Anyway, in Part II, I addressed the basic notion that if you know you are going to acquit a corrupt person, like Donald Trump, it is easier to do that, cognitively, if you avoid hearing any evidence of his guilt. So, stonewall all investigations, tune out any sources of information that might tell you the truth, block out facts and create a general cloud of bullshit that obscures anyone's ability to pick out reality from the miasma of lies. And, this is important, do this in part to save yourself the cognitive dissonance of having to acquit someone you know is guilty. I mean, you could do the right thing, but... yeah, that ain't gonna happen. Remember, we're talking about the enablers here.
There is, however, another approach.
If you can't rewrite the facts, rewrite your own moral code. Mulligans all around!
He didn't do it. What? He did it? Then it must have been OK.
How difficult is this? Remarkably easy, judging by political history. I write frequently about the difference between policy preferences and process preferences. Consider, for example, the filibuster. Is it a vital protection for the rights of the minority party, or the worst thing ever because it gets in the way of majority rule, and majority rule is the definition of democracy?
I've written about this kind of thing before. Be careful about what you claim as a moral principle. For so many people, it is situational because once you take an actual moral stance, it can come back to bite you. And when it does, you have to decide whether or not you are willing to lose.
Democracy is actually all about that. The important book here is Loser's Consent. Go read it. You really should. Basically, everything goes to shit when one side decides that they aren't willing to accept a loss. When you rewrite your moral code to decide that my side is right, no matter what, and anything is legitimate to keep my side in power, no matter what, because losing is illegitimate...
That way lies badness.
The basic point, though, is that peoples' morals are... flexible.
Have you ever done a bad thing in your life? Yes. What excuses did you make to protect your sense of self? I'm not talking about what you told others. I'm talking about what you tell yourself. Maybe the pop-stuff by Dan Ariely here is less rigorous than my usual citations, but hey, this isn't my academic specialty.
And this is written into politics anyway. You evaluate your friends and family more favorably for the same behavior than you would for strangers or people whom you have reason to dislike. Add an adversarial context, like partisan politics and you magnify the effect.
Being morally consistent is very hard. It is not the default. All of the personal, cognitive and political incentives run against it. Rewriting your moral code to suit the circumstances? That's actually far easier, at least in cases that are maybe vaguely marginal. That's how most human brains work.
The issue is that there are cases that are... not marginal. What makes a particularly reprehensible enabler is full cognition of the facts of the case, and a conscious decision to engage in moral doublethink. Consciously deciding to go from Russia-is-the-enemy to Putin-is-awesome and the Don Jr. meeting was cool because of Trump... that's rewriting the moral code.
As I said, though, we should not be surprised that this kind of thing happens. It's just an extreme case.
After all, we regularly see the parties flip on which one likes the filibuster, and which one hates it. Trump's enablers are just taking that basic impulse to unprecedented extremes, and they are doing so because losing is unthinkable to them.
That kind of gives you a hint at the direction this series is going, I guess. And by "hint," I mean that I am thinking as I write. Stay tuned! Expect interruptions, though.
