Borrowing a Cup of Hope #21:The Slippery Slope from Amoral to Immoral

Autocracy Isn’t Just Bad, It’s Wrong.

(Author’s note: I caught some sort of bug and have been too ill to write for more than 2 weeks. Sorry for the delay. I’m almost ok now).

I’ve been ill since the assassination of the former Speaker of the MN House, Melissa Hortman, a Catholic Sunday School Teacher, and her husband, and their dog, a rescue. Another legislator was shot along with his wife, and they have somehow survived a combined 15 bullet wounds. They caught the guy, a gun nut, a fervid “Christian” and an avid Trump supporter. Since then, Trump has suckered us into dropping ginormous bombs on Iran.

These events are of a piece. They are both acts of American violence, playing out in large and small spheres. Doing Squint Eastwood’s “Go ahead. Make my day” tough guy crap. Trump’s heightening of violent language throughout his campaigns have devalued the restraint normally practiced in campaigns that understand there are unsettled people out there who could reach the tipping point. Trump called Kamala Harris “a Communist” in her campaign, and just yesterday called New York mayoral candidate Zohram Mamdani “a Communist”. It’s true of neither, but it could draw automatic weapons fire like it did in Minnesota.

That is an immoral use of the platform. Not amoral, not neutral free speech, but Immoral, taking license to do wrong.

There is nothing new about this. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. nailed it on 4-4-67, when he said the US is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and that hasn’t changed. King knew from the beginning of his effort to end legalized segregation in the United States that it may cost him his life. When he told his fellow students in the Seminary that he intended on breaking segregation, and he wanted their promise to stand with him, they all laughed, saying (and I paraphrase) “You won’t be standing long, because they will bring out their long rifles and shoot you down.” But he was also talking about Vietnam, the overthrow of governments from Iran to Nicaragua, and the rampant spread of firearms domestically.

In my own naive delusions about my home country, I grew up believing that we are always changing for the better, that people would see and understand that racism is bad, that discriminating against women is irrational and wrong, that giving poor people the means they need to live a better life would eventually help them to become more self-sufficient, that selling military weapons to any lone crackpot who wants one will lead to massacres, that some people need the care of institutions, that public health and public education are good for everyone; all of these were truths that I held to be self-evident. But a Jewish scholar once said “Things don’t always go forward. Ask any Jewish person who knows history. Sometimes things go backwards.”

I think the latest shock to my naive system is a reckoning that there is a complete and devastating absence, even collapse, in moral leadership. Most Americans have reconciled themselves to the idea that we are an Amoral nation, (lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something) a nation without a significant commitment to having morals. We all kind of let everything slide. When we go to work, we are told to "leave your conscience at the door." We know advertisements are dressed-up lies, that salesmen exaggerate, that the product of a TV network is not the show but instead it is the audience that is being sold. We know that Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger and inside trader in the Stock Market; that Preston Bush laundered money for the Nazis; that Henry Ford was a big supporter of Hitler; and that the Delano family of FDR’s mom built their fortune in opium. But now, with Trump and the MAGA Republicans running (ruining) so much of the government, we are an Immoral nation (not conforming to accepted standards of morality at all). Polite political fibs have become a torrent of policy lies. Amoral means not caring about morals, Immoral means conflicting with morals, it means actively attacking morals in Trump’s case. Always Attack, said Roy Cohn to Donald Trump. And this needs to be named and called out. What Trump and the MAGA “Christians” are doing Is Immoral.

Joan Didion was asked to write about morality for The American Scholar, and she wrestled with the idea and how the term can be used. She said “‘morality,’ a word I distrust more every day,” varies under circumstance; “it is difficult to believe that ‘the good’ is a knowable quantity.”…. (people will say) “‘I followed my own conscience.” “I did what I thought was right.” How many madmen have said it and meant it? How many murderers?….when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.” MAGA says we ae there, and they have the only moral imperative; everyone else is un-American.

This is a thorny, knotty problem, because the current administration is unrelentingly immoral, but presents itself with righteous indignation that anyone can question the motives of Der Fuhrer. Trump takes in millions in cash bribes at a dinner that includes foreign nationals, with the fig leaf that they are buying Trump’s crypto currency, and Trump refuses to release a list of buyers and what they spent. His press secretary goes whole hog with the “how dare you! “ argument that Trump would never sell out his position for personal profit. But we have seen him do this many, many times already.

In my experience, I have seen the tug of war in public morality pull from the two directions of Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Southern Baptist, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the American Baptist. Fallwell introduced the idea of “the Moral Majority” which cloaked the political aspirations of his community with a solemn self-righteousness as they attacked homosexuality, same sex marriage, the right of a woman to self-determination in health care and abortion, and the implied anti-DEI message that maybe non-white people aren’t fully as American as the white males like Fallwell who are prepared to rule the nation.

Karl Rove, the political brains behind George W. Bush, used this anti-gay marriage and anti-choice rhetoric to drive “Christian” voter turnout (which had been previously somnambulant) and win elections (or get them close enough to steal), and with Lee Atwater made the minority party of Republicans successful enough to take the White House without the support of the electorate. That hard-wired discipline is what drives the Republican party today.

The idea that there is some sort of common morality that we can refer to is therefore not a concrete thing, but is instead a moving target. Christian Nationalists are among the most immoral people in the country, a direct descendent of the KKK, a fringe crackpot group of so-called “Christians” who think the Sermon on the Mount is too liberal. Nothing moral or Christian about them.

We can’t cite specific religious beliefs as source material for morality without finding concordance elsewhere. Religion has in the past been a resource where we seek moral clarity, but no religion has a clean track record anymore. The Jewish faith is soiled by the genocide in Gaza; Islam’s home country of Saudi Arabia beheads gay people and abuses women; Buddhists persecute the Rohingya in Burma; Chinese atheists persecute the Uyghurs; the Lutheran-Catholic German Nazis killed about 80 million people. No one’s hands are clean. But we can try to realize a common sense of morality outside of faith traditions.

So if we are to fight the unalloyed immorality of the Trumpistas, we have to use the term Immoral with a straight face, knowing it’s tricky to go down that road. It’s a widely abused term, yet it is what we have. A currently successful example is Moral Mondays, an ongoing effort by Rev. William Barber, head of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and pastor of a Disciples of Christ congregation (they are too small a denomination to have much of a heinous track record). Rev. Barber is trying to define immorality in detail, and battle it one fight at a time.

Defining morality is like trying to pick up some mercury. But we can’t wait until there is a committee meeting that approves the language and definition. We have to call out Trump’s immorality and the immorality of his followers as each occasion arises, in our own voices and using our own definitions.

What they are doing is Wrong with a Capital W. What they are is Immoral. What they achieve is destructive, it is against the well-being of the world community. Each act has to be named and called out. And they have to be defeated in detail. Start here:

It is immoral to pledge to uphold the Constitution and then disassemble it.

It is immoral to advocate for unborn children by shooting adults dead.

It is immoral to pledge to deport illegal immigrants, and then deport legal immigrants and citizens.

It is immoral to build concentration camps for ICE captives where children have to fight adults for water.

It is immoral to restrict abortion access so that women with ectopic pregnancies will die.

It is immoral to take food and medical care away from those in need in order to give deep tax cuts to people who own $500 million yachts.

It is immoral to pledge you will not overturn precedent if approved for the Supreme Court, and then immediately overturn the precedent of Roe v. Wade.

It is immoral to compare immigrants to vermin, the same way that Hitler compared Jews to vermin.

And on and on.

Name Names. Fight The Power. Win Or Lose.

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