The Floor of Decency
There
was once a bare minimum standard of public behavior.
By David Brooks
Opinion
Columnist
- Oct. 28, 2020
Until four years ago there was
what you might call a Floor
of Decency. This was the basic minimum standard of behavior to be an accepted
member of society. Even when people did bad things, they at least tried to
pretend that they were good, that they operated according to the basic values of
society. You may or may not like the people in, say, the Obama or Bush
administrations, you may think they made grave mistakes, but you have to admit
they generally strove to meet this basic minimum.
Because it was more or less taken for
granted, a lot of us weren’t even really conscious of this floor. It was just
there, like the sidewalk you step on when you walk down the street.
I vividly remember the moment in the
last campaign when, for me, Donald Trump smashed the floor. Trump had already
made fun of the appearance of his rival Carly Fiorina in an interview with Rolling Stone. Then in the
second Republican presidential primary debate he looked to Rand Paul and said,
“I never attacked him on his looks, and believe me, there’s plenty of subject
matter right there.”
The sad thing is
that, from the vantage point of 2020, that line no longer seems that
outrageous. But it seemed outrageous then. No other modern presidential
candidate had talked and behaved that way.
And then, just when you thought the
country would rise up in moral revulsion … nothing happened. Trump’s behavior
got worse and worse and worse … and nothing happened. He was defying moral
gravity. A lot of Americans either had reality TV moral standards or their
expectations of politicians were so low they didn’t care.
I had trouble adjusting to the new
reality. I imagined the floor was just lowered. Even after he was elected, I
predicted he’d be out in a year. He’d create some scandal or commit some crime
and would be gone. He created more scandals than I expected … and he just kept
going. One of the oft-repeated phrases about Trump during these years was: There
is no bottom.
The floor had upheld a basic standard
for political behavior so it was not just dog eat dog. You may not have agreed
with other people, you may not have liked them or even found them tolerable,
but you granted them basic legitimacy as civic actors because they at least
recognized basic standards.
With the floor gone, the assumption of
legitimacy went too. Today, many Trump opponents look at the moral degradation
Trump supporters tolerate, the bigotry they endorse or tolerate, and they
conclude that such people are beyond the pale. Simultaneously, many Trump
supporters conclude that Trump opponents have such viciously anti-American
ideas, that they too lack legitimacy. We’ve long had polarization, but we now
have in America a crisis of legitimacy, which is a different creature. It’s the
obliteration of other citizens, an assumption that the institutions, like
election systems, are fundamentally frauds and are rigged. This is what Trump
is exploiting now.
Amid this alienation,
Americans lost faith in each other. In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a
good or great deal of trust in the
wisdom of their fellow citizens in making political decisions. Today only a
third of Americans have a great or good deal of trust in the ability of their
fellow citizens to make competent political decisions.
Joe Biden is the personification of
decency, and if he wins he’ll do his best to restore our standards of behavior.
But a lot of people on the hard left and the hard right now consider politics a
war of all against all, where the ends justify any means.
Nobody has emerged unscathed. Those of
us in the anti-Trump camp will be smiled upon by history I imagine, but we
might pause for a moment to consider the mote in our own eye. Our own sins are
the only ones we can control.
Over the past four years we’ve poured
out an hourly flow of anti-Trump diatribes and in almost every case they rise
to the top of the charts — most liked, most retweeted, most read.
Even when justified, permanent
indignation is not a healthy emotional state. We’ve become a little addicted to
our own umbrage, addicted to that easy feeling of moral superiority, addicted
to the easy affirmation bath we get when we repeat what we all believe.
Trump-bashing has become a business model. Politics has become a way to define
and signify your identity, and that is elevating politics to too central a
place in life. He’s made life all about himself, and a lot of us too readily
played along.
Here’s one thing we will never be able
to shake, the awareness that our basic standards of decency are more fragile
than we thought; the awareness that any year, some new leader may come along
and bring us back to a world of no bottom.
