The Moral Cost of Alarmism
It's corrupting to give yourself permission to behave badly
It’s easy to see how this era’s nasty, adrenaline-fueled politics affects other people. But we should understand what it threatens to do to us, too.
We’re all familiar with the modern style of consuming political news: We seek out coverage and commentary we agree with, and that information makes us proud of our side and furious at others. Since the other side is consuming information in the same way, we are driven apart and into comfortable, self-righteous bubbles.
But the story doesn’t end there because we aren’t simply consumers. We’re participants, too.
From these bubbles emerges an intemperate, cruel profile that then invades the public square. We have seen it in comment sections and Twitter/X. We’ve even seen it among some public officials. It is marked by incuriosity, instigation, insults, mendacity, piling on, cancelations. It is remarkable not just for its corrosiveness but for its immorality. It is the opposite of how we are taught to behave as we’re growing up.
So how in the world does that happen—how did we get this way? Is it because young people are no longer taught kindness, forgiveness, grace, humility, and judiciousness? No, that’s not it.
The problem is today’s environment makes us believe that our bad behavior is justified.
Today’s environment makes us believe our bad behavior is justified.
A feature of today’s hyper-polarization is the sense among some that their opponents aren’t just wrong; they are also malign. The other side hasn’t merely taken a different position on some issue; they want to harm us, the nation, our community, or our way of life.
Something dangerous occurs when we make this shift, when we stop seeing political opponents and start seeing villains: We decide that winning matters most. The goal is no longer sustaining our political inheritance. Or preserving social peace. Or even simply adhering to long-established norms of proper behavior. Winning matters most. And that means granting ourselves preemptive forgiveness for doing things we know to be wrong.
For nearly a decade now, some on America’s political right have accepted, defended, and in some instances even celebrated intolerable language and behavior. Convinced that America is in an existential struggle, they’ve given themselves permission to act in ways they once would have condemned.
Because many on the left have believed that they are battling nefarious forces, they too have given themselves a get-out-of-jail-free card. When you convince yourself that you are preserving justice and democracy, you can easily believe your tactics are beyond reproach. I suspect the journalists who failed to report on the president’s decline didn’t believe they were hiding the truth; they likely believed they were serving a larger cause. Likewise, I suspect the White House aides who concealed information about this matter saw themselves as public servants.
An astonishing aspect of this era is that so much regrettable behavior has been understood as the lesser of two evils—and therefore not so objectionable. Yes, journalists might concede, we’ve not exactly exemplified the best of our profession for the last decade, but we had to be this way. Yes, defenders of the most troubled and troubling officials might concede, we’re not thrilled with what we’ve done, but we had to be this way.
But rules of morality, or at least rules of public virtue, are most important during times like these. Anyone can be fair, tell the truth, and act with rectitude when things are good. But we must hold ourselves and others to such standards when things are tough. Humans are flawed. We are sadly prone to selfishness, ambition, vengeance, and worse. It doesn’t take much before we lean into such frailties. This is precisely why we are taught restraint, prudence, accommodation, patience, and ethics.
But we must be careful to not overstate risk, to not catastrophize, to not demonize. Those are the first steps toward building up a tolerance for our own immoral behavior.
So when we catastrophize, when we vilify, we take the first steps toward indulging our basest instincts. We open the door to our natural weaknesses. Before long, we expand the category of “unfortunate but necessary behavior.” We don’t want to act like this, but we have to be this way. Since they are so wicked, and since losing to them would be intolerable, we are allowed to deceive more, insult more, break more rules. If we’re pressed on the matter, we can justify it as pragmatism.
In the heat of the battle, we think we are appropriately subduing our opponents, we think we are appropriately using all tools at our disposal. But we are slowly but surely corrupting ourselves.
The present always has a conceit: that this moment is the one that matters. That we, right now, are in serious danger. Yes, things might’ve been bad back then, but that was nothing like this.
That mindset can lead those in positions of governing authority to make grave errors. The perceived risks of a war with France led Congress to pass the unjust Alien and Sedition Acts. The perceived risks of domestic “public danger” after the attacks on Pearl Harbor led FDR to authorize the unjust internment of Americans of Japanese descent. The perceived fear of Communist infiltration caused the injustice of McCarthyism. When we ratchet up alarm, we ratchet up the chances of moral error.
This is not to say that all risks are exaggerated much less imagined or that we shouldn’t be vigilant and strong in times of crisis. But we must recognize that we—all of us—are unusually vulnerable to making unsound decisions and then defending those unsound decisions when we are convinced that existential danger looms.
We can’t be free from all danger. That is the reality of public life. And we must not put our heads in the sand when it arises. That is a responsibility of leadership in public life.
But we must be careful to not overstate risk, to not catastrophize, to not demonize. Those are the first steps toward building up a tolerance for our own immoral behavior.