A Snake in Snake's Clothing*
Rudy Guiliani just got hit with a multi-billion dollar lawsuit with no funds to pay his legal team; Mike Pence was forced to huddle in a closet somewhere while being threatened with lynching by an angry Capitol mob; the QAnon conspiracy theorists patiently waiting for a civil war to arrive were forced to slink back to their pre-revolution lives, wondering where the last year of their life went. What do all these people have in common? They all, in various ways, learned a valuable lesson in both human and political life, which is that character matters.
Character has taken a hit in recent years, with many people on all sides arguing that character doesn't really matter for holding public office. Instead what matters is Getting Things Done. It doesn't matter if you have sex with young interns or have three wives or never fulfill basic contractual promises. What matters is that you can fulfill X, Y, or Z campaign promise. And while it's interesting that the Trump administration has managed to resurrect the importance of character by virtue of lacking any at all, the deeper question we'll discuss this week is why character matters in the first place.
It's easy to dismiss character as just whiny moralizing or Puritanical obsessiveness with private behavior. But really, and crucially, what character does is allow us to predict what other people will do. It's actually *not* about golden tablets or the voice of God, but instead about the tendency of people to behave, or not behave, in ways that align with their public values and goals. It's about patterns.
It's actually *not* about golden tablets or the voice of God, but instead about the tendency of people to behave, or not behave, in ways that align with their public values and goals. It's about patterns.
Rudy Guiliani's surprise that Trump was leaving him completely helpless after the abject (and pretty humiliating) loyalty Guiliani demonstrated throughout Trump's presidency, and Pence's surprise when Trump unleashed an angry mob targeting him in particular for failing to do what the Constitution does not allow him to do are both surprising in and of themselves. Pence in particular was shaken to his core and, tellingly, did not attend President Trump's farewell address last Wednesday.
But as most people realize, none of this should have been a surprise. Giuliani trusted his political legacy to a completely untrustworthy person, someone who has always demonstrated that other people exist primarily to serve his ends and who has never shown any propensity for any kind of principled activity, let alone loyalty. Pence, who really should have known better, given his religious faith, also trusted his political legacy and provided his almost unwavering loyalty to a man with absolutely no principles and a long track record of destroying people who had previously helped him. A complete lack of loyalty is one of Trump's most obvious character traits, so why were either Pence or Giuliani surprised when he turned around and bit them both?
What Justifies Trust?
The reality of human social life is that we have to trust people. We can't walk around assuming everyone is ready to stab us in the back. Doing so would take most of the joy out of living and leave us, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, leading a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." That doesn't sound good at all!
The alternative (Hobbes' solution notwithstanding) is to trust people by using cues from their behavior to determine when and how much trust they are worthy of (you also need good institutions that protect people from the snakes of the world, but that's a subject for a different post). Trusting people is important because it allows us to make plans, engage in complex enterprises, and, over time, build on that trust so we have a group of people with whom we can interact *without* having to question their motives constantly. This kind of trust is what good friendships and good marriages are founded on and without it life would indeed be a pretty bleak thing.
The flip side of that coin though is that trust is always a fragile thing. It requires a leap of faith, to a certain degree, because people do in fact change or behave unexpectedly, so no trust is ever absolute. But the crucial question in the case of Trump is why anyone found him trustworthy to begin with.
How We Know Who To Trust
But let's take a step back and look at the reasons people trust other people in the first place. At the basic level there are institutions and culture that make it unlikely that, for example, when I buy groceries the grocery store clerk will hit me in the head. Those are important, but again, they'll be the subject of another post later. The real question is how you know whether or not to trust the person in front of you who you plan on interacting with over time. That interaction could be dating or a contract for service or an employee or any number of important joint endeavors that require you to estimate how the person in front of you will behave in the future.
There are two signals in particular that we think are crucially important, and one more so than the other, namely character and principles.
Character is basically the track record of someone's life. If you look at people like Mitt Romney or Barack Obama -- whatever you think of their principles -- their track records are generally characterized by honest dealing and good faith efforts in the service of the public good. One can obviously disagree with their values or their goals (and we disagree with a lot of them!), but they seem to be, from what we know, decent and honorable people.
The second piece, principles, is more complicated. It's more complicated because while most people agree on the basics of what constitutes good character, there's a lot of disagreement about principles, though maybe not as much as people think. While progressives and libertarians and conservatives will all disagree on the principles of ideal taxation or on the goals of the welfare state, all will presumably agree on the following principles:
Keep your promises.
Reciprocate (when appropriate)
But the problem of principles is that they're cheap. It's easy to just say you're for or against something. The reason character matters is because it's expensive. It's hard for someone to build a reputation as a trustworthy person over time and usually the easiest way to do this is to in fact be that trustworthy person.
The reason character matters is because it's expensive.
This is partly why the support for Trump was so bizarre in the first place. He might have alluded to certain principles that his base liked, but they had no earthly reason to think he would actually behave in a consistent way or sacrifice anything to make those goals happen. Let's be honest. Here's a buffoon who hasn't managed to successfully do anything except be an asshole on reality television. Does he have financial knowledge? Apparently not. Does he understand the Constitution? No. Does he get what sacrifice means? Clearly not. Does he have a track record of commitment and a lack of impulsiveness? No, no he does not. Does he seem like a decent person in his personal life? Not even remotely.
Apart from bluster, it's not clear what attracted Trump voters to him, other than his braggadocio and his reputation as an outsider who would "drain the swamp." What's fascinating about Trump as a political figure is that he lacks both character and principles and instead, like most demagogues before him, simply sways to the beat of whatever he thinks his base wants in the moment. This makes him profoundly dangerous, as we saw on January 6th, but also somewhat easier to pick off, since without principles or character it's harder for him to get into people's heads in a longterm way. We hope that Trumpism is a fad, a kind of bizarre viral populism that, like the coronavirus, does a lot of damage in the short term, but in the long term herd immunity may reduce to a relatively minor annoyance. That's the hope, anyway.
The Magic Combo of Character and Principles
So in the spirit of Radical Moderation, here are some thoughts on who to trust in politics and why. As you'll see, character matters. And it matters not because we're moralizing bores, but because character is often the *only* real information we have about how someone will behave in the future. Character allows us to predict how people will act in the future, which is essentially the foundation for trust. Principles are important, let's be clear, because principled action is the foundation of human political life (we think, anyway), but principles alone do not tell us who to trust because as the famous line about Satan quoting Scripture goes, people can use principles in all sorts of unscrupulous ways. So at the end of the day the best information we have about other human beings is their track record of behavior. What you do says an enormous amount about who you are and how you'll behave in the future.
What you do says an enormous amount about who you are and how you'll behave in the future.
To see why character matters, let's take a look at some of the combinations that are possible and why people get confused about the primacy of character. There are a few ways the cookie can crumble in political life, but usually we're looking at the combination of principles, character, and institutions (and yes, we'll get to those later, we promise!).
People with good character making unprincipled arguments: This combo doesn't give us a lot of solid information either way, to be honest, because sometimes principled people have to make pragmatic decisions in the heat of the moment. The otherwise peaceful person who kills a home intruder has made a tough decision that we wouldn't want to make but we don't consider this a departure from their character so much as a way of responding to the exigencies of the moment. But the crucial issue for our purposes is that we can assume that if this is, in fact, a one-off, the person will explain himself or herself and go back to behaving in a way consistent with their character. If they don't do that, they we can safely assume we were wrong about their character.
People with poor character making principled arguments: This one is easier because character really does serve as a good tell in this case. Why does this person suddenly care about immigration or inequality or freedom? If their track record shows no sign of caring for these things in the past, we can feel pretty certain they don't care about them now. While we all sometimes have to work with unscrupulous people, we don't have to trust them and we don't have to assume they're operating in good faith. So we can use them, like they would use us, for our own purposes, but we should never trust them with more power than we're willing to hand over to someone who doesn't care about our well being and who will almost certainly abuse it if given the chance.
People of poor character making unprincipled arguments: these people are kind of nice because, like a rattlesnake, they give us ample warning of who they are and what they're up to. We know where we are with these folks and can act accordingly. These folks are untrustworthy qua untrustworthy. It's easy!
People of good character making principled arguments: This is the easy case and the best one to hope for. These are the people we like and respect, even when we disagree with them. The people who live by their principles in predictable ways that allow us to predict what they are going to do and why. These folks are the salt of the earth and the kind of politician we can and should look for. Now, let's be clear: being a principled person making principled arguments doesn't mean I have to like you or agree with you or invite you to dinner. And it doesn't mean I have to vote for you. But being a person of character defending clear principles makes it easier for us all because, like playing a sport with clear rules, we can dispense with the issue of trust and get right to the question of action. When we play soccer with principled players we know, for example, that they are unlikely to be hiding a knife in their shinguards. We don't have to worry about that particular attack because that attack is off the table, by mutual agreement. That lets us get right to the game of playing soccer. Similarly, in politics, when we're talking to a principled libertarian or conservative or progressive, someone whose track record shows a consistency and good faith effort to do the right thing, it allows us to get right to the heart of the debate, rather than circling each other like wary dogs wondering what the rules are and whether the person is going to actually follow them.
A person of character defending clear principles makes it easier for us all because, like playing a sport with clear rules, we can dispense with the issue of trust and get right to the question of action.
The mistake Trump voters and everyone in his administration made was assuming that an unprincipled person who claimed to be looking out for them was actually going to do so. In fact, of course, he has done the opposite because he was a snake from the beginning and a snake through to the end. You almost can't blame him for the chaos he created because it was the adults in the room who should have known better.
The moral of this administration is that when someone tells you they're a snake, believe them, regardless of how much you want to believe otherwise. Another broader moral moving forward is that despite what people might say, the character of our elected officials does, in fact, matter. It is often the most reliable signal of the kind of person they are and the way they'll behave once they're in office. It's not a perfect signal, but it gets us much closer than any other. And it's something worth fighting for.
*Our analogy is admittedly limited because snakes can actually be pretty cool and usually only bite when threatened, while Trump and other unscrupulous politicians attack their fellow human beings for a variety of self-serving reasons, the most obvious of which is greed. But hey, the internet requires catchy headlines and we oblige.
What do you think? Does character matter enough today? What kinds of character traits do you think are important? Did we miss anything here? Tell us in the comments!