Just for a Handful of Silver

 One of the most fascinating aspects of the Trump era is how it has managed to bring once-submerged aspects of people's characters (both suppressed villainy and unexpected heroism) to the fore. In ordinary times, after all, many of the significant moral differences between people—their real as opposed to merely hypothetical courage and integrity—remains hidden. This is because, in ordinary times, simply going along with the collective opinion of one's party, caste, or society exacts no special moral cost. One is imperfect, but only in a normal sort of way, and no more so than everyone else. 

The thing about Trump, though, and other would-be gangsters and tyrants, is that they make a point of exacting special moral tributes from anyone who goes along with them. They make sure that, if you are going to join their team, you must do so at the cost of violating your moral self. It is a crude mechanism for maintaining group loyalty that is well known to the leaders of criminal organizations. You make sure people have really debased and compromised themselves in order to join your clique; that way, they can never turn on you, because they have shed their ties to the mainstream moral community. 

This is why Trump operates so effectively as a kind of enchanted portrait of Dorian Gray, showing the true moral corruption of people who—before he came along—had been able to pass as normal in the pre-Trump world. The era of his presidency has worked better than any cosmic judgment to distinguish the sheep from the goats. On the one hand, there are people who—when Trump asked them to do something truly over the line—had the integrity to say no: people like Mike Pence. Such individuals showed unexpected integrity. They had more character, when it counted, than some of us might have expected. 

Then there are the people on whom Trump reacts as a kind of caustic reagent—the people whose moral selves shrivel and vanish upon contact with him. One of the outstanding spectacles of this has surely been the career of J.D. Vance. Here was someone who, when he first came to public attention in 2016, people thought had moral integrity. He sounded like he had it, at least to people who read his book (which did not include me). He clearly knew enough to see through Trump, describing him as a demagogue who has fixated on a vulnerable population of immigrants as a convenient political scapegoat. 

But then, Vance got a taste for power and fame. And if, as I say, we had still been living in ordinary times, this probably would have been reasonably compatible with virtue. Vance might have pursued a normal political career as a moderate Republican, and we would never have seen the corruption of the soul within, because the political environment of the time would have put him to no special moral tests. He would have been able to pursue power without having to mortgage his integrity to do so. 

With Trump, however, he had to choose: integrity, with slightly less power, or moral rot, with slightly more. Vance chose rot, plus power. This first became apparent during his senate run, when he started deploying the exact same demagogic techniques that he had earlier accused Trump of using (proving that he knows exactly what he's doing, and what's wrong with it, and is choosing to do it anyway, out of a sociopathic quest for power). Then, he apologized to Trump for his earlier comments. In effect, he kissed the ring of the overlord of MAGA. 

He's also a reliable voice in the senate for "America First" ideas like halting aid to Ukraine. Because, of course, bending the knee to Trump requires also bending the knee to Putin. Bow to one would-be autocrat and bully, apparently, and you have to bow to them all. 

And now, not only is Vance refusing to stand in the way of Trump's apparent bid for dictatorial power, even though his earlier writings show that he knows full well the danger that Trump poses; he is also actively abetting Trump's quest to turn the world's leading democracy into a backward autocracy. He is not just complacently falling into line with the MAGA-wards drift of the Republican Party and electorate, that is to say; he is actively stumbling over his rivals in the race to become Trump's number one lieutenant and enforcer in a future MAGA dictatorship. 

The most telling moment came last week, after Robert Kagan published an excellent piece in the Washington Post warning that Trump could become a dictator. J.D. Vance's response to this historian exercising his First Amendment rights was (in the telling of the New York Times) to send a letter to the Justice Department calling for Kagan's arrest and prosecution on charges of conspiracy and incitement (a mirror-world version, of course—and this was the point—of the charges that Trump now faces for trying to subvert the outcome of the last election). 

Obviously, the letter will go nowhere in the current Justice Department. But in a federal executive controlled by Trump, and staffed with his chosen lackeys, it might well actually lead to an arrest. 

Here is a special, Shakespearean, operatic level of villainy on display; a cringing Grima Wormtongue-esque study in the forgotten arts of fawning Elizabethan-era lickspittlry. Because Vance doesn't even have the excuse of actually believing any of this. He knows—his own past comments prove that he knows—exactly who Trump is and what he is trying to do to this country. And Vance is choosing to actively advance Trump's aims regardless; choosing to help him persecute his critics in the press and public, and thereby degrade our democratic institutions and constitutional freedoms; even while knowing better. Seeing the good, he chooses the evil. 

And all—for what? For a tiny little bit of power. Just for his brief moment in the spotlight; just for his paltry career. "Just for a handful of silver he left us,/ Just for a riband to stick in his coat—," as Browning once wrote of his "Lost Leader" (believed to be Wordsworth—but standing in, for purposes of posterity, for other every political turncoat then and since). Just for that, he is willing to mortgage the country, our democracy, and the fates of millions (not only in the U.S., but in every place that U.S. power touches—which is everywhere on Earth).

"Oh man!" as Byron once wrote, thou art a "feeble tenant of an hour,/ Debas'd by slavery, or corrupt by power." And our debased political cravens of today do not even have the excuse of lacking alternatives. No one's back is up against the wall (yet). Under our current institutions, no one is going to be arrested or shot for opposing Trump. People like Vance could easily spurn him and preserve their integrity. The worst that would happen to him is that he'd have to use his Yale degree in the lucrative practice of the law somewhere in the private sector, rather than using it in Congress to subvert American democracy and kiss the arse of Putin (an expression I permit myself only because I have Orwell as precedent). 

But Vance is trying to create a system where this is no longer the case. He is actively seeking to empower Trump to persecute his political enemies and critics; he is even providing a political and legal roadmap for how Trump can do it, equipping him with ready-made rhetorical arguments to dishonestly turn the tables on the press and public if he regains the White House. Then, it will be more than just a little bit of power that people will be forfeiting if we continue to oppose Trump. The costs of opposition will be much higher, and the moral test will therefore be more extreme. 

How many more debased lackeys will then be revealed? On how many other once-normal-seeming souls will Trump cast his spell to reveal the stink and rot beneath the surface? Unfortunately, there will be more Vances to come. Vance himself is making sure of that. If he knows, on some level, that he sold his soul for the merest slice of paltry power—just for a handful of silver, just for a riband to stick in his coat—he wants now to make sure he is not the only one so compromised. He stands ready to put all the rest of his party to the same blood oath. "If I'm going down, I'm taking you all with me!" 

And he might just succeed.