To destroy Trump, is it OK to break the rules? We’ll pay a high price for doing so
AMERICAN politics is not usually the place for high philosophy. But there is a plain philosophical dilemma that confronts the entire project of American democracy, without resolution to which there is no clear path forward for our teetering republic.
When it comes to matters of politics and morality the question is: do the ends justify the means? That question came up for me as a clip from an interview with philosopher and commentator Sam Harris circulated on social media, in which he seemed to express approval for Twitter and Facebook’s censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election (a story that later proved to be credible).
Harris seemed not necessarily to think that this was good general practice, but that it was justified on the basis of Donald Trump’s existential threat to society.
“At that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. First of all it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden,” Harris said. “[But] whatever scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is … it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.”
Harris is among the most principled public intellectuals in the United States. For me, his integrity is not in question. Yet his statement embraces the politics of moral relativism.
In a follow-up podcast, Harris offered context and clarification of his remarks. He pointed out that the host in the original interview cut him off as he began to offer an equivocation, stated that he misspoke in using the word “warranted” when he ought to have said “justifiable”, and that in truth his mind is still not made up on the question.
That’s fair enough for me. But what remains for the rest of society to grapple with is the larger question of means and ends.
“What we are witnessing now among Republicans is not normal politics,” Harris said, with respect to the GOP’s willingness to overlook Trump’s refusal to recognise the results of the 2020 election and his pre-election refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
Those facts qualify Trump, in Harris’s view, as an existential threat. Yet, in the same interview, he expressed political views in line with many Trump supporters and much of Trump’s policy platform: “Do I think we should have a secure border? Absolutely. Do I think we should be harder on China? Yes. Do I think that much of the left is in the grip of an insane moral panic? I do. Not only don’t I denigrate many of (Trump supporters’) political concerns, I share them.”
It is issues like these, and in particular the last one (Harris is referring to the anti-liberal, identity-based politics widely viewed as having captured the soul of progressive politics and crudely encapsulated in the term “wokeism”) that leads many Republicans to what Harris describes as “the real Trump derangement syndrome: to be defending the indefensible”.
Not all Trump supporters deify him. For many, supporting him is simply rational. The ends justify the means.
For some on the right, averting their gaze from Trump’s and his allies’ wild claims of election fraud was rational because Trump could never be as dangerous as their enemies – even as these claims led to violence in our nation’s Capitol.
And for some on the left, irresponsible demands to defund or even abolish the police were necessary to support a larger argument against systemic racism – even as violence increased in cities across America.
As Sam Harris said: “The integrity of our democracy depends on hundreds of norms like these not being violated on a daily basis.”
If they are, then what options are there for the future apart from violence and chaos?
We must move away from the hollow utilitarianism of modern American politics where the ends justify the means. If we do not, it will not end well.