Personal ‘Decency’ Doesn’t Matter In Politics
It can’t hold a candle to concrete investments in constituents’ lives.
I hear all the time that President Joe Biden is a “decent man.” He might very well be. He seems like he is in some cases. But nothing about his personal decency matters to me. Nothing about his personal decency matters to my family, my friends, my neighbors. Nor should it matter to you.
That’s because his job has nothing to do with decency. The things that make Joe Biden decent are personal in nature and cannot, by definition, affect the public.
Biden is not a religious leader. He does not have a say over your morals. His job is to deliver concrete improvements to the lives of his constituents, and to manage the distribution of those concrete improvements efficiently. These are yes/no kinds of things that are easy to assess. Whether he makes people feel warm and fuzzy when they talk to him on the phone is useless to you. But did he make it easier to join a union and fight for your rights at the job? Yes. Did he invest trillions of dollars to create jobs to improve infrastructure, boost education, return manufacturing to the U.S., and fight climate change? Yes. Did he end the war he promised to end? Yes. I have my quibbles about how he performs the distribution side of his job, but that side of things is currently a work in progress—so I will give it a provisional yes.
Everything else in politics is marketing. Ignore it.
Focus on whether your neighborhood has well paved sidewalks, safe streets, good schools, green spaces, parks, affordable groceries, access to transit, and whether your cost of living is feasible. If you want to learn true decency, go to the house of worship of your choice or delve into philosophy or the arts.
A president, and every other elected official below a president, is a glorified office manager. Treat them as such.
If Decency Mattered, We Wouldn’t Have Trump
Donald Trump is selling $60 Bibles during Holy Week to appear like a “good” and “religious” person to his cult, most of which is constituted by evangelical Christians who pretend like they are good people too.
A judge and jury found Trump liable for sexual assault of writer E. Jean Carroll. The judge said that Trump would have been convicted of rape had the statute of limitations not run out on the case. Instead, Trump has to pay Carroll $83 million for defaming her repeatedly. He defamed her by saying that she lied about his rape of her. She and her lawyers proved in a court of law that he indeed raped her. Trump owes her because he can’t stop yammering about it in public.
Trump has also been found by a judge and jury to have committed endless fraud in his businesses. He has been barred from running a business in New York. He is flailing, trying to make all kinds of money from scams like the aforementioned Bibles with his name on them, to come up with the cash to pay the fines. He owes the state of New York nearly half a billion dollars, and he just had to get special dispensation to get more time to come up with a fraction of that sum.
Trump got elected after he got caught bragging about sexually assaulting women.
As president, his only lasting “accomplishment” is a tax cut that didn’t help anyone below the top 1%. Even that is set to expire next year. Everything else in Trump’s term was corruption, chaos, grift, and violence against minorities. That was all before he flailed and failed in the face of a pandemic that killed over a million Americans and caused the largest economic crash since the start of the Great Depression. He’s the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer Americans employed than when he entered office. His first of four criminal trials begins in a couple weeks.
None of this is decent. It is explained away by supposedly religious people. It is excused by the supposedly pious. Because those people are not decent. They want to enslave everyone who doesn’t already submit to them entirely. They demand to be worshiped for existing.
Don’t give them the satisfaction.
‘You Just Want The Government To Be For Handouts.’ Yes. That’s What It’s There For.
The Trump fans out there will insist that the government exists only to prevent “those people” from getting things they “don’t deserve.”
They cannot be swayed from the idea that they are the only people who pay taxes. It is an article of faith to them that they are the ones who are put upon, who are being stolen from, to fund the “lavish” lifestyles of the “undeserving.”
You will not convince them otherwise, no matter what reality says. Don’t bother showing them research, charts, or anything else to bolster your case. They won’t hear it. They want to dominate you. Organize around them with people who don’t want to dominate you. The wannabe dominators will benefit when the rest of us win, too. Not that they actually deserve it.
Their wrongness should not impact how you, your families, your friends, your neighbors live your lives. Because you pay taxes too. That means, in a capitalist system based on monetary transactions, the government owes you goods and services in exchange for the money you gave them.
The government exists because we pay for it, because we are spending money to receive specific services that are laid out in the Constitution, federal laws, and state and local laws that have been built for hundreds of years. We pay the government to efficiently manage the distribution of the resources we provide them for the use of everyone.
So when you encounter a Trumpist who insists otherwise, just ask, “Where did you get the idea that we’re supposed to pay extra money to take things away from our neighbors?”
Bad People Can Be Used To Do Good Things
Politicians can and do accomplish good things that benefit the vast majority of Americans. But none of it is inevitable. They don’t do these things out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s because political pressure existed on them, from all corners of society. If they didn’t do these things the people demanded, they would lose their jobs. That is the American people making their will known, not personal wins for these politicians. But the point I am making here is that these politicians were used by good Americans to do things to help more good Americans—regardless of these politicians’ personal evil.
Below are just three American presidents who were personally monstrous, but who were pushed around the American people to do good things:
President John F. Kennedy
The epitome of a privileged rich boy, JFK was a philandering drug addict who nearly blew up the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I feel he has been unfairly deemed heroic by the most talented political marketers of three consecutive generations. His career in both the House and Senate was laughably light when he had the gall to run for president on the strength of his ability to give speeches and look handsome on TV.
But then a funny thing happened. Once he won, he supercharged his predecessor’s investments in scientific research.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at JFK’s science legacy. “From human health to telecommunications to environmental studies, Kennedy left his stamp on a nation that was on the verge of economic transition – from a manufacturing and agricultural model to a society grappling with the challenges of a new information age,” they wrote.
Environmental protection, the internet, space exploration, and so much more happened because of these investments. Those are wins for the American people, not Kennedy.President Bill Clinton
Clinton is a sexual predator, having used his power over a White House intern to receive sexual favors in the Oval Office. He’s been accused of rape and other sex crimes by other women. He has never provided a satisfactory answer for why he rode on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane that was used for decades to traffic children for sexual slavery. He is unequivocally a bad human being.
But millions of kids, who were my peers at the time, received health insurance for the first time due to Clinton’s healthcare plans. It was, to that point, the largest expansion of child healthcare in the nation's history. Learn more about the Children’s Health Insurance Program here. This isn’t due to the moral force of Clinton. It is due to the demands of millions of good Americans who deserved better.President Richard Nixon
Nixon is Trump’s most obvious predecessor in presidential corruption. His enemies lists and recorded Oval Office conversations about the “inferiority” of minorities sound like a political thriller. But they really happened.
But Nixon also happened to be president when a dramatically more working class-oriented Democratic Party dominated Congress. Nixon got us this close to universal basic income and universal healthcare, until JFK’s sleazy brother let his own presidential ambitions get in the way of actually giving universal healthcare to the American people.
What Nixon actually accomplished included the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, long before his Republican Party coalesced around the idea (re: took bribes from fossil fuel companies) that climate change is a hoax. Richard Nixon, not a supposedly environmentally friendly Democrat, is why we are able to fight climate change at the federal level.
Funny how things work out when the American people push politicians around, eh?