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“The President is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and the eyes of our children.”
William Bennett, “The Death of Outrage,” 1998
There was a time, not that long ago, when American conservatives were obsessed with the public virtues of private character.
Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan titled her biography of Reagan, “When Character Was King.”
“In a president,” Noonan wrote, “character is everything. A president doesn’t just deal with the problems of the day; he sets the tone and spirit of the nation.”
James Q. Wilson, a longtime Harvard professor, wrote “The Moral Self” in 1993, a key text in the conservative case that character was the cornerstone of public and private life: “Human beings are endowed with a moral sense — an intuitive capacity to judge actions as fair or unfair, right or wrong.”
Mitt Romney Campaign Chief Strategist Stuart Stevens photographed at the Romney Campaign’s Boston headquarters, Friday, June 1, 2012. Credit: AP Photo/Josh ReynoldsWhen I was working in the George W. Bush campaign, his single most powerful message was “Restoring honor and dignity to the White House.” Of all the ads we made, the one with then-Gov. Bush delivering that line straight to the camera moved the numbers more than any other.
While there is much on the policy front that Republicans got wrong in the 1980s and 1990s — remember the Laffer Curve that was the cornerstone of Republican tax policy — they got the importance of character right
“The presidency is not merely an office of power; it is an office of example,” George Will wrote in 1998.
Watching Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend launching a war with the Persian Empire and chortling over killing Iranians — “We might do it again for fun” — I’m struck by what the Donald Trump era has done to our national sense of self. A president who treats war like a snuff film he would have enjoyed with Ghislaine Maxwell — “I just wish her well,” Trump said when the pedophile was arrested — is a cancer on the nation’s soul.
It’s no surprise that we keep hearing about groups of youngish Republicans who praise Hitler in chatrooms. It has been 2007 since they knew a Republican president who was a decent human being.
Why does JD Vance defend the Nazi-humpers in his party? Because he knows that the way to advance in the Republican Party is to be the most transgressive. Donald Trump launched his campaign in 2015 by calling Mexicans rapists.
Now that a masked death squad is chasing brown people across the country, there’s no political juice in a mere verbal assault against Hispanics. So, Vance decides to up the ante and defend those in his party who cosplay as Nazis. Let’s see you top that, Marco Rubio.
It is the deepest sort of denial to assert that a country led by broken, sick men does not impact the definition of what it means to be an American.
Compare this moral collapse to Ukraine. Since the Russians launched their full-scale war of genocide, Ukrainians look to their country and leaders with great pride and respect. The Russians thought that Ukrainians would fold like a cardboard box left in a long rain. Not since Hitler invaded Russia has there been such a miscalculation in a European war
Now in the fifth year of the largest European land war since World War II, the character of the Ukrainian people has been tested under the most brutal conditions. For generations, the quiet heroism and courage of Ukrainians and their leaders will be celebrated.
To grow up in America today is to look at our national leaders with a sense of disgust and alienation. Who in their right mind would want to be Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend who talks in public about dating his own daughter? Who would want to be a man so void of any basic humanity that the death of millions after the killing of USAID is gleefully cited as shrewd budget management?
The conservatives who once lectured the country about character did not lose the argument. They abandoned it. When it became inconvenient — when their voters chose a man who embodies everything they once claimed to oppose — they folded. Not gradually, not reluctantly, but enthusiastically.
The same movement that once insisted a president must be a moral exemplar for the nation’s children now explains away a man who paid hush money to a porn star, who mocks the disabled and who celebrates cruelty as strength. They did not change their theory of character. They simply decided that winning was worth more than the theory.
That is the real American crisis. Not just that we have a president of broken character, but that an entire political movement chose him knowingly, repeatedly and joyfully.
William Bennett was right in 1998. He just didn’t anticipate that the people who agreed with him most loudly would be the ones who burned it all down.
Stuart Stevens, a Jackson native, is a veteran political consultant, working on multiple high-profile Republican campaigns, including presidential and senatorial campaigns. In more recent years, he has been affiliated with the Lincoln Project, comprised mainly of longtime Republicans who oppose Donald Trump. Stevens has spoken out on what he views as the country’s shift toward authoritarianism and is the author of multiple books, including the 2020, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”
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