The decency agenda . . . amiss...
The essayist Andrew Sullivan has contended that Americans, or American leaders at any rate, have lost their sense of decency. In invoking Orwell’s famous essay about the English, he may have a point. But this observer feels that he has misidentified the problem.
It was another quasi-Englishman, Harold Macmillan, who declared that the most important attribute for any successful politician is ruthlessness. How can one be both ruthless and decent at the same time? It’s possible, maybe, but unlikely.
There is nothing controversial in the claim that the current American presidential administration, and a good part of the country’s other two branches of government, do not exhibit much decency. Sometimes, or even oftentimes, they are flagrantly indecent.
That, however, is not new. Donald Trump may be the most vulgar chief executive since Lyndon Johnson, but were his predecessors really that decent?
It’s fair to say, on the contrary, that the last truly decent American president was Ronald Reagan. Not always, but most of the time – in his silly storytelling, his mediocre films, his hatred of nuclear weapons, and so on – Reagan had the outward (and maybe the inward) decency of Jimmy Carter without the irritating virtue. One reason the American people gave Reagan a pass over the Iran-Contra affair was that they couldn’t believe a man who seemed so decent would have done such a thing if he had truly understood it. Can one say that about any of his successors?
Were either of the Bushes decent men? In their armed interventions, their Supreme Court appointments, their management of the economy? Was Bill Clinton decent in his double-dealing with Russia or in his handling of the many scandals throughout his political career? Was Barack Obama decent in his mass deportations or in his weekly assassination targeting sessions? Was Joe Biden decent in his notorious crime bill, in his abandonment of loyal collaborators in Afghanistan, in his bear hug of Benjamin Netanyahu?
The quality Mr Sullivan wants is not decency but dignity. Trump is the first American president in recent memory, with the partial exception perhaps of Clinton, to go out of his way to behave without any reasonable sense of dignity. Even Johnson would make the effort when the cameras were on. No matter how many times these men felt the need to demean themselves and their office, they could be dignified when it mattered: recall, for example, George W. Bush’s speeches just after 11 September 2001. The dumb good-old-boy Texan act, and even the accent, were gone.
It’s hard to name a Western leader today who acts with deliberate dignity. Claudia Scheinbaum, maybe. This has nothing to do with decency, or indecency. It’s another problem.