Back In Fictional America

“In a country that still had a functional moral compass, citizens would watch the January 6 hearings, band together regardless of party or region, and refuse to vote for anyone remotely associated with Donald Trump,” @RadioFreeTom writes: https://t.co/6p6SzYHlJq

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) October 17, 2022

It's a lovely idea, a nation with a moral compass that fits the writer’s morality to a “T”. But that’s all it is. And upon examination, it’s really not that lovely.

The argument for electing George McGovern over Nixon was basically a moral one. The supporters of McGovern saw the Vietnam war as moral issue, and Nixon as a corrupt hack. Fifty years later I still agree with that analysis. Fat lot of good it did, though.

Was the entire country morally outraged by Watergate? No more than they were by the Civil Rights Movement. That was the time the country should have shown it had a moral compass; but it didn’t. But if morality is shown in politics, we didn’t show it when Nixon resigned, either. The lesson of Nixon’s resignation wasn’t that there were some things the nation would not stand in its elected officials; it was that even impeachment was a weapon, and it was a neutron bomb that hurt people but left institutions standing. Or so it seemed.

Gingrich learned that lesson, and when the “liberal” Clinton replaced Bush pere, he turned it on Clinton. It was also revenge for Iran/Contra. No, the current GOP hasn’t invented anything; they’re playing revenge politics from a 30 year old playbook.

No one ever accused Newt Gingrich of having a “moral compass.”

There was never any national outrage over Nixon. There was weariness over the scandal. If there was any outrage, it was over Ford’s pardon. But Ford lost his bid to be elected (he never was an elected President) because he was even less inspiring in office than Jimmy Carter, who is still the best ex-President we’ve ever had. It wasn’t a moral compass that denied Ford a victory.

The better argument is that if the country had a lick of sense they wouldn’t elect a Republican to be so much as a dog catcher. FDR cleaned up Hoover’s economic mess and Truman desegregated the armed forces and kept American prosperity growing through government actions that Eisenhower (he who warned of the military/industrial complex) kept going. Kennedy and LBJ continued the Democratic success until Nixon damaged it and then Reagan wrecked it entirely, beginning in earnest the transfer of wealth upward to the 1%. And not for nothing but there were scandals in every GOP Administration after Eisenhower’s, which is another reason Gingrich worked so hard to create one against Clinton. The best he could come up with was Clinton not wanting to admit publicly to a blow job in the Oval Office.  

Trump’s entire four years in office was a scandal, capped off by January 6, but carried over by the theft of government documents. Yes, a country with a moral compass would treat Trump like a piece of excrement that should be flushed away. But the idea of a national moral compass is a peculiarly American delusion. If we’re going to start lamenting our loss of it, the Native Americans and blacks and Asians, just to begin with, would like a word.