What history remembers is not always about the grandeur of Rome but the emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Whether he actually played a fiddle while Rome burned may be more a story told about this often-immoral leader to show his indifference to human suffering.
What history may remember about recent years of our republic is a president reportedly watching television while the Capitol was being attacked by a mob, some of whom wanted to hang his vice president.
I avoid writing about partisan politics. But there are clearly moral or ethical political issues. It was the philosopher Aristotle who said that “man is by nature a social animal.” He suggested that there is a reciprocal relationship between individuals and the societies in which they live, each feeding off the other.
Clearly, just as Nero’s fiddling was morally wrong, so, too, was Trump’s reportedly watching television while the crowd he sent to the Capitol went on a rampage. What made it worse was Trump saying he called the Department of Defense to send in thousands of troops, something he lied about. On Fox News, the Defense Department head said Trump had called him about sending the National Guard, but when testifying under oath before the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6, 2021, former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller said the former president never requested 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the Capitol prior to January 6. It’s amazing what people remember when under oath to tell the truth.
I am not a lawyer so I don’t know if Trump’s behavior was illegal, but I do know it was morally wrong when measured against the oath of office he took when assuming his office to protect and defend the laws of the land and the Constitution. The free and safe transfer of executive powers is one of the parts of our republic which separate us from dictatorships where power is not passed freely and peacefully.
Failure to obey the oath one takes is sometimes called “dereliction of duty”— a term often associated with the military. It is not one that might be used as a legal argument against an office holder such as the president but it does come with a long political history.
After the Constitution was ratified, western Pennsylvania protests against a whiskey excise tax led a mob to burn down the local tax collector’s home. President George Washington called up local militias to crush the rebellion.
I know that when any political figure is questioned regarding ethics, I am told that “we didn’t choose a person because of their ethics but only to get things done.” Too bad, maybe if you had we wouldn’t be in such dire situations today, when some politicians lack the moral courage to tell the truth fearing they may not be reelected. In other words, they lack character and moral courage, two qualities associated with Washington.
One of the reasons we mistrust political leaders is that they say one thing while actually believing another. Some call this “cognitive dissonance.” But it may explain why voters are confused and often angry at the institutions supposedly set up to preserve, protect and defend them, while political commentators spread their lies.
In his final address to the American people in 1796, Washington warned about three factors that might hamper our full democracy: disunity, loyalty to party over nation, and foreign entanglements.
Recognizing the link between ethical leadership and democracy, Washington said: “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more less force to every species of free government.”
John C. Morgan taught ethics for many years and is now a writer and columnist.
