Moral nihilism Inc.

I just want to make a meta-comment about the latest Thing, which is this:

The statement “cheating is bad” should be a tautology. In. other words, it should be like saying “cheating is cheating” or “bad is bad.”

A huge problem with Trumpism as a cultural and political movement is that it rejects this. Donald Trump is a cheater who doesn’t think cheating is bad if you can get away with it, which is the same thing as not thinking cheating is bad. He clearly feels the way about rape, the way a lot of men do (this is Feminism 101, which is a course certain elements of dudebro left are currently flunking).

Cheating on a spouse is just a particular subcategory of cheating in general, which is bad. Defrauding your creditors is bad. Not honoring contracts because you can litigate your way out of having to do so is bad. Collecting money for charitable purposes and then spending it on yourself is bad. And so forth.

But what’sreally bad is doing all these things and not feeling bad about doing them, because the person who does that is a sociopath, which is exactly what you don’t want anyone in a position of authority to be.

Donald Trump has spent his whole life cheating everyone, including but very much not limited to his various spouses, and that’s bad. But what’s much much worse is that he doesn’t think it is. By way of stark contrast, f you read the Starr report, which apparently I’m one of about seven people in America who ever has, you’ll find that Bill Clinton felt really bad about cheating on his wife with Monica Lewinsky, and eventually broke off their two-year affair because he did feel quite guilty about it. And btw it was a real affair, with all the emotional complications that involves, not just “a blow job from an intern” [sic: she wasn’t an intern anymore when they started having the affair, let alone during the two-year course of it, which perhaps seems like a trivial detail, but the endless repeating of that particular lie is symptomatic about the whole hypocritical mess].

Trumpism represents a fundamental moral nihilism, because his core supporters admire him for cheating, lying, and raping his way through life. He’s a sociopath, and Trumpism is a sociopathic ideology, which is more than anything else the key aspect of its fascistic core, in which the only pseudo-moral values are power and domination.

Any time somebody dismisses concerns about lying, cheating, etc., about their preferred candidate, they’re taking the first step down the road that. ends up in Donald Trump, which is to say in some form of fascism. The key to a lesser of two evils argument is to recognize that the lesser of the two evils is still. evil, as opposed to some admirable superman (always a man of course), whose transgressions are actually good.

And if you think that isn’t happening in re Graham Platner, you’re mistaken. Quoting from the excellent Jerusalem Demsas piece that Scott linked to yesterday:

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, argued that “nothing that has come out about Graham Platner is scandalous” insisting that the freak-out was due to “weirdo gaslighting from upper class ninnies.”

In another set of tweets, he distinguished between real scandals — like the Iraq War, attacking Iran, and the foreclosure crisis — and the pearl-clutching over Platner’s cheating. The latter being the result of “rule following perfect resume ladder climbing Harvard law grads” who are “lizard people creeps.”

Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, similarly argued that attacks on Platner were downstream of the establishment’s hatred for “real people who aren’t corrupted by the system. They never go after insiders like this, because they’re already good boys and girls who do exactly as they’re told.”

Leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker similarly characterized the blowup as “desperate manufactured outrage around [Platner’s] personal issues” that was an attempt to distract from his platform.

Sen. Ruben Gallego said “we all know that he’s lived a very, you know, real experience.”

Cheating is really bad and Nazi tattoos are really bad, and lying about both is really bad, and voting for Graham Platner rather than Susan Collins is really good, because life is full of moral compromises, and this is a particularly easy one to make, because Donald Trump is a sociopath and president of the United States, and stopping him and his political movement is more important than anything else. This isn’t complicated.