Have You No Sense of Decency?

What's dangerous today isn't woke ideology, trans people, or immigration. It's the tolerance for violence, vulgarity, and sheer meanness of spirit.

1.

When I was growing up five hundred years ago, “decency” was part of the square, bourgeois normalcy that I — as a privileged, rebellious, closeted teenager in suburban Tampa, Florida — hated.  It was epitomized by the Reagans and their old-fashioned values and anti-drug crusades.  I wanted to tear it all down.

Now, of course, I’m a lot older.  For one thing, I see how much of my adolescent rage was misguided – I was angrier at shopping malls and “hypocrisy” than racial or economic injustice.  I was Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, equal parts privilege and angst. 

For another, the poles of decency have switched.

Today, the Democrats are the party of decency, and the Republicans are the party of trolls, name-calling, vulgarity, and extremism.  They want to tear it all down, “it” being the globalized and multicultural society that has ‘ruined America.’  And accompanying their radical zeal is a puerile, trollish nastiness that makes Holden and me look like Gandalf the Grey. 

Of course, this “decency” was always a part lie, since it lay atop so much oppression and violence. The dominant group was never that decent to women, people of color, immigrants, the disabled, or queers, to name a few.  After all, I stayed in the closet for a reason.

But there were at least some standards for how public figures, especially politicians, behaved.  Reagan shredded the welfare state, created the wealth gap that is still growing today, and ignored AIDS for years, but he didn’t brag that he could grab women by the pussy. That should count for something.

It’s not just Trump, though. Trump may have raised populist American vulgarity to a demagogic art form (Jeff Sharlet has written about how it is the main point of his rallies) but there was plenty already there in the Tea Party movement and, of course, in the once-far white nationalist Right.  Now it oozes beyond Trump to tens of millions of Americans who love nothing more than to own the libs, like some powerless teenagers vandalizing a city wall because they have no other way to flex their muscles.

Take, for example, the entire GOP’s insistence on mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s first name.  Everyone who follows politics knows that she pronounces it KOM-ala, not kam-AH-la.  Yet at the RNC, nearly half the speakers intentionally mispronounced it.  Indeed, looking at the Washington Post’s chart of who said what, the mispronunciation tracks one’s MAGA-hood.  Matt Gaetz yes, Nikki Haley no.

There are at least two reasons for this bullshit.  First, it serves to otherize Vice President Harris. “Everyone” – meaning, every white person – can pronounce Donald, Tim, and JD.  But “Kamala”?  That’s weird.  Foreign-sounding.  Especially with the accent on the second syllable.  It’s a subtle birtherism, but it’s birtherism nonetheless.

Second, and I think more importantly, it’s just trolling.  Disempowered MAGA men love to imagine that they’re making woke progressives cry “liberal tears” by their mean little antics.  They say Kam-AH-la — and “Democrat Party” instead of “Democratic Party” — simply because it’s name-calling, because they hope it will get a rise out of us.  Again, like a pathetic schoolyard bully.

MAGA embodied, not by Norman Rockwell but Midjourney

And of course it’s not just mispronunciation. Trump has called Kamala Harris “dumb as a rock,” “nasty,” a “bum,” and “real garbage.” I’ve seen numerous memes making fun of Harris, who is clearly quite intelligent and whose vocabulary and sentence structure dwarfs that of Trump, as “dumb.” I’m not sure if this is trolling or racist/ sexist delusion: The Nation has devastatingly catalogued the way Trump denigrates Black women in particular.

These people think that what is new and dangerous about America are things like woke ideology, trans people, and immigration.  But what’s really new and dangerous is their tolerance for violence, their vulgarity, and their sheer meanness of spirit. 

2.

Of course, as soon as the poles of mockery are reversed, right-wing snowflakes call foul.  “Don’t condescend to Trump voters,” coastal elites like me are always told.  And part of me (especially the rabbi/meditation/psychedelic part) agrees.  It’s manifestly obvious that the name-calling and lib-owning are, like all bullying, symptoms of a deep self-loathing and profound insecurity.  These people know that the country they once loved — the mean, chauvinistic, white-dominated, Christian-first, English-only, gay-bashing one where they or their husbands were in charge — is never coming back, even if Trump wins the election. I think they know, too, that they have allowed themselves to be victims of globalization and economic change, even if they blame their loss of status on elites and immigrants rather than billionaires, large corporations, and their political enablers. They know that their old ways don’t work anymore; their disregard for truth and decency has, at its root, a sad, nihilistic despair.  So I do feel some compassion for them.

Then again, a lot of people experience grief, loss, and change.  Not all of them turn their pain outward, scapegoating and dehumanizing “illegals” or supporting a boorish demagogue.  Some accommodate themselves to new realities, find ways to grow with them, and take responsibility for their shortcomings, rather than blame someone else.

But MAGA lashes out in vengeance, rage, and nihilism.  Do 90 million Americans really believe the Big Lie, or do they just not give a fuck?  Trumpism is a lot like pro wrestling (maybe not a coincidence, since arch-hucksterer Vince McMahon played a big role in creating both).  Everyone knows it’s fake, but they still shout along as if it isn’t.

I’m reminded of this well-known passage by Hannah Arendt, writing of past totalitarians but equally apposite to Putin and Trump:

This constant lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.  A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.  And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.  With such a people, you can do whatever you want.

This seems mostly true today, though now the lying is done by sinister overlords to manipulate the people, but by a demagogue and television networks responding to ‘audience capture.’  Maybe Trump’s billionaire backers are engaged in mass manipulation, but Trump, Carlson, Vance, and the rest?  They’re giving the people what they want.

3.

Like many progressives, I can’t believe that the presidential race remains this close.  Not because of the MAGA base, but because of the twenty or so percent of Americans willing to put up with it, or don’t know about it, or think it’s just fake news.

This is a profound moral failure.

It should count that this candidate is a convicted felon; that he incited a riot against the capital that stated the express intention to kill members of congress; that he, every day, lies more than any politician before him, from the ‘Big Lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen to the preposterous lies about the size of his political rallies; that he is vulgar, mean, intemperate, and brutish. 

Sure, for a MAGA nativist or Christian nationalist, all these sins may be denied or overlooked in the name of revenge or apocalyptic messianism.  But what about everyone else?  These things used to matter, especially to conservatives. 

I think back, again, to the conservatives of my youth.  This was the party that — to a fault, in my view — used to insist on virtue, morality, and moderation.  And now?  How many of them are willing to overlook the obvious criminality and venality of Trump and his cronies, just for the sake of a tax cut, or a more accommodating policy toward Israel, or some other bowl of porridge that’s worth selling the conservative birthright to obtain?

Of course, many conservatives today know this. They know how Trumpism has destroyed their party. In a sense, their loss is even greater than mine, since they’ve lost their political home. Here’s what some of them have said about Trump:

And yet, even some of the people on this chart have now lined up behind him.

Possibly even worse, the “low-information voters” who may now decide the election represent an even greater failure on the part of the American educational system. Every time I read an interview of them, I wonder to myself, how do they not see that one of these candidates is a serially lying criminal who wants to build concentration camps for suspected “illegals”? How can they not know the stakes?

The great gamble of the Harris campaign is betting that enough people feel disgusted with Trump and Trumpism that they will take a chance on “joy.”  I am sure that a small legion of political strategists have reviewed the numbers, and I have nothing to offer to their calculations, other than the hope that they are right. 

For sure, fighting negativity with negativity hasn’t worked. All the warning and doomsaying about Trump from commentators like me hasn’t moved the needle.  People either aren’t paying attention, or they’ve grown immune to hyperbole.  Liberal journalists have cried wolf too many times. 

The Harris bet is that there is still a thread of decency, however hypocritical or incomplete, that runs through the fabric of mainstream America.  This was never where I found myself most at home, and teenage me would surely be appalled at my embrace of it.  But it is there nonetheless.  And the Harris campaign is betting that enough people know in their guts — that is, their moral intuition — that Trump is just a bad guy, and that it’s worth taking a chance on someone more positive. This is, in a sense, a spiritual campaign.

We have come back from the brink before.  Consider the period in American life that gives this essay its title: McCarthyism.  Red-baiting demagogue Joe McCarthy has a lot in common with Trump: the draft-dodging, red-baiting Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s former aide who taught Trump his aggressive strategy of always attacking, exaggerating, and demonizing the opponent.  But also a nativist fanaticism; Trump has even begun calling Harris a “Communist” of late, which is utterly ludicrous from a factual point of view.  And a disregard of the truth.

In early 1954, McCarthy accused the Army – during the Eisenhower presidency, no less – of being “soft on Communism.” During weeks of congressional hearings, McCarthy had failed to make his charges stick; Army special counsel Joseph R. Walsh had refuted every single one of them, and McCarthy had been caught lying more than once.  Then, on June 9, McCarthy went after a young associate in Welch’s own law firm, alleging that he, too, had ties to the Communist party.  That’s when Welch responded, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

Harris isn’t asking Trump that question, because she knows the answer. She’s asking it of ordinary American people, and predicting that they’ll answer in the affirmative. God help us if she’s wrong.

---

I hope y’all are having a decent week. (See what I did there?) I’ve been doing a bunch of work in the psychedelics-and-law space this week - digging

Jules Evans

’ take on recent efforts to improve safety in medical and religious psychedelic use, including some by my colleagues at Emory.

I also wrote this helpful reminder to would-be Defenders Of The Jews that spreading conspiracy theories is never good for us.

Thanks to Jay Kuo at

The Big Picture

for injecting some fact-based reasons to be optimistic about a Harris victory. Also, in the category of “How is this election even so close when one side is promising militarized authoritarian nationalism?” check out

Popular Information

‘s harrowingly sober analysis of what mass deportations would actually look like.

Have you all seen that my friend and meditation comrade in arms

Dan Harris

has a new Substack? Check it out! Inner mysticism, m*therf*ckers. (That’s a Dan paraphrase.)

Thank you for subscribing!