{"id":1411,"date":"2025-11-23T11:32:33","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T16:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potlatchga.com\/?p=1411"},"modified":"2025-11-23T15:29:52","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T20:29:52","slug":"something-to-think-about-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potlatchga.com\/?p=1411","title":{"rendered":"Something to Think About"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Sullivan recently published comments on The Weekly Dish<\/em>, his Substack<\/em> newsletter, entitled \u201cThe Question of Decency\u201d that caught my attention.* For those of you who might not be familiar with Sullivan, he is a British-American conservative political commentator and the former editor of the New Republic<\/em>. I have been drawn to him because I find him to be one of those rare persons among political pundits who sheds his personal leanings and tells the truth to seek out our common humanity.<\/p>\n

Sullivan\u2019s article made me think of the McCarthy hearings in 1954 when Joseph Welch, the Army attorney, asked Senator McCarthy \u201cSenator\u2026Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?\u201d Welch\u2019s words were met with applause and helped to end the nightmare that McCarthy had put the nation through with his outlandish and fraudulent claims about communists in the government. Like so many of you, I have hoped for such a moment to discredit Trump, waiting for the nation to come to its senses.<\/p>\n

Here is a lengthy excerpt from Sullivan\u2019s article. I hope that it speaks to you as it speaks to me.<\/p>\n

\u201cJustice, liberty and objective truth\u201d are still believed in here among ordinary Americans. There remains a common aversion to cruelty, unfairness, extremism, and lies in our everyday lives. It has its roots in Christianity \u2014 as liberalism does, as we are beginning to understand better. But it can endure without religion as part of a culture. And this commitment to decency is, as in England, an invisible but vital bulwark of democracy itself.<\/p>\n

Democracy requires decency because it requires mutual respect: to defend others even as we disagree with them, to accept decisions others have made and elections we have lost, to distinguish between robust rhetoric and dehumanizing cruelty, to accept objective truth when it proves us wrong, to maintain a baseline of civility, to accept the we are all in this together. Politics is inextricable from culture, and a decent culture will sustain democracy while an indecent one will ultimately unravel it.<\/p>\n

This is why I reject the shallow accusation that I have \u201cTrump Derangement Syndrome.\u201d It\u2019s too glib, too dismissive. Yes, some have gone overboard in opposing this president; from Russiagate to the Bragg indictment, overreach has been real. I\u2019ve acknowledged it. But the core impulse to reject Trump outright, to see him as uniquely hideous in American political history \u2014 as a national, collective disgrace \u2014 remains a vitally important one.<\/p>\n

Because Donald Trump is the most indecent man, by far, to ever hold the presidency. He has openly mocked the disabled and the sick; he has reveled in stories of torture and murder; he has spent decades grabbing women \u201cby the pussy\u201d and bragged about it; he has derided prisoners of war \u2026 for being captured. He parlayed his own divorce into tabloid coverage and spoke publicly of wanting to date his own daughter. He began his political rise by pushing a Birther conspiracy he knew was a racist lie. We have become inured to his references to \u201cshit-hole countries\u201d and \u201cthe 51st state\u201d and \u201cGavin Newscum,\u201d to a misogyny that made Jeffrey Epstein a close friend, and to his gratuitous depiction of his predecessor as a mere \u201cautopen\u201d in the White House itself.<\/p>\n

The indecency is in substance as well as style. It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force it to accept a settlement on the invader\u2019s terms. It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die.
We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon \u2014 but then new indecencies happen. You think you\u2019ve reached an all-time low, and then a trap door opens and we\u2019re down in the sub-basement<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

*Andrew Sullivan, \u201cThe Question of Decency: Orwell, Trump and the dangers of a profoundly indecent man in the presidency,\u201d The Weekly Dish<\/em>, November 21, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n

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