Copyright The Boston Globe
From the last month alone we’ve had more than a gruff progressive from Maine: A Democrat elected to be the attorney general of Virginia, despite getting caught during the campaign having written texts that fantasized about the death of a colleague. A White House that answers press inquiries with “your mom” jokes and ideates dumping feces on American citizens. A prominent conservative podcaster interviewing a vile racist and antisemite — and being defended by the president of the Heritage Foundation, who suggested conservatives should be focusing on “our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.” After intense backlash from many members of his staff, he admitted to making a mistake — but it took him a week to figure that out. It’s no use drawing moral comparisons. What matters is that all of this behavior, on its own, is deplorable. But partisans love to compare. When one side has a bad actor, they no longer denounce and repent — they say it matters less than winning and point at examples of bad behavior on the other side. And thus the cycle continues. But why do we have to tolerate bad behavior at all? There should be a standard of conduct expected of everyone in politics, and politicians should be shamed when they don’t meet it. Our Founders didn’t just see virtue as a helpful trait in our leaders — they saw it as essential to the existence of the Republic. They built a system that subjected leaders to checks on their behavior, through term limits and elections. For this system to work, we have to vote for the right kind of leaders. But American voters have grown shameless, too. Shame has fallen out of fashion. It’s seen as prudish, inhibitory, soft. But this republic needs a uniform sense of shame, not only to demand virtuous leadership from our political class but to hold ourselves accountable. Bad leaders don’t turn up in office unless we vote for them. Thomas Jefferson had no use for the traditional idea of aristocracy. What good would hereditary favor be in the nascent republic? In a letter to John Adams in 1813, he argued that the “artificial aristocracy” was built merely on “wealth and birth.” This didn’t mean that Jefferson wanted to entrust leadership to just anyone, of any character. He believed in a ruling class defined not by bloodline but by virtue. The “natural aristocracy,” full of “virtue and wisdom,” had a “more precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.” In Federalist Paper 57, James Madison wrote that the first aim of a political constitution should be “to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.” The next: “To take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” Both Jefferson and Madison believed in the need to have leaders who are the best among us: the kind of people with excellent character that prioritizes the “common good” over the personal and the partisan. They didn’t always live up to this standard themselves — both were slave owners, for example — but they were right about the need to strive for it. That’s unlike many of our political leaders today, who don’t even attempt to seek virtue but instead see it as weakness. Voters do the same. They don’t just fail to shame their favorite politicians; they revel in their roughness. For some Democrats, Platner’s thorny past is the perfect middle finger to a polished Democratic Establishment. For some Republicans, Trump’s brashness is what makes him the right kind of fighter against a corrupt elite. But we can sympathize with those frustrations without tolerating the bad behavior. To end the spiral of shamelessness, we have to vote accordingly. Madison wrote that Americans themselves are responsible for selecting virtuous leaders. ”To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea,” he said in 1788, when delegates from Virginia gathered to ratify their new country’s Constitution. “If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community,” it will be reflected in the choices we make in our elections. Jefferson wrote that voters would drive the “separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff,” adding that “in general they will elect the real good and wise.” He conceded that at times, “wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them,” but never “in sufficient degree to endanger the society.” Was that overly optimistic? It’s up to us to demand a higher standard for our leaders. But despite all of his controversies, Graham Platner is still filling up town halls across Maine. Despite his violent texts, Jay Jones was just elected the principal legal officer of the state of Virginia. And despite the honor and responsibility of sitting in the White House as the leader of the United States, our president is happy to take goodies from sponsors of terror and use his office to pardon shady friends and billionaires. Shame is a communal endeavor. You don’t just feel it because you know you’ve done something wrong. You feel it because others are crying out that you’ve done something wrong. Americans deserve the highest standard of leadership. Our elections shouldn’t devolve into an exercise of choosing the lesser of two evils. But to have great leaders, we have to vote for them, and to shame them when they fall short. That starts with feeling shame ourselves.
