That guy Will Shakespeare gave us a lot of phrases that now come trippingly to the tongue. (Get it? That’s one of Shakespeare’s phrases.) But Shakespeare often gets credit for a line that actually was not his, namely, “All’s fair in love and war,” to which some folks now add, “and politics.” The attribution to Shakespeare is wrong – as is any countenancing of politics as a no-holds-barred brawl.
We will give due credit to the author of the original phrase in a moment. But first, let’s note the awful condition of American public life that now confronts us, where a former president is taking power again flanked by an embarrassing assortment of radical and unqualified advisers and top officials – ready to carry out an agenda of retribution against their political opponents, with a foreign policy that threatens global stability. Ordinarily sensible people who seem thoughtful and responsible – notably, members of the Senate and the House – are enabling this, even though polls show most Americans don’t agree with what this new administration has planned.
I’m sorry if this sounds overtly partisan. I’m not a member of a political party, though I am a progressive, and I hope that if a Democrat were doing what Republicans are these days, I’d call them out just as clearly. Like many people, I’ve been shocked that the moral sensibility of elected officials hasn’t led them to stand up to Donald Trump, maybe to block some of his worst appointments – like, say, the Fox News talk show host Pete Hegseth, who has no leadership experience and a reputation as a dangerous drunk, which he denies, to lead the most potent military force in history, with 2.9 million employees; or the craven anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, despite his embrace of views that are contrary to established science. Where, you may ask, is the decency in those elected to protect the nation?
Here’s the problem with that thinking, and with hoping for an exercise of conscience by congressional Republicans: Political ideology isn’t guided by morality. In fact, research shows that it’s more likely that our political feelings will shape our moral judgments, rather than the other way around.
Two years ago, a study by three respected political scientists advanced an analysis of data supporting just that notion: that while people act on gut feelings — or what the researchers called “moral intuitions” — those gut feelings are set by political ideology. And, the researchers noted, political ideologies appear more stable than moral foundations. In fact, moral arguments are often fashioned to justify political acts, rather than political behavior arising from a moral code. I’d suggest that’s why you heard some U.S. senators eagerly invoking their specific Christian beliefs in support of Pete Hegseth, whose behavior over decades surely cannot be seen to comport with Judeo-Christian teachings.
This is troubling if you’ve been hoping that the moral backbone of politicians will someday strengthen, and they will come to recognize the damage to our democracy that is being done — that all’s not fair in politics, in fact, any more than it is in love and war.
Getting back to that non-Shakespearian notion: It actually came from an English writer named John Lyly, who was a contemporary of the Bard of Avon. Lyly is familiar to English scholars for a literary style known as euphuism – no, not euphemism, but “you-foo-ism”, a word you’ve probably never heard, though it’s a style you know: ornate phrases larded upon one another, as though the self-impressed writer couldn’t help but drop in some sophisticated alliteration and onomatopoeia.
Euphuism, Lyly’s approach to language, is precisely what we do not need right now, in the face of this challenge to democracy. We need plain talk.
Like what finally felled Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose vitriolic diatribes against the supposed communist threat in the American government – and in Hollywood, and in cities and towns across the country – captivated Americans in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Hundreds of people were blacklisted as supposed threats; countless careers were ruined. Finally, though, a mild-mannered lawyer named Robert Welch, who was representing the Pentagon in a hearing McCarthy chaired, got fed up – after McCarthy had shamelessly accused a young associate of being a communist. Welch said, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” He famously said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
Nobody had stood up to McCarthy, really, until that. The hearing room erupted in applause. And it broke the spell. McCarthy spiraled into irrelevance; America recovered.
So we ask now, is there no shame among the enablers of the Trump era? Apparently not. Shame is an outgrowth of a moral sensibility — which, remember, is guided by political ideology.
So democracy must be saved not by moral argument, but rather by political strategies, and hard work by those who care. Abraham Lincoln didn’t avert the Civil War, remember, by arguing the immorality of slavery; he ended slavery by a military defense of the nation’s political structure – that is, our Constitution.
That’s the task at hand, then: to marshal political forces for a cause no less high than to save our democracy. It cannot be rescued by moral force alone. It’s a dispute in which we are all called to choose our side.
In that, of course, Shakespeare had some direction. “I will keep where there is wit stirring,” he wrote, “and leave the faction of fools.”
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.