Summary: Noah Smith argues that America’s leadership has become morally corrupt, exemplified by Trump’s recent aggressive meeting with Ukraine’s President Zelensky. Many people feel uneasy and scared about the current state of U.S. politics, as they see a shift towards a “gangster state.” This situation highlights a broader decline in public morality and the troubling rise of leaders who prioritize power over decency.
there are enormous moral differences between individual human beings. There are people for whom greed, selfishness, and cruelty are not occasional lapses, but a way of life. There are true villains in this world. Everyone knows this on some level, and we’ve organized large parts of our societies around trying to police the true villains and keep them from attaining power. But society is always at a disadvantage, because villains work around the clock; people who crave power and dominance spend all of their waking hours trying to get it, while normal, flawed people can only spend part of their time policing them. (View Highlight)
And the villains have a lot of practice using normal people’s flaws to divide them. When society is politically divided, power-hungry people exploit those divisions to rise to the top — we tell ourselves “He may be a bad guy, but he’s a bad guy on my side.” (View Highlight)