In Defence of Virtue
How the 'New' Right Drags Us All into the Sewer
Once upon a time - it does seem a long time ago doesn’t it? - you didn’t get the kind of lying politicians we have now. Or at least we didn’t have so many of them, or so many people willing to support them. Of course there have always been governments that have told lies and/or twisted the truth, generally in order to achieve specific political or military objectives.
Tony Blair and New Labour come to mind, and are too often forgotten, along with the Bush administration’s manipulation of ‘stove-piped’ intelligence indicators regarding Iraq’s weapons programs. As long as politics have existed, there have been politicians who have lied in order to conceal some indiscretion or further their own careers.
But until relatively recently, you could not have had a president like Donald Trump, who began his presidency by lying about the attendance at his presidential inauguration, regardless of the fact that the entire world could see with their own eyes that he was lying - and lying with the full-throated support of his press secretary and his administration.
That lie, as the Washington Post has pointed out, was one of 30, 573 ‘false or misleading statements’ that Trump told during his four years in office. No mean feat, and it does at least show a kind of creativity, however twisted and malignant. But the most striking thing about Trump’s empire of lies is that his party and most of his supporters didn’t care. No matter how gross the lie, they didn’t bat an eyelid.
When Trump finally left office with the biggest lie of all, that he hadn’t won the election, millions of voters believed he was telling the truth, or at least didn’t care that he wasn’t.
And this is perhaps Trump’s greatest success as a ‘populist’ politician. He demonstrated that facts are no longer relevant to high office, that trying to tell the truth is no longer an essential aspiration for a political leader, which carries at the very least the prospect of some kind of moral reprobation or disapproval when politicians fall short.
He demonstrated, again and again, that the pursuit of truth or even the idea of a common agreement on what is true or false need not play any meaningful role in democratic life.
All of which leads us to George Anthony Devolder Santos - at least that’s what he says his name is - the recently-elected representative for New York's 3rd Congressional District. Within weeks of taking up his seat, Santos has established a record for serial dishonesty that even Trump must surely admire. Where Trump lied mostly to make himself look good, or at least stop himself from looking bad, Santos has lied about everything. I mean he has literally made himself up, or built a replica of himself from a kind of existential flatpack kit.
This is a man who said his relatives were Ukrainian Jews who had survived the Holocaust. They weren’t. Confronted with this false claim, Santos said he meant that his parents were ‘Jew-ish’ - he may not be Jewish but he doesn’t lack chutzpah. Santos lied about which school he went to, about jobs on Wall Street that he never had. He said that his mother was killed in the South Tower on 9/11 when she wasn’t even in the country.
A military veteran has even accused him of scamming of $3,000 from a GoFundMe campaign page raised for his dying service dog in 2016. Nice. And if you’re going to behave like that, you might as well claim to have attended Baruch College when you didn’t, and throw in the equally false claim that you played in the volleyball team and ‘slayed’ Harvard and Yale, because why the hell not?
Clearly truth is in the eye of the Devolder here, which gives him a kind of reptilian power that can take you a long way in US politics these days. There is something morbidly fascinating about Santos’s willingness to lie about big and small things, that could make him the subject of a movie one day - let’s call it The Wolf (Who Wasn’t) Of Wall Street or Blankman.
It would need someone like Peter Sellars to capture the weird combination of oily smoothness and yawning moral vacancy at the heart of this strange and clearly sociopathic character.
What should concern us most is not just Santos himself, but the wider context that has enabled someone like him to fly so high with no discernible moral compass and no aspirations beyond his own self-advancement.
What makes Santos a man of his times is not just his incontinent dishonesty, but the absence of any serious consequences when his lies were revealed, and his complete indifference to the fact that he has been well and truly exposed as an absolute unmitigated fraud. No one should be surprised that the hapless phoney Kevin McCarthy responded to the allegations of lying directed against Santos by saying ‘so do a lot of people.’
Er, dude, they really don’t. Not like this. And not only has the GOP taken no action against Santos, but McCarthy and his clique have put Santos on two low-level committees - a reward for aligning himself with the Marge-the-Nazi, Gaetz/Boebert wingnut caucus.
To paraphrase the Eagles, Santos may not be able to hide his lying eyes and his smile may be a thin disguise, but he ain’t goin’ nowhere.
He may not a great man, and he clearly isn’t a good man, but he is smart enough to know the kind of people he is dealing with. And the triumph of a political sociopath who is so weirdly comfortable with his own depravity is yet another symptom of the moral collapse of the Republican Party, and perhaps of the American Republic itself.
Because there is only so much a society can stand of men like Santos and Trump. The seemingly endless army of grifters who have gathered round them are not merely products of a ‘post-truth’ era; they are the consequences of a sustained attempt by the ‘new’ right to destroy any sense of honour, probity and decency in public service, and extinguish the notion of common good that is essential for any democratic society to prosper or even function.
Through their ‘culture wars’, their attacks on ‘wokeness’ and ‘virtue signallers’, they have tried to consign the notion of civic virtue to the dustbin of history. By virtue, I mean the idea of ‘ virtù’ that Craig Nelson once called the ‘holy grail of moderns’ in his biography of Tom Paine. As Nelson puts it:
With its origins in vir, the Latin word for man, and considered the ultimate goal of every meritocrat, virtù was originally translated as ‘public spirit’, for, as described by a line of philosophers from Aristotle to Montesquieu, it referred to someone so devoted to civic service that he became famous in his lifetime, and after death was remembered by history for his great and generous work.
It’s safe to say that Santos will not be remembered in this way, assuming he is remembered for anything at all. But his metamorphosis from anonymous nothingness into the King of Fakes is an inevitable consequence of a society - or a section of society - that no longer expects any notion of truth, decency or public service from the people it chooses to represent it.
‘Woke Wars’
America isn’t the only place where this is happening. The British electorate elected a prime minister who was almost universally known to have no interest in the truth, who smirked and lied week after week, and was only forced from office when it became clear that his behaviour was harming his own party’s political prospects.
In Johnson’s downfall lies a ray of hope, however dim, but the Zahawi scandal is a reminder of his legacy. And yesterday, presented with accusations of dereliction of duty from the Home Office regarding the disappearance of asylum seeker children from British hotels, the thuggish neanderthal Jonathan Gullis shouted ‘they shouldn’t have tried to come here illegally.’
Not long ago, an elected politician would not have dared suggest that children who may have been kidnapped for sexual trafficking or forced labour somehow deserved it because they are ‘illegal’. But these are new times, shaped by a ‘new’ right that brazenly violates ethical standards and proclaims its callousness and cruelty, in the hope that the public will get into the sewer with it.
This is why its politicians and spokespeople batter away relentlessly at ideas and attitudes that they call ‘woke’ and ‘virtue signalling’. They want to lower the threshold of acceptability, so that men like Gullis can shout out whatever depraved thought comes into their tiny minds and call it freedom. This is why they gathered instinctively in support of a pimp-grifter like Andrew Tate over Greta Thunberg.
They are trying to change the rules of the game. They haven’t won, and there is no guarantee that they will win. Because human beings may not be as instinctively good as the left sometimes likes to believe, but they aren’t necessarily as bad as the culture warriors of the right would like them to be either.
Every society has to wage a battle between its worse instincts and its best. And even in our tormented and chaotic times, roiled as we are by algorithms and toxic platforms that seem to be constantly pushing at the barriers of the acceptable and unsayable, we don’t have to play the game they want us to play.
Florida may or may be the ‘place woke goes to die’, as Ron DeSantis put it, but the rest of the world doesn’t have to be that place. And the liars and fascistic grifters who have infested our rotten political structures and institutions these last few years should not put us off from the pursuit of truth and justice, or deter us from trying - even if we don’t always get there - from trying to live up to the best of ourselves, rather than succumb passively to the worst that our societies have to offer.
Some might call this aspiration ‘virtue signalling’, but it is so much more worth pursuing, and so much better for all of us, than the torrent of filth and lies that the likes of Trump, Santos, and Gullis would like us all to swim in.