Our New Pandemic: Moral Cowardice

It's contagious as hell, and spreading fast; plus, a word on what courage looks like from Alexei Navalny

JD Vance, in his office Credit: miniseries/Getty Images

Over the decades, I have offered up all manner of obloquy concerning Donald Trump. When shadowing him up close in the nineties – our Age of Innocence, back when America still thought he was a joke, before we became the joke by electing him twice — I noted that his hair looked “like an abandoned nest.” I added that when he focused his powers of concentration on something other than himself ­­­­­­— which doesn’t happen often — his lips “fix in puckered protrusion,” making him “look like a distressed mallard.” I have since called him everything from the “Bullshitter-in-Chief” to “a walking rap sheet with a combover.” When running low on my own epithets, I have recycled those of others, calling him “Mango Mussolini,” “Cheeto Jesus,” and a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

But one slur I would never hang on Trump is to equate him to JD Vance. Even I wouldn’t stoop that low.

Because at least Trump has the courage of his own convictions. (His misguided assertions, I mean, not his felony convictions.) Trump’s lies are his own, and he sticks by them. He’s told them so often, that he’s probably even convinced himself 20 percent or so of them are true. Whereas, Vance chooses to tell the lies of others — namely, Trump’s — meaning he doesn’t even come by his dishonesty honestly.

How else to explain a guy who once called Trump “a moral disaster,” a “cynical asshole,” “cultural heroin” and “possibly America’s Hitler”? (The last of which, I’d never call Trump— there’s zero chance Trump would gas The Jews at Auschwitz when he could turn the camp into a perfectly good condo development.) But then Vance goes to work for him, just two heartbeats away from the presidency? (If Elon Musk and Trump die in a Tesla Cybertruck accident.) Or who, when one of Musk’s adolescent dork-squad DOGErs that are unlawfully helping Elon dismantle our federal government, gets caught saying online that he “was racist before it was cool” and we should “normalize Indian hate”……….Vance cuts him a free pass? And who, even after the Indian-hater resigned in disgrace, and Elon ran a poll on his online propaganda emporium, in which, surprise! — 80 percent of Elon’s fanboys said he should be rehired — JD Vance, whose wife is Indian, as are his kids, said he should be asked back, without the guy offering so much as an apology? Well, it’s understandable. Because even if I can’t fully see into any man’s heart, particularly Vance’s — it’s way too dark in there — I’m guessing that Vance isn’t afraid of his wife or children. But that he is terrified of his Two Dads.

And that’s why, despite the above head fake, this isn’t actually a piece about JD Vance. It’s a piece about moral cowardice that causes dishonesty, our new national pandemic, which is contagious as hell, and spreading fast. Of which Vance is only a flashing neon example – he is afraid of the people who can punish him, be it Trump, or Trump voters, for not taking his dutiful loyalty oath. And so, he overcompensates by say, suggesting that court orders no longer apply to His Majesty’s whims, no matter how unlawful the latter are, while offering up the Constitution as a burnt sacrifice in order to appease the MAGA gods.

Not only has Vance said in the past that Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” He just tweeted this past Sunday that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” even as the executive has bypassed Congress by lopping off entire limbs of government whose funding has already been appropriated, when the latter is bestowed the Constitutional power of the purse. Which the judiciary has thus far backed up, even as the executive branch ignores them. And which — bad news for my former fellow conservatives — is not conservatism at all. It’s anarchism. When you hold that the Constitution or our system’s power-checking mechanisms of other branches of government no longer apply to you, then you are no longer a guardian of what you’ve long pretended to stand for. You are endorsing something else entirely: i.e, authoritarianism, one strongman’s indiscriminate will lorded over the people, even if plenty of the people are gullible enough to root for it. (It’s hard to build things like stable governments, much easier to burn them down.)

But you could substitute any number of other names for the moral coward, JD Vance’s. Like say, Speaker Mike Johnson’s, who theoretically lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, but who mostly lives on his knees before Trump/Musk. Or you could add 7/10ths of brocasters, or 8/10ths of the broligarchy, or 10/10ths of Republican Senators, who are passing through one disastrous Cabinet pick after another — from accused sexual-assaulters, to dictator-coddlers, to science-deniers, to enemies-list keepers. People who would never even be considered, let alone confirmed, under a sane president. But who, when an insane president’s party is too cowardly to stand up to his insanity, decide instead to become an instrument of his madness.

But rather than fatigue you with further instances of (justified) condemnation, I’d rather offer you words of edification. To show you what actual courage looks like, and why you should adopt it. I’ll skip the overly-long setup, since the passage I’m excerpting is long enough. But recently, I’ve been reading the posthumous memoir of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident, called, simply Patriot. A pleasing eff-you title, since Navalny, who prematurely perished a year ago while being unjustly imprisoned in Trump-butt-buddy Vladimir Putin’s Siberian gulag, did indeed lay a greater claim to representing the Russian people’s interests than their exploiter, Putin, ever will.

Since I often disparage the moral pygmies who tend to inhabit public life, readers sometimes ask, “Well, who do you admire?” In politics, it’s a short list. But at the very top of it is Navalny, who was never elected to anything — even if he once unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Moscow. And yet, he was a true leader. The kind we can no longer claim, and need right about now: Fearless. An unapologetic freedom-lover. Completely unwilling to bend the knee to corrupt power, even after corrupt power tried to kill him, and ultimately succeeded. He was first poisoned, but after he recovered from the near-death that brought on, he returned to the country that poisoned him, knowing full-well that he’d be imprisoned for returning. He did so anyway, to prove a point – that freedom and truth matter. Even if he was essentially murdered for proving it.

When Navalny died/was killed last year, I wrote this angry screed of a piece, contrasting him to Trump. Sample, in case you didn’t click through:

1. Navalny sacrificed himself for others, Trump sacrifices others for himself.
2. Navalny was a great man. Trump wears the word “great” on his dopey hat, while dancing to Village People songs in front of fellow Putin idolators.

But now, on the near anniversary of his death (February 16) at age 47, I’d like to offer you something more than easy potshots. Something deeper, and words to hang on to. Not my words, but those of Navalny’s himself. On the importance of not being a moral coward. He offered this at the conclusion of one of the trumped-up trials against him. Even though I’ve edited plenty of it out, it still goes on for a good while. But I hope you’ll read and internalize it all. Because if you’re dispirited, and need to find courage, this is what it looks like up close:

How many times in their life is someone who has committed no crime and who has not broken the law given the chance to deliver the final word? Never. Zero times. Well, if they’re unlucky, maybe once. But over the course of the last year and a half, two years if you count the appeals process, this is probably my sixth or seventh, possibly my tenth, ‘final word.’ I’ve heard the phrase ‘Defendant Navalny, you have the chance to say a final word’ on many occasions. I have the impression that with your final word — for me, for anyone, for everyone — come your final days. You’re always being asked to deliver your final word. I say this, but at the same time I see that these final days don’t come to pass.

And there’s one thing in particular that convinces me of this. If I were to take a photograph of the three of you [the judge and the two prosecutors], or better still all of those people with whom I’ve been dealing in recent times, it would show people with downcast eyes, staring at the table. Do you realize that you are all constantly looking down at the table?.....

I am suffering under no illusions. I understand perfectly that none of you will suddenly leap up and overturn that table, nor will you say, “I’ve had enough of all this!” Neither will the representatives of Yves Rocher stand up and say, “Navalny has convinced us with his eloquent words!” People are made differently. The human consciousness compensates for the feeling of guilt; if it didn’t, people would constantly be throwing themselves onto dry land like dolphins…..

Nevertheless, at this point in the proceedings it’s very important for me to address those who’ll watch or read my final words. It is, of course, quite useless. Still, you people who stare at the table, this is effectively a battle taking place between those crooks who’ve seized power and those who want to change something. We are fighting for the hearts and minds of those who simply stare at the table and shrug their shoulders. People who, when all they need to do is not do something vile, they go ahead and do it anyway.

There’s a well-known quotation — nowadays everyone loves to quote someone — from the well-known book To Slay The Dragon. ‘Everyone’s been taught to do bad things, but you, you swine, how did you end up being top of the class at it?’ This isn’t addressed specifically to this court. There are huge numbers of people who are forced to do a vile thing, but then there are those (and this is the most common scenario) who do a vile thing without anyone coercing them or even asking them to. They simply stare down at the table and try to ignore everything that’s going on around them. And our struggle for the hearts and minds of the people who stare at the table is to explain to them once again that they shouldn’t just stare but confess to themselves that, sadly, the whole system of power in our beautiful country, and everything that’s happening, is based on endless lies.

I stand before you and am prepared to stand here for as long as it takes to show you all that I don’t want to put up with this lying — and I won’t put up with it. The whole thing is literally lies from start to finish, do you understand? …..

Everything is built on lies, on constant lying, do you understand? And the more concrete proof of something that we present to you, the bigger the lies that we come up against. These lies have become the whole modus operandi of the state; they’re now its very essence. We watch our leaders give speeches, and we hear lies from start to finish, be it on important matters or trivial ones. Yesterday Putin said, ‘We don’t own any palaces.’ Yet we’re taking photos of three palaces every month! We publish them and prove it to the world…..And we don’t have any oligarchs, either, who are constantly feeding off the state. Just take a look at the documents that show the head of Russian Railways has registered half of the state corporations in Cypriot and Panamian offshore zones.

Why do you put up with these lies? Why do you just stare at the table? I’m sorry if I’m dragging you into philosophical discussion, but life’s too short to simply stare down at the table. I blinked and I’m almost forty years old. I’ll blink again and we’ll be on our deathbeds, with our relatives all around us, and all they’ll be thinking about is, It’s about time they died and freed up this apartment. And at some point we’ll realize that nothing we did had any meaning at all, so why did we just stare at the table and say nothing? The only moments in our lives that count for anything are those when we do the right thing, when we don’t have to look down at the table but can raise our heads and look each other in the eye. Nothing else matters. ….

Maybe this is going to sound naïve, and I know it’s become the norm to laugh ironically and sneer at these words, but I call on absolutely everyone not to live by lies. There is no other way. There can be no other solution in our country today.

Bonus Tracks: I generally don’t like to repeat my musical picks, but I like this 1997 Bob Dylan dirge so much, that I’m rerunning a beautiful cover of it, which I posted three years ago, but that seems even more apt now. It’s performed by the angel-voiced Aoife O’Donovan, who is accompanied by The Jacobsens on cello and violin, with a Franz Schubert chaser.

And if you’re a longtime listener who can’t abide reruns, here’s Shelby Lynne and her sister, Allison Moorer, doing an equally beautiful rendition of the same tune: