WSJ columnist: “Trump Accelerates Our Decline Into Moral Relativism”

The writer, Gerard Baker, is English and the former Editor in Chief of the Journal. He is broadly supportive of Trump’s policies (like myself) but then you have this problem (and I agree).

As is often true, he wasn’t the first but is the worst to use others’ wrongs as an excuse for his own.

Moral relativism is enticing. It enables me to establish the moral value of everything I do by reference to the behavior of others. It allows me to avoid censure by judging my intentions, choices and actions not on the basis of whether they are intrinsically right or wrong, but by the lesser standard of whether someone in a similar position might have done something similar.

It is deeply corrosive of personal mores and social trust. Over time it dulls the conscience to any moral hierarchy. It is never a legal defense and shouldn’t be a moral one.

Moral relativism is hardly new in public life. Self-exoneration through false moral equivalence by public figures is as old as time itself. But when it becomes the controlling ethical architecture of public behavior, we are in serious trouble.

********************

We’ve been descending this spiral for a long time, but as with just about everything to do with the gargantuan figure of Donald Trump, his behavior has accelerated the descent.

His corrosive effect on norms of ethics, language and, for that matter, conservatism, has been amplified by the eager acquiescence of the Republican Party in the process.

**************************

Take the pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the Binance cryptocurrency exchange founder, convicted of money-laundering offenses. This after his firm had been involved in a lucrative financial partnership for the president and his family that helped contribute to the $4.5 billion in wealth they have generated this year alone. Morally equivalent precedents: Hunter Biden? The Clinton Foundation? Hardly on the same scale. What we have seen this year is new levels of graft and grift. We seem to be moving rapidly toward a justice system in which the president essentially gets to decide who should be in prison. If you’re a political enemy, we’ll come up with a crime to fit your punishment. If you’re a friend, we will annul your crimes.

***************************

It should be possible—and it is essential to a well-ordered society—to call out morally reprehensible behavior by your own side as well as by your opponents. That it no longer seems to be leaves us all morally degenerate.