NOW WHERE ARE THOSE VIRTUECRATS?

Conservatives who sell out their values for Trump send a clear message to our kids

In the 1990s, as President Clinton’s scandals unfolded, conservatives insisted that character mattered and worried loudly about the toxic effects of our politics on the culture. What message, they asked, were we sending our children? What is the message now? Consider the problems of raising children in an era in which our most famous role model is President Trump. As parents, we struggle to teach our children empathy and compassion. We hope to teach them character, humility, impulse control, kindness and good sportsmanship. We want them to learn how to win and lose graciously, treat others with respect, avoiding name- calling, and tell the truth even if it’s inconvenient. Good luck with that now. Young people only need to flip the channel to see what success looks like in America today. Whatever we tell them, they have a keen sense of what traits or behaviors are rewarded and celebrated. They have an acute sense of the hypocrisy of a society that touts virtue but lavishes fame, wealth and power on people who flout it.

MANLY, STUDLY, ALPHA MALE

Especially for young men still searching for a model of what it means to be a man, Trump’s behavior will carry significant weight. And why not? He may be a bully, a fabulist, a serial insulter and an abuser of women, but our alpha- male president is a billionaire, married to a supermodel, and has been elevated to the most powerful job in the world.

For many young men, Trump is both liberating and revolutionary: freeing them from the demands of civility and what many of them see as overly feminized hypersensitivity.

And the folks who had once been the culture’s chief defenders of character and virtue seem to be OK with that. After Montana’s Greg Gianforte body- slammed a reporter, Rush Limbaugh applauded him as “manly” and “studly” for assaulting the journalist. It wasn’t always this way. Before Trump, former Education secretary William Bennett, the author of The Book of Virtues and one of the most prominent virtuecrats of the right, had emphasized the importance of the president as a role model: “The president is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and Young Trump supporters in Wilmington, N. C., in November. the eyes of our children.”

But during the recent presidential campaign, Bennett reversed himself, saying that conservatives who objected to Trump “suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.”

Last August, Bennett wrote an essay making the case for overlooking questions of character in choosing a president: “Our country can survive the occasional infelicities and improprieties of Donald Trump. But it cannot survive losing the Supreme Court to liberals and allowing them to wreck our sacred republic. It would reshape the country for decades.” TOXIC SLUDGE Like Bennett, most conservatives have been willing to make the trade- off: They were willing to inject toxic sludge into the culture in order to win a political victory. Needless to say, this is a dramatic reversal for the right.

Conservatives once recognized that politics was a means, not an end, because they believed that we live in communities sustained by moral capital, recognizing, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes, that moral communities are “fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy.”

But in the right’s new media ecosystem, a willingness to accept and rationalize lies has become a test of tribal loyalty.

Unfortunately, the effects run even deeper as Trump’s acolytes in politics and social media model their behavior on his, combining the worst traits of the schoolyard bully: the thin- skinned nastiness that mimics confidence; the strut and sneer that substitute for actual strength. Vindictive smashmouth attacks have replaced civil engagement.

Conservatives have long claimed to champion opportunity and the culture of success, but this is now supplanted by a ruthless contempt for “losers,” which easily translates into disdain and mockery for the broken, the poor in spirit or anyone with fewer Twitter followers than Sean Hannity. Insult, bombast and cultivated insensitivity become the coin of the realm.

Think of it as trickle- down boorishness.

For many of us, this has a familiar feel. It is as if we’ve all been sent back to the sixth grade playground. The message we are sending our kids is, unfortunately, quite clear.

Charles Sykes is a conservative commentator and author of the forthcoming How The Right Lost Its Mind, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press in October.

JOHN BAZEMORE, AP