It’s Not Political, Sonny. It’s Moral
Life imitates art and for the Boomer generation nowhere so much as when the art is ‘the movies’. A seminal example, which Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather likely never anticipated, occurred when Michael Corleone said to his older brother about a proposed assassination, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” That deadpan declaration would inspire and inform a generation of actual and wannabe bosses. Every swaggering exec adopted the motto as an anti-apology. The much-admired Dr. Anthony Fauci summoned the line earlier this year in an interview to explain how he handles criticism from officials in the current administration. But the movie’s citation went beyond advice on comportment. Michael was redefining ‘business’ as whatever we deemed it to be. In that transformation, morality and ethics, long publicly entwined with business conduct, also must change. Blunt Sicilian relativism bumped off the sham Protestant ethic.
The Godfather’s distension of the concept of morality was not new. Morality was long prone to intensely subjective interpretation. Two centuries before Michael Corleone shot Virgil Sollozzo, spoiling that dinner of the ‘best veal in the city’, David Hume warned us against employments of the word ‘morality’ that claimed we ‘ought’ or ‘ought not’ “pronounce characters and actions amiable or odious, praiseworthy or blameable.” Hume argued that our morality emerges from our own feelings, not some outside authority. While the Scottish philosopher believed that some common moral sense might exist because what causes pleasure and pain is general, he opened the door to arguments that the existence of any single accepted standard of morality was unlikely if not impossible.
Philosopher Charles Taylor summarized how this plays out in a modern democracy by noting that while each person might hold “a conception of the good or worthwhile life”, there is no “socially endorsed conception of the good” accepted by all. Instead, that society must have fair “procedures for arbitrating between (sic) the competing claims of individuals and groups”, procedures such as elections. Michael Corleone enacted his personalized conception of the good or worthwhile life starting in that Bronx Italian restaurant and his ‘family’ elected to endorse it. Donald Trump versus Joe Biden insists that we choose between their competing personalizations of morality. As in The Godfather, both of their families are threatening to wage open warfare, to ‘go to the mattresses’. One faction is already on ‘standby’.
Although this particular moral Armageddon rose quickly over the last four years, both sides have mined the ruins of antecedent clashes such as the Civil War for material for its foundation thus allowing individual ethics in seemingly infinite fractals to cluster into polarized ‘socially endorsed conceptions of the good’. Each puts out hits on the other via barbs on Twitter and even occasionally with bullets. Those melees rarely involve issues that could be characterized as political — the pursuit of specific policies — and instead concern what each finds ‘odious’ in the other tribe, on what is insisted is ‘blamable’ in those villains’ thoughts and deeds. That is why regarding this November 3rd election we might paraphrase Mikey Corleone and say that, “It’s not political, Sonny. It’s strictly moral.”
That dynamic means that Americans this year are asked to choose between two domains of reality; each of which seeks to enact not so much the greater happiness for all as the greater happiness for themselves. Indeed, if any opponent remained happy after the election that must be considered a defeat. The actions and expressions of supporters on each of those sides signal a belief that the consequences of their guy losing (it’s always a guy; well, almost always) would be a collapse of their world, a repudiation of their belief system.
The ‘honour’ of their own side and the ‘infamy’ of the other as Hume put it bind supporters fast to their ‘family’. Each sees the other side as at best amoral and at worst immoral. Neither can admit to a plurality of moralities that in practice require arbitration not erasure. Rather than select a set of policies as superior this election, voters seek to further ingrain their set of sentiments, which in both cases are as notable for what is excluded as for what is embraced. The exchanges are all shout and snark. Rationality is no more than a pose when it comes to morality, which when cast off — as is now the situation — satisfyingly allows the fight to burn more fiercely.
In 1960, Americans debated the missile gap and fears of recession. Sixty years later, we agitate over whose family misused influence, who lied more, who will rob the supposed rights of the other group. In 2000, party affiliation largely determined initially who supported George W Bush or Al Gore. A generation later, multiple Republican groups have mobilized as anti-Trump while ‘lifelong Democrats’ plan to vote again for the man who called their old party “Radical Socialists”, “un-American”, and “treasonous”. With our strong sentiments, we are fixed like iron filings to the magnet of ‘our side’ and only a few on the edge of each clump can ever be pulled away by a sudden epiphany that something previously accepted is actually odious.
This election, however, is not a movie and it’s not a morality play. Voting for President of the United States of America is choosing who will execute our laws, represent our nation to other countries, and protect all citizens. To make it into a test of competing moralities in which each side’s insistence that unless one morality conquers the other cataclysm results renders us not a republic but acollection of gangs. The more one side points out the terribleness of the other, the more that other side’s supporters hunker down. Someone attacking our morality attacks our self concept, our belief system, and our values. Nobody ever sent a thank you note let alone a donation and a voting pledge for that kind of ‘help’.
Elections of a moral rather than a political character are not about facts, truth, or reason. Their dynamics tilt powerfully personal. In that context, there is no winner on November 3rd or thereabouts. There could be using the leverage of that moment a leader who would take the first step toward the other polarity. Through the power of example, that leader might show authentic concern for other people by actually doing something other people want done for them, by being as Martin Luther King said ‘ other centered’ rather than ‘self centered ‘. Simultaneous that leader must persuading his own followers that victory at the polls does not legitimize vanquishment of the other side. In an election that is about competing moralities, the quest is not to demean the other side’s beliefs but to establish through example the benefits of our beliefs by putting them into action. As Albert Camus wrote, “We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.” The winner of this election will be the person and their ‘family’ who imagine the end of this discord of moralities and convey the importance in a republic of finding some common conception of the good. Then we might get back to politics.
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