Today’s office-seekers can survive having committed transgressions that would have eviscerated their candidacy just a decade ago.
Today’s office-seekers can survive having committed transgressions that would have eviscerated their candidacy just a decade ago.
I magine it’s the 1990s, and you find yourself transported 30 years into the future, to the year 2022.
Undoubtedly, your first question would be, “What the hell is gluten?”
But say your next question is about politics, and you’re told about the scene for U.S. Senate races — the Republican candidate who had allegedly held a gun to his wife’s head, who fabricated a career in law enforcement and in the military, who admitted to having multiple secret children, and who allegedly paid for at least two women he’d been involved with to have abortions.
“Wow, what did Republicans do when all those candidates dropped out of their respective races?” you might ask your ’22 tour guide.
“No, those were all the same candidate,” your guide might say. “And he’s leading in the polls against an incumbent.”
You’d be so shocked you’d throw your beeper at him.
(And all this is without his telling you that the candidate is Herschel Walker, which is, incredibly, only the second-most-insane thing about the story.)
We are clearly a long way from the days when even the hint of scandal would cast potentially problematic candidates into the “spending more time with their family” zone, never to be heard from again. (Paging President Gary Hart.)
Instead, today’s candidates can survive having committed some formerly unforgivable transgression that would have eviscerated their candidacy just a decade ago. Remember Herman Cain’s quaint decision to drop out of the 2012 presidential race because he was facing accusations of sexual impropriety by several women? In 2022, he’d be backed by a cabal of supporters who fought for him not in spite of his misdeeds but because of them.
It is easy to attribute the death of the political scandal to Donald Trump, a walking, talking impeachable offense. Everyone knows Trump’s greatest hits — the Access Hollywood bus, the self-own in which he paid a porn star $130,000 in hush money before calling her “horseface,” telling a group of minority female congresswomen to go back where they came from, mocking members of the military, his two impeachments, and so on. (For a full listing of his misdeeds, just read practically any book published in the last two years.)
In the shadow of Trump, one can see why most candidate blunders seem pedestrian by comparison. Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson suggested that people could cure Covid-19 by gargling Listerine. When Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters was asked to name an underrated “subversive thinker” whom he admired, he named Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber.” Also in Arizona, GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake endorsed a legislative candidate — in another state — who had proclaimed Jews to be evil. (All these candidates are even-money propositions to win on Tuesday.)
And of course, races around the nation are populated by Republicans who believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and some who attended rallies in D.C. prior to the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, which had the intent of overturning the result.
But while Trump clearly accelerated the public acceptance of wretched candidates, he is by no means its cause. In fact, Donald Trump is merely a symptom of a larger phenomenon that made problematic candidates not only acceptable, but preferable.
This transformation has accelerated as culture wars have started moving out of the public square and into Congress and statehouses. When conservatives started to believe that the power held by their preferred elected officials was the only thing keeping the U.S. from devolving into a progressive hellscape, the quality of candidates began to matter a lot less. If you’re involved in a holy war, why quibble about the character of the general leading you into battle?
The change has been a decade coming and is a byproduct of the shift in the conservative viewpoint itself.
At about the time of Barack Obama’s first inauguration, Republicans decided they were sick of being steamrolled by progressives willing to use the power of government to achieve their ends. Out went the conservatism of small government, judicial modesty, and personal freedom. In came a new conservatism that posited a muscular role for all levels of government, seeking to bend the public to its will. The new conservatism said that a larger state was fine as long as the right people were in charge of it.
In many ways, these new conservatives were looking to give the old government they felt had failed them the middle finger. And that middle finger took the form of Donald Trump.
But it also left America without a party willing to stand up to government overreach. The new conservatives began using the power of law to fight the culture wars: If you don’t like what social-media companies allow on their platforms, for instance, just wait for your state to pass a law abridging the platform’s right to moderate its content. If you think Disney is trying to groom your children, you might have a governor who punishes the corporation by withdrawing its tax benefits. And so on.
Suddenly, the argument was no longer about how involved the state should be in our lives. It simply became a battle over who was going to control it. And as the perceived stakes of elections grew, the standards to which we held the politicians “on our side” dropped.
This has transformed American politics from a battle of ideologies to a raw contest for power. If you truly believe that the last thing keeping your child from being forced to attend a drag-queen story hour at his or her school is which party controls Congress, then it makes sense you’d be willing to accept a Senate (or House) candidate with dramatic personal flaws. Who cares if Mehmet Oz spent decades on television selling quack weight-loss medicines to daytime-television audiences — if he’s a vote to investigate Hunter Biden, he’s for me! (This philosophy was most vividly demonstrated by talk-show host Dana Loesch, who said, “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”)
Of course, Democrats haven’t exactly engaged in public hand-wringing about the quality of their candidates, either. Their great Senate hope in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, suffered a stroke just before the state’s primary and has been struggling mightily to recover. In his only debate with Republican Dr. Oz, Fetterman mumbled incoherently throughout; but his handlers are trying to drag him across the finish line because they know, once on the Senate floor, all they need him to do is say “aye” to their bills and “nay” to bills pitched by Republicans.
If you believe — as it appears members of both parties now do — that politicians should be micromanaging every aspect of our lives, then it makes sense to forgive terrible candidate behavior. Under the new system of legislative activism, every election becomes an apocalyptic battle in which it appears America is teetering between socialism (if you’re a Republican) or the end of democracy (if you’re a Democrat.)
The antidote to this madness is to recognize that when our government is smaller and more modest in its aims, we won’t need to slavishly support rotten people just because they represent our beliefs — because we will be able to solve a lot of those problems without involving lawmakers. The people who don’t believe the government should be in the business of, say, telling private businesses whether they are allowed to require vaccines for their employees are less likely to embrace terrible candidates and weird conspiracy theories in order to force-feed everyone else their vision of America.
After all, facts are no match for incentives. And if you think we are one election away from the destruction of America, you will support literally anyone who says he’s on your side. “But he fights!” should not be the sole determinant of a candidate’s fitness for office, especially if that candidate’s fights have consistently landed him on the wrong side of decency.