CXXXVI. The Cost of Doing Wrong

There used to be a price for poor decision-making. Invest in the wrong business, you lose your money. Lie under oath, and you lose your case. Profit while you are in office, and you went home in disgrace. Cheat on your pregnant wife with a porn star and the campaign ended that afternoon.

None of these things were perfectly enforced or applied to everyone equally, but you knew there was a moral code. It sat in the back of every decision a public person made. It made some of them choose better. It made the rest at least pretend to make better choices.

There’s no such cost anymore.

That is the story of the Trump regime, and it is the story we keep failing to tell plainly. We’ve seen the cruelty of running people down in the street or the constant insulting language or using loopholes of existing law to find ways to profit off the public and prosecute enemies.

The story underneath all of it is the absence of cost. The regime has rewired the basic economics of public behavior so that the wrong thing is now the easier thing to do, and the right thing carries more of a burden or tax. We have all noticed pieces of this.

Consider what the wrong thing now buys you. Lie in public, repeatedly and on camera, and you get a cabinet seat. Demand loyalty over competence, and the people fired by the FBI for refusing to break the law are replaced with people whose only qualification is that they will do what they are told. Stage a hand-to-hand fight on the White House lawn, plate every door handle in gold, sell pardons to donors, threaten foreign leaders to extract a business deal, and the response from your own party is…crickets.

When the political cost approaches zero, the financial reward goes up.

Now consider what the right thing costs. Refuse an unlawful order and you are fired before lunch. Ensure everyone has equal access to services by knowing the real history? That’s too woke, so you’re gone. Tell the truth about an election and you become a target. Hold the line on the rule of law and you watch the line move without you in it. Career civil servants who spent thirty years building expertise are walked out by armed guards, replaced by people who could not pass their entrance exam.

The message is not subtle. The message is published in HR memoranda and broadcast on cable news. Doing the right thing is not something we value.

This is not new in human history. It is, in fact, the oldest move in the autocrat's playbook. You do not need to make wrong behavior mandatory. You only need to make it cheap and make the right behavior expensive. The market does the rest. Henry VIII did not have to force his aides to flatter him; he only had to behead someone who didn't. At first, Hitler did not need the full use of brutality; he only had to reward those who agreed with him and sideline those who didn’t. Russia did not have to compel its oligarchs to fall in line; it only had to throw a couple of them out the window.

The Founders understood this exact dynamic, which is why they built a system designed to make corruption costly knowing certain types of individuals were corruptible. That system of checks and balances is what the current regime is dismantling, piece by piece, in plain view.

The damage compounds. The norms we expect when being a citizen or running a successful business are not all written into laws, nor should they ever be, which is what makes law both a necessity and a risk. Between the laws are the unwritten agreements about how power is handled, how opponents are treated, or what a president can and cannot do. They erode slowly through a thousand small violations that no one challenges, and then they collapse all at once when someone notices the rules apparently no longer apply.

We are at a collapsing stage. Every authoritarian is watching with pride from Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang. There is a particular American resource being burned here that most of us are brought up believing makes America different.

It’s called moral capital. It’s the credibility a country earns by doing hard things for the right reasons over generations. We don’t always get it right, but our intentions are typically based in doing the right thing. D-Day was moral capital. The Marshall Plan was moral capital. The Civil Rights Act was moral capital. One could make the case that removing the Iranian regime was moral capital and the right thing to do. Each of these was complicated and imperfect, but they are the types of events that built an American reputation for doing hard things and decent things. Problems occur however when there is a lack of moral consistency.

It took eighty years just to build up the capital of these events, yet it is being squandered in months on pathetic cabinet appointments, gold leaf arches and ballrooms, and the petty satisfactions of a man who confuses being feared with being respected.

Twenty-six of twenty-nine countries surveyed now report a collapse of trust in the United States. That is the result of this regime telling the world that its word no longer means what it used to mean, and the world is believing it.

The cruelest part is what this does to the people watching. Children are watching. Your kids are watching, and so are mine. They are learning, in real time, that the path to wealth and power runs through dishonesty, that loyalty matters more than character, that the loudest cruelty and obnoxious behavior wins, even on the hallowed grounds of the White House.

We tell them otherwise at the dinner table, yet Fox, Facebook, and now CBS tells them otherwise on every screen they own.

The cost of all this will have an endpoint. It always does. Empires become brittle and then they break, usually messily and usually on a timetable no one chose. The Romans learned this. The Germans learned this. The Soviets learned this. We will learn it too, and the bill will be paid by our kids who had no hand in running it up.

In the meantime, doing the right thing is expensive. Doing the wrong thing is free. The job, for anyone still doing the math honestly, is to refuse the discount. To keep paying the higher price anyway. To raise children who know there used to be a cost and who can imagine one again.

That is not a strategy. It is a stubbornness, and for now it is one of the only things keeping some of our institutions from collapsing completely.

Keep being stubborn.

Drive any American highway long enough and you will meet him. The lawyer on the billboard, suit pressed, arms folded, promising that someone owes you money. Injured? Wronged? Slipped on something? Call now. The land of opportunity has quietly become the land of the claim.

Philip Howard has been warning us about this for thirty years, and I have been reading him for most of them. Back in 1995, in The Death of Common Sense, he made a quiet and radical argument. Law had stopped being a shield for freedom and started being a substitute for judgment. We stopped asking what was right or sensible. We started asking what was actionable. This week, in a piece for Common Good, he returns to the same wound, and he is still right.

Here is what we have forgotten. A healthy community does not run on liability. It runs on trust. And trust requires that we leave each other room to be human, which is to say, room to be wrong. The teacher who makes a judgment call. The principal who bends a rule because the rule is foolish. The neighbor who says the wrong thing and is forgiven. None of that survives in a country where every mistake is a deposition waiting to happen.

We built a system that treats human error as a market opportunity. Somewhere a billboard is being printed right now, inviting strangers to find in your worst day a shot at their best one. We called this protection but its coming close to spiritual corrosion. We need to remember the much older and harder human work that remains of trusting one another enough to let a mistake be a mistake.

I wish we had more support for families and their loved ones in those last days. Hospice is a great service, if you can get it, especially when it allows someone to stay in a comfortable, familiar place and be well cared for. Time and again, I’ve read of these moments where the mind goes back to the beginning, or at least to the years before adulting took over. In this remarkable reporting, a doctor has witnessed deathbed visions so often that he finally subjected them to scientific rigor so they might be taken more seriously. Maybe this is one of the ways the long, unbroken string of a life prepares the way for a person to rejoin those they have loved. In any case, it is a fascinating read, and I wish for each of us some share of what these patients seem to feel as they close out this life in the presence of love and comfort.

It’s been a good week. We’ve gotten much needed rain. Keep what you are reading close by so you can knock it off by the end of the month.

Above all else, be remembered as a good human.