Have you no decency?

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” 

The words weren’t addressed to Donald Trump, though they might have been. 

Let’s skip over some of the obvious instances of Trump’s lack of decency – such as the payment to a porn star, the pardons to corrupt friends, the incitement of violence towards journalists or anyone else asking the harder questions – and go straight to a single, telling and more recent example.

On 12 November, Chris Krebs, then head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and therefore the top expert on election security in the US, declared that the 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history”. He had the backing of a group of other senior officials.

There’s a popular belief that “speaking truth to power” is a good thing. From my personal experience (at a far lower level), it can get you sacked. As indeed, happened to Krebs. Faced with a truth that didn’t fit his narcissistic view of the universe, Trump simply fired him. And he did it, as usual, with a Tweet, accusing him of inaccuracy, and publicly declaring that he had “terminated” him.

The quotation at the start of this post was from 9 June 1954, and the words were spoken by an attorney, Joseph Welch, attacking Senator McCarthy, the man who gave his name to the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch hunt of the 1950s. Three months earlier, on 9 March 1954, the journalist Edward Murrow had already begun to sound the end of McCarthyism, when on national TV he attacked its author, then  the junior Senator from Wisconsin:

… we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. 

The baleful face of the autocratic bully:
Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump

Doesn’t that sound like Trump? He likes to present himself as the champion of American liberties – indeed of America – though he stands by as heavily armed radicals intimidate or murder peaceful citizens exercising their constitutional rights. 

His ‘America First’ doctrine has seen the US abandon longstanding arrangements with his allies, whether by pulling out of the World Health Organisation or the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, or by undermining NATO. That has caused consternation among allies and comfort to enemies, such as Putin in Russia, who still won’t recognise Joe Biden’s victory in the election, such is his investment in Trump.

Even more striking is how Trump, by dropping the Trans Pacific Partnership, has left China as the major trading power in the Pacific region. That was confirmed by the recent signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s biggest trade deal, dominated by China and without the US.

Murrow made an even more serious accusation against McCarthy just before the passage I quoted from him before. He said:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends on evidence and due process of law.

Wow, that has a contemporary ring, doesn’t it? Disagree with the present tenant of the White House, and you can expect a fusillade on Twitter, and dismissal if you’re in a job Trump can fire you from. Distinguishing dissent from disloyalty? “What’s the difference?” says the President.

As for conviction depending on “evidence and due process of law”, well, we only need to look at the string of frivolous court cases brought by the Trump campaign with not a shred of evidence between them. His view of justice is that if it advances his interests it’s right, and if it doesn’t, it’s fake and probably criminal. 

Murrow’s denunciation of McCarthy marked a turning point in the Senator’s reign of terror. The final blow were Welch’s words, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”. They revealed the Senator for what he was, a sadistic bully and a bigot, for whom there could be no role in a nation dedicated to the pursuit of freedom.

The McCarthy era ended. We’re not quite out of the woods yet, but it looks as though the Trump era will also close in a few weeks’ time. That says something important about the nature of the US system.

There’s plenty wrong with it. To take a key fault, its foundational sin is the belief that one group of humans, marked by African descent and darker skin, is so far below the dominant whites that it’s legitimate to treat them as inferiors, even to the point of enslaving them and inflicting on them cruelty no white man would regard as tolerable if inflicted on another.

That attitude remains, only party attenuated, and resurfaces with depressing frequency in killings of black people for which the perpetrators face no penalty. That’s especially true if they’re policemen, which they often are.

But despite those terrible flaws, there is a fundamental strength in America, embodied in its Constitution. That document enshrines not so much liberty itself as the aspiration to that liberty. And that means that as long as there are enough people sufficiently wedded to that Constitution, the US will recover even after venomous aberrations from decency, such as McCarthy’s or Trump’s.

But let’s return to Murrow. He had denounced McCarthy for having behaved abominably, and went on:

And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. 

Trump didn’t create the divisions in the US, the disrespect for law, the abandonment of tolerance, that he exploited. He simply took advantage of them. And then he fanned them.

But Americans need to look within themselves and their neighbours to find the sources of these threats. That’s where the disease needs to be lanced. And that’s where they’ll find the courage, if anywhere, to keep defending their Constitution.

The same applies to Europeans tempted by our own bullies, such as Abascal in Spain, Salvini in Italy and Marine le Pen in France. 

Or, come to that, Boris Johnson in Britain.