Make Character Great Again

America can’t survive the complete corruption of our political class.

One of the hallmarks of our current time is that simple truths can often sound like radical dissent. To declare that “lying is wrong” in response to a grotesque falsehood is to invite an avalanche of whataboutism. Say that “political violence is evil,” and you’ll quickly be challenged to take sides and declare whether right or left is worse.

It’s not that people disagree with those statements, exactly. It’s just that granting their full truth carries uncomfortable implications.

Here’s another simple truth: Character matters. This is the political assertion that meets with perhaps the ultimate “yes, but” response. “Yes, but so does policy.” “Yes, but no one is perfect.” “Yes, but we need to fight fire with fire.” As a wise retired federal judge once told me, when someone says “Yes, but” the only words that matter come after the “but.” The “yes” is appeasement; the “but” is belief.

And so it is with this political moment. We live in a time of partisan animosity so great that an October NBC News poll found that 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans “believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.”

In those circumstances, the quest for character becomes a form of luxury belief. It’s what you cling to in safer, more secure times. That same poll found that “two-thirds of reliable Democratic and Republican voters say they’d still support their party’s political candidate, even if that person had a moral failing that wasn’t consistent with their own values.”

While a decreasing emphasis on character is clearly a bipartisan problem, other polling indicates that the position of white evangelicals, in particular, has totally transformed on the matter. Between 2011 and 2016, white evangelicals went from the American demographic least likely to agree that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties” to the group most likely to agree with that statement.

This transformation made Donald Trump’s presidency possible, and it is a grave mistake. Good character should never be optional in leaders, and strength of character is more important in difficult times.

But it’s now wrong to simply assert that truth as self-evident. Millions of Americans disagree. They’re willing to hold their noses and vote for someone they might not even trust to manage a local McDonald’s and send them to the United States Congress, or even the White House, so long as they defeat the hated enemy on the other side.

Why are they wrong? The evidence is everywhere, if you know where to look. While bad policy can be extraordinarily consequential, our current political dysfunctions are mainly due to bad character. And if you vote for bad character to stop bad policy, you’re making the sickness worse.

Consider the challenge of mutual hatred. Negative partisanship is now a central fact of American politics. Millions of Americans now support their political party not because they love its politicians or its policies, but because they hate and fear the other side.

It would be bad enough if that hatred and fear were rooted in truthful assessments of political opponents, but partisan Americans consistently misjudge their ideological adversaries. They rate them as far more extreme than they really are.

While partisan media shoulder much of the blame, ask yourself: How many politicians raise money and gain power by stoking as much hatred as possible? How often are they exaggerating the threat of their opponents? How often are they engaged in outright lies?

Or consider the distrust of American institutions. Competence is quite often a key by-product of good character. Indeed, I’d say it’s an aspect of good character. In my experience the best lawyers, the best doctors, the best military officers, and the best corporate leaders combine a set of skills that include not just self-discipline and an inquisitive mind, but also an innate curiosity and openness that allows them to understand and absorb new information and competing ideas.

The instant a person becomes so convinced of their own excellence that they lose those qualities is the instant that their hubris can destroy their competence. Time and again, American institutions lose trust not just because they’re corrupt (an obvious sign of bad character), but also because they’re sloppy or inefficient, or just can’t accomplish the most necessary tasks.

Lift up the rock on a broken institution, and you’ll see opportunists and frauds squirming underneath.

Or think of the challenges to democracy itself. The conspiracies that culminated in the violent attempted coup on January 6 were entirely the product of one of the most colossal character failures in the history of the United States. Donald Trump’s malicious lies and will to power were the obvious first causes of the riot, but consider the cascading character failures that led to the attack.

Most of Trump’s staff folded. Rather than expose his corruption and resign, they stayed by his side and even joined in the effort to overturn an American election. Most of the Republicans in Congress followed suit. Even the most outspoken of congressional Christians either flatly lied to the American people or willingly followed Trump’s lead. They didn’t have the basic level of courage and integrity necessary to say the truth.

Almost the entire right-wing infotainment industry gave in, too. While there were brave voices demanding that Trump yield, huge right-wing media figures enthusiastically pushed the most bizarre of conspiracies. And they were richly rewarded for their lies.

What ultimately stopped Trump? Character. It was the character of judges—including Federalist Society judges—who turned back dozens of election challenges. It was the character of members of Congress, including both Democratic and Republican leaders, who decided they would return to the House chamber and finish counting the electoral votes that would secure Joe Biden’s lawful electoral victory.

We can’t forget the character of Mike Pence. While I disagreed with Pence on countless occasions before January 6, he was at the eye of that hurricane, and he stood firm.

I used to think of the absence of character mainly in relation to its long-term, insidious threat to the republic. Think of it as the political equivalent of smoking three packs of cigarettes per day. Bad character makes the body politic unhealthy, but it does so often slowly and imperceptibly—until one day you realize that the nation is sick, but the addiction remains.

Bad character is a long-term threat. The smoking analogy is valid. But January 6 taught me that bad character can function as an immediate threat as well. Like a gun to the head.

When people crack under pressure, the results can be sudden and catastrophic. And when they crack, all their policy ideas are but dust in the wind. On January 6, for example, America was only one more crack away—a Mike Pence “yes” to Trump’s scheme—from the worst constitutional crisis since 1861.

The conservative world is, right now, largely split between two camps: the Republican establishment and the MAGA populists. Traditional Republicans still understand the importance of character, at least to some extent. Indeed many of them were proud of a perceived contrast between the Bill Clinton–led Democratic Party and a Republican Party that (once) remembered when character was king.

But now, as my Dispatch colleague Nick Catoggio writes, “The modern Republican Party is essentially a hostage crisis in which each wing could kill the party by bolting the coalition but only one wing is willing to do it and both sides know it.” The MAGA wing will stay home if its demands aren’t met. The establishment, by contrast, dutifully marches to the polls, no matter who has the “R” by their name.

This has to change. It is not the case, for example, that a Republican Senate candidate is running “only” to be a vote, and not a leader. There is no such thing as “only” voting. When Ted Cruz executed Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro’s so-called Green Bay Sweep (a plan to challenge the 2020 election by stalling the electoral-vote count), he was “only” voting, but that vote was also a dangerous act of toxic leadership.

I’ve focused mostly on the Republican character challenge mainly because so very many GOP election deniers are running for office, and because Donald Trump—one of the worst men ever to occupy the Oval Office—remains the Republican frontrunner for 2024. Yet, as noted above, the polling data indicate that a lack of commitment to character is a bipartisan problem.

When you distrust or despise your enemy enough, character is often the first casualty of political combat. But if we kill character, we risk killing our country. We cannot survive the complete corruption of our political class.