Are We a Nation of Cheaters?

For the past year the nation’s klieg lights have focused on Donald Trump’s dismantling of the norms of civility and integrity, and for good reason.  Most Americans, including many who support him politically, reject his constant assault on empathy and reason, and on our basic democratic institutions.

Still, the question arises:  Is Trump sui generis, a true moral outlier randomly imposed by the fates on a virtuous society?  Or does he represent a sort of avatar of an ethically troubled culture, a natural outgrowth of a morally suspect country?  

On balance the evidence favors the latter conclusion.

Trump has long sold himself politically as a businessman who knows how to make deals and get things done in the practical world.  So let’s start on his turf: business and the economy.  And here we find a great deal of moral mischief, from violations of laws to ‘sharp’ business practices that dispossess others.

Rates of lawbreaking by American corporations have been high for decades, and arguably have been increasing and causing greater harm over the past 30 years.  This is especially the case in the area of finance, which has seen a number of major outbreaks of crime and other malfeasance.

These include the pattern of fraud in the savings and loan industry in the late ’80s and early 90s, which contributed to the total of more than 1000 failures of savings and loan firms and several hundred banks, at a cost to American taxpayers estimated at $124 billion; the widespread fraud in the financial statements of Enron, WorldCom and many other companies in the early 2000s, fraud that federal investigators estimate cost investors at least $100 billion in losses; and the mortgage-backed securities scandal that infested the nation’s major investment and mortgage  companies and that brought the U.S. and world economies to their knees in 2008 and 2009.

Other industries have also separated themselves from the better angels of our national values.  Defense contracting firms have commonly defrauded the Pentagon, even in wartime.  During the nation’s long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal commission estimated in 2011 that companies had already stolen between $10 billion and $18 billion in their contracts to provide logistical support, security and other services for the wars.  Major oil and gas companies have also systematically looted the federal treasury, in this case evading royalties owed to the government by lying about the value of the fossil fuels they extract from public lands.  Meanwhile pharmaceutical companies have illegally (and dangerously) marketed drugs, auto companies have hidden lethal and other defects in cars, the tobacco industry long dissembled about intentionally addicting users and smoking risks, and oil companies have deceived the public about the science of climate change.

Most of American society’s other major institutions–law, medicine, science, politics, religion, education, sports–have also been embroiled in scandal in recent years.  The #MeToo movement highlights widespread sexual assault and harassment in industries from Hollywood and high technology to Washington and Wall Street, while the recent reports of more than 250 women and girls regarding a crime wave of sexual assault by an Olympic team and university doctor reminds us of the unthinkable plague of sexual assault by priests and its cover-up by the Catholic Church here and abroad.

In education public school teachers have been found cheating to raise their students’ standardized test scores, and major universities have created fake courses and other academic scams to keep star athletes academically eligible while university medical scientists engage in conflicts of interest while working for pharmaceutical companies.

Nor is democracy itself in good hands.  Political campaigns are distorted by hordes of cash increasingly donated by unidentified special (wealthy) interests, and the outcomes of legislative elections are preordained (and minority populations especially disenfranchised) by the devious gerrymandering of voting districts.  Then, too, American citizens do not meet well their obligations in our constitutional republic.  In national elections over the past several decades, fewer than three-fifths of the nation’s voting age population has voted, including in the 2016 election.  (According to the Pew Research Center, this places the U.S. 28th among the 35 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, most of them developed, democratic societies.)  And a large segment of American adults is woefully under-informed about political processes and public policy issues, the so-called ‘low information voters’ who are especially susceptible to demagoguery and the sort of ‘fake news’ disseminated through social media by Russian operatives to influence the 2016 election.

The president’s profile maps this reckoning pretty well.  A ‘successful’ businessman who used bankruptcies and stiffed his contractors in amassing his wealth.  Check.  A self-confessed sexual predator who has called his numerous accusers ‘liars.’  Check.  A man who founded a bogus ‘university’ and entered the White House pre-installed with conflicts of interest.  Check.  A politician who comprises a one-man assault on democratic norms, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, and who asserted during the 2016 campaign that ‘I love the poorly educated.’  Check.

For all of his unprecedented behavior among our national leaders–his disdain for rules and norms, his constant deceit, his nasty bullying, his misogyny and, yes, his manifest racism–the president reflects many lamentable behavior patterns and values in the national character.

But he has also uniquely spurred reaction.  And in the rising of social movements against his worst impulses and behaviors lies the hope for national redemption.