds more fever dreams of so-called patriots, deluded revolutionaries, and conspiracy theorists. It turned a public health crisis into a culture war that unnecessarily killed hundreds of thousands of Americans while undermining trust in public institutions for perverse political and egotistical gain.
The Republican Party is not the party of values. It hides behind religion while perverting Christ’s message to love our neighbors. It revels in cruelty — separating families, killing the innocent and idolizing the selfish and narcissistic. It embraces fascism and the undermining of democratic principles.
The Republican Party is the party of death.
So much for Christian "morality" in this day and age (all Republicans claim to be "Christians"). In this election most voters see it as a "choice" between the lesser of two "evils." The problem with that line of thinking is that there is only one side that is "evil," but many people seem to be "confused" about what side that is. Biden talks about what he can do for working people against the continuing inroads of the powerful into what is left of their right to live in simple human decency; Trump and his immoral allies create scapegoats to disguise their powermadness and greed.
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