The Moral Collapse of the American People

Is America’s decline reversible? It’s hard to say for never before have Americans brought moral collapse upon themselves.

Salvador Dalí

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

In his final Christmas message to the American people as president, Joe Biden said:

For the last time as your president, it’s my honor to wish all of America a very Merry Christmas. My hope for our nation, today and always, is that we continue to seek the light of liberty and love, kindness and compassion, dignity and decency. May God bless you all.

In his, Donald Trump posted:

Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics, who are constantly trying to obstruct our Court System and our Elections, and are always going after the Great Citizens and Patriots of the United States but, in particular, their Political Opponent, ME. They know that their only chance of survival is getting pardons from a man who has absolutely no idea what he is doing. Also, to the 37 most violent criminals, who killed, raped, and plundered like virtually no one before them, but were just given, incredibly, a pardon by Sleepy Joe Biden. I refuse to wish a Merry Christmas to those lucky “souls” but, instead, will say, GO TO HELL! We had the Greatest Election in the History of our Country, a bright light is now shining over the U.S.A. and, in 26 days, we will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

What do these clashing messages tell you about two men who have occupied/will occupy the highest office in the land? If it isn’t obvious, I suggest you repeat social studies class. And perhaps also consult with your spiritual counselor, if you’re religious, or other ethical guide, if you’re not.

The American people — or half of those who voted anyway — have accomplished in 2024 a feat they have never before done in the 250-plus years of the nation’s history: they have consciously and with eyes-wide-open elected as president a man who is a convicted felon, found liable for sexual assault and fraud, a prolific liar who attempted a coup d’état against his own government and whose moral comportment competes with that of the most depraved and soulless of history’s lowlifes. He furthermore unabashedly displays his love of dictators and contempt for democracy. And corruption flourished in Trump’s first administration with half a dozen cabinet secretaries forced to resign in face of criminal charges and Trump himself being cited for well over 3700 conflicts of interest. Expect more to come in his billionaire-laden cabinet.

Add to this a questionable mental state. Just before last month’s election, 233 psychiatrists and other mental health professionals stated in an open letter their conviction that “Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for ‘narcissistic personality disorder,’ ‘antisocial personality disorder,’ and ‘paranoid personality disorder,’ all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism.” Not to mention clear signs of early dementia.

These days, Trump voters are okay with all of this. Americans used to adhere to high fitness standards and a now quaint moral code when it came to choosing their leaders.

In 1972, Senator Thomas Eagleton was forced to withdraw his candidacy to be vice president for having been treated for clinical depression during the 1960s.

1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after being convicted of bribery, tax evasion and money laundering.

In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as president as he faced impeachment for crimes ranging from obstructing justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress to tax evasion.

In 1987, Senator Gary Hart dropped out as the Democratic presidential frontrunner in face of revelations of extramarital affairs.

Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, Hart announced, “I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.”

Indeed.

In his 2004 bestseller, What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank explains how we got to this state:

Backlash theories…imagine countless conspiracies in which the wealthy, powerful, and well connected — the liberal media, the atheistic scientists, the obnoxious eastern elite — pull the strings and make the puppets dance. And yet the backlash itself has been a political trap so devastating to the interests of Middle America that even the most diabolical of string-pullers would have had trouble dreaming it up... What do its rebels demand? More of the very measures that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place. This is not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all possible.

Marcus Collins, a business school professor at the University of Michigan, decries voters’ prioritizing pocket book concerns over moral principles:

There exists a moral threshold where we prioritize ethics over economic gain. There is a line that separates the acceptable from the unacceptable, where we act inlined with our values over our checkbook. Yet in American politics, we repeatedly witness a disturbing pattern where voters rationalize compromising fundamental moral principles for promised financial benefits as seen in the 2024 presidential election.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Yet I don’t buy the argument that Americans voted for Trump because “the price of eggs is too high.” The average cost of a dozen Grade A large eggs was $3.65 in November, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Real median household income is over $80,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 1932, the U.S. unemployment rate was 25 percent and the nation was economically prostrate. Soup kitchens proliferated. Scholars were heralding the failure of capitalism. Adjusted for inflation to today, the price of eggs then was around $3.45, while per capita GDP was $14,830 and inflation stood at -9.1 percent. But voters elected Franklin Roosevelt, not a mid-century Donald Trump.

In 1976, inflation and interest rates both stood at around 5 percent (as opposed to half that today). In today’s dollars, the price of a dozen eggs was $4.66, while average per capita GDP was $47,640. Unemployment approached 8 percent. Voters elected Democrat Jimmy Carter to be their president, hardly a radical populist.

Four years later, as inflation surged to almost 13 percent, interest rates soared to 18 percent and unemployment rose to over 7 percent (with youth unemployment at double that), and per capita GDP was $48,147 in real dollars, a dozen eggs set you back $3.22, and Americans chose Ronald Reagan, not a lying, morally depraved, treasonous crook.

The Economist magazine calls the American economy “the envy of the world” with its high growth rate, low unemployment and steadily decreasing inflation. I also discount to an extent the assertions that “flyover country” is so angry at the elites that, in their alleged desperation, they opted for a loudmouthed con artist over a smart squeaky clean incumbent vice president. Working class and rural folks do harbor justified class resentment, but that is only part of the reason they went for Trump.

Admittedly, the method the federal government uses to calculate real incomes tends to capture the economic realities of higher-income people better than those of working-class and middle-class Americans. That said, ironically, in 2016, the median income of Trump voters was $11,000 higher than that of Clinton voters ($72,000 vs $61,000). In 2020, 57 percent of voters making less than $50,000 voted for Biden, while 54 percent of those earning $100,000 voted for Trump, according to Statista.com. Trends changed in 2024, with 46 percent of voters earning $30,000 or less voting for Trump, while 51 percent earning $100,000 to $199,999 voting for Harris. The upshot is that pundits have a tendency to overgeneralize. And Trump, to his credit, made significant inroads with all key demographic groups, including traditional Democratic constituencies.

Much is written about how Trump pulls it off and why Americans are so gullible to his lies. Explanations include a personality cult, popular reaction against a “woke” Democratic Party dominated by educated liberals, backlash against globalism and immigration, racism and a global rightward trend. These are all valid, but don’t explain the full picture. I’ll add two more key explanations:

Joe Biden is the first president under whom the economy added jobs every month he was in office, according to BLS — a total of 16 million. We enjoy the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. Incomes have increased by $4000, adjusted for inflation during his term. GDP has grown 12.6 percent under Biden. The inflation rate, now at 2.7 percent, has fallen from 3.4 percent since last year. Yet voters cited “economic reasons” for choosing Trump. As The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols notes, “An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.” Americans prove that they prefer circus over serious policy.

Billionaire-financed Right-wing Media

Trump’s dystopian “American carnage” campaign rhetoric paid off. Nearly two-thirds of Americans have a hard time telling truth from lies when elected officials speak, according to Pew Research.

The burgeoning right-wing media-verse acted as a powerful force multiplier. Today there are over 1500 right-wing radio stations in the U.S., along with another 700 religious stations that broadcast MAGA memes and endorse Republican candidates for office. Fox News has finished No. 1 in cable news viewership for 23 years in a row, dwarfing those for MSNBC and CNN. Pro-Trump Sinclair Group TV stations reach 40 percent of U.S. households; it also owns the largest number of radio stations at nearly 200, and is continually expanding its media empire.

Journalist Michael Tomasky sums it up:

Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Moral Collapse

The great moral philosopher Kellyanne Conway in 2017 contributed to the national debate the notion of “alternative facts,” a concept that turns on its head the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s assertion that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

We now live in a post-truth, anti-knowledge, anti-expert age where QAnon-marinated superstition reigns, respected persons of science are shunned, books are burned and morals and norms are trashed. The leering specters of fascism, treason, pandemic and intolerance flit around the gates eager to storm and sack the proverbial shining “city on a hill” as John Winthrop described the Puritans’ new foothold in America, and later purveyed by Ronald Reagan to describe American exceptionalism.

City University of New York academic Sam Ben-Meir maintains that “Trump is demonstrative proof that America is facing head-on its moral and epistemic downfall” by which “we have forgotten, or willfully discarded the nature of truth: truth is no longer a concept to be taken seriously; there are only various perspectives each determined by particular interests, but there is no such thing as a truth in the sense of a universal production which is indifferent to differences of interest, perspective, identity, and so on.” He continues,

What we are seeing is a nation in decline having openly embraced a dangerous moral and epistemic relativism, which is philosophically unsustainable, and logically unsound.

Trump’s fascist, authoritarian rhetoric is not merely for popular consumption — it is not him catering to his extreme base, but a horrifying reflection of ourselves, of what we are becoming: that is, a country which will write off certain people as “vermin” not because of what they’ve done but simply because of where they come from or who they are. A country which will embrace the words of a quasi-despot as truth even when they fly in the face of what is before our very eyes.

How can a democracy carry on if two halves of its population cannot agree on essential truths?

In his Republic, Plato suggests that a nation that is not governed according to reason is like a ship captained by a fool, with a crew that is incompetent. And he goes on to say, “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

Enter Donald Trump. And America’s decline. Is it reversible? It’s hard to say. For never before have Americans brought moral collapse upon themselves, not even during slavery which half the nation opposed and fought to end. But one thing is certain — we’ll all be paying the price.