That’s the point of this article in The Federalist. The author can’t seem to quite go whole-hog and say that character is meaningless (indeed, she keeps insisting that it’s of great importance), but she does dance around it a lot, ultimately coming down hard on the side of “Even if Roy Moore sexually assaulted young and under-age women, at least he’ll vote for more conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court, and that’s what really matters, because his leching after teenagers half his age is a private sin, not a public one, so it pales compared to his willingness to get rid of abortion, so it’s all okay.”
One irony here is that this is an attitude, a moral relativism, that conservatives often accuse liberals of. But social conservatives explicitly claim a moral righteousness, a purity, a demand for virtue in others, that flies directly in the face of this sort of realpolitik. Ultimately, the author has to sort of shrug and say, “Hey, God does great things through immoral people in the Bible, so God probably wants you to vote for Roy Moore.”
I’m not sure that’s a particularly moral argument, and it seems a poor theological one; hopefully it’s not (as it was last November) a winning one.
Why It’s Justified To Vote For A Morally Questionable Politician
God uses all kinds of ‘immoral’ men and women to bring about his purposes. He is actually rather pragmatic regarding the secular world.
"… at least he'll vote for more conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court."
And there we have it.
I would have been more convinced by the argument if Bill Clinton were cited as an example of a morally failed politician who did great things. But the article never got around to that.
A lot of what irks me about this is the hypocrisy. "We demand moral paragons, an end to relativism, a return to true values. Oh, wait, our Senate majority is in danger? Well, screw that noise — at least Roy doesn't assault 14yos in the streets and frighten the horses."
It's also irksome in that there's a lot there that I could argue either way. Sometimes realpolitik is necessary to higher ends (and sometimes that becomes a bit of convenient self-delusion and excuse-making). Sometimes it's necessary not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good (or even the mediocre).
But, again, when I hear it being raised with such convenient timing from the Right, and taking moral dictates and putting escape clauses into them, and saying "Well, nobody actually approves of King David being an adulterer or sending his lover's husband off to war to be killed, but, hey, he still turned out to be a great king, so how bad a sin could it have been?" ["Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"] … the the moral suasion and righteousness drops precipitously. .
+John E. Bredehoft Except they can't, because Bill Clinton Was Only Ever A Rapist (And Hillary His Enabler) is the only thing in the Federalist's play book for that president. After all, we have to have moral standards, don't we?
Similar debates on realpolitik emerged when Jimmy Carter took office. Kissinger, in complete accord with Nixon and Ford (and probably with Johnson and even Kennedy), promoted the association of the United States with some unsavory characters. Carter would have none of that – well, except for a deeper friendship with Egypt that paid dividends.
Yet Carter's failures are just part of a long string of failures, from the left, center, and right, in which the U.S. tried to influence policy and ended up damaging itself. A few:
(1) Under Carter's watch, we recoiled at the human rights abuses of the Shah of Iran. Next thing we know, Americans and Canadians are hostages, and U.S. forces are dead in the desert.
(2) Well, we'll take care of that. Let's prop up one of the Shah's enemies to balance the power – King Hussein. Oh, sorry, I mean Saddam Hussein. It's not like Saddam is ever going to cause any trouble for the U.S.
(3) Oh, and we need to counter Soviet influence in Afghanistan by supporting freedom fighters. Nah, they won't cause any trouble for us either.
(4) Oh, and I guess Saddam did cause a little trouble, and kicking him out of Kuwait wasn't enough. (Aside: I strongly believe that the Bush 41-led coalition that liberated Kuwait was one of the rare successes of U.S. intervention, primarily because it concentrated on a focused goal that received widespread agreement in that wonderful powder keg known as the Middle East.) So let's kick Saddam out of Iraq, also. The people will love us!
Of course, demands for moral purity ONLY apply to Democrats. They don't care about moral purity of Republicans, and haven't since…well forever, basically. Which is coming back to bite them bad, for 2018 and beyond.
Senate Majority Leader Mc-I-Hate-Roy-Moore-nnel can't pretend to be morally outraged. I mean, he can and he is pretending. But it's blatantly transparent that he's just lying through his teeth because of his past behavior. There's no way for the Republican Party to pretend to suddenly start caring and for this to be believable.
Swing voters aren't that stupid. Deep Red deplorable voters? Maybe they're that stupid, but the fact that we're even contemplating a D win in this race is indicative of how bad this is for the Republicans. They've tarred and feathered themselves with Trump and Moore, and swing voters are disgusted.
Democrats, in contrast, have the opposite pattern. More often than not, we're quick to throw each other under the bus. When we say we care about this issue, it's not just a skin deep political ploy. We've been walking the walk for years and years. We haven't been perfect, of course, but we strive to get better and better.
Now, we're still likely to lose this election. I know the polls say it's maybe 50-50, but don't get your hopes up too high. This is deep Red State territory here. But things may get very crazy if Moore wins and Senator Mc-I-Hate-Roy-Moore-nnel makes good on his threat to expel him. It's unclear how this will all shake out, but it's not going to give swing voters the impression that Republicans know how to do this governing thing…
+John E. Bredehoft As an example of how attitudes change: the James Bond flick, The Living Daylights, which stars one of my favorite Bonds, Timothy Dalton (the first believable assassin of the bunch, not matched until Daniel Craig, though Brosnan had his moments).
Anyway, a good third of the movie is Bond throwing in with a bunch of Afghan mujahideen against the Bad Guy Soviets (more bad-guy because the head of the Afghan military base was a crooked Soviet general who was plotting shenanigans), and in particular allying himself with a western-educated Afghan princeling guerilla fighter whose weapons are being provided by the West (except for the ones they steal from the Soviets, or buy from the crooked Soviet general).
The idea that those heroic mujahideen freedom fighters would, in a few short decades, turn into Taliban theocrats and al-Qa'eda terror cells, and that another western-educated, child of wealth, muahideen leader would become the most wanted man in the US … was nowhere on the horizon.
But I digress.
+John E. Bredehoft I was intentionally using realpolitik in an unusual fashion, in terms of domestic discussions of the moral character of leaders, and the need to sometimes compromise one's ideals about allies with the pragmatic needs of greater and longer-term interests.
On a foreign policy front, the US has an awful record both of compromising its principles in order to prop up or ally with truly awful regimes (Henry Kissinger usually has his fingerprints on these cases, but they both pre-date him and will doubtless post-date him), and shooting its interests in the foot when it occasionally decides to be moralistic about the whole thing.