WHATEVER WORKS!

The political pendulum has been swinging back and forth in the United States between the conservative right and the liberal left for as long as I can remember, and probably long before that. Despite these fluctuations, while nations rose and fell, economic systems flourished and failed, and political ideologies came and went all around us, we continued to move forward and closer to the ideals upon which our nation was founded – freedom and justice for all. But something has changed. Something is different about the United States - something unnerving and unsettling. The long arc of the moral universe is no longer bending toward justice. The moral imperative that both guided and characterized our nation through most of the 20^th Century – DO THE RIGHT THING – has been replaced with a new, amoral, pragmatic and fatalistic imperative - WHATEVER WORKS. This new imperative reflects a new set of core values and those values have already started and will continue to have a huge impact on our norms, rules and laws.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the vast majority of Americans, myself included, truly believed it was our responsibility as citizens to “Do the Right Thing,” and we expected our leaders to be our role models. In fact, we weren’t very tolerant of them when they came up short. For example:

In 1972, George McGovern , the Democratic candidate for President running against incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon, selected Thomas Eagleton, the former Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, as his running mate for Vice President. That was until it was rumored shortly after the Democratic Convention, and later confirmed, that Eagleton had been hospitalized and treated several times for clinical depression and had not told McGovern about his illness prior to his selection as McGovern’s running mate. Eighteen days after the convention, concerned about Eagleton’s fitness for the office and how the public would view his history of mental illness, McGovern dropped Eagleton from the ticket. McGovern was soundly defeated in a landslide election by voters who felt he had shown poor judgment, judgment unbefitting a President, by not vetting Eagleton properly before selecting him as his running mate in the first place.

In 1974, President Richard Nixon, half way through his second term, was forced to resign (the first and only President to have to do so) and several of his top aides were sent to prison after it was revealed by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and eventually confirmed by a lengthy investigation, that Nixon and his aides had orchestrated the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters located in the Watergate building in Washington, DC, for the purpose of bugging their phones.

In 1988, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, a Kennedy-like figure, was the front runner in the Democratic Primary for the office of President of the United States and was leading George H.W. Bush, the sitting Vice President and presumed Republican nominee, by 13 points in the polls. Then the Miami Herald ran a story accusing Hart of taking a cruise on a yacht in the Caribbean with a woman who wasn’t his wife and published a photo of her sitting on his lap near the water. The public outcry was so great that Hart was forced to suspend his campaign and withdraw his candidacy the very next week.

Clearly, that was not the same United States that elected Donald Trump in 2016.

I know there are millions of Americans who, like me, still believe we have a responsibility as citizens to “Do the right thing.” We may even still be a majority. But if we are, we have unquestionably been out-maneuvered and out-played by our fellow Americans who have come to believe that whatever you do is OK as long as it works and you can get away with it. And they now have the upper hand.

How this change came about is really irrelevant right now. The important question is, what can we do about it? The answer to that question is dependent upon our first accepting that the United States of America is morally bankrupt. Our norms are no longer being respected, our rules are being ignored with impunity by our own leaders and the current President and Republican controlled Congress are doing everything they can to change our laws in ways that will allow them, and the new generation of Robber Barons they serve, to do whatever they want without consequences.

Say what you want, think what you want, but the fact is - we are no longer the “Good Guys” and the whole world knows it, even if some of us choose to ignore that reality.