The Twilight of American Morality?

Fight the darkness but offer a righteous path back to decency

January 24, 2025

By Marc Cooper

A short preamble: I make no illusions about the morality of the United States. From slavery through Vietnam, the nuking of Japan, and up to today in Gaza, this country has engaged in numerous and severe acts of immorality. In the 1960s, my moral outrage against the war in Vietnam led me to several arrests, a couple of violent confrontations with untethered cops, and ultimately to a five-year ban on attending any California university. So, please, after you read this, I require no rehearsals of the many sins of the United States. I know all of them.

That outrage of mine over Vietnam—and just as passionately against Jim Crow apartheid—and that of millions of others was triggered by a sense of betrayal. We had grown up being told about the basic decency and humanity of our country, a global beacon of democracy and humanity, and a refuge for the oppressed. The nefarious war against Vietnam brusquely shattered much of the national mythology and sparked a generational rebellion against the old order.

The War of Independence, the American Revolution—now celebrated mostly with hot dogs and fireworks displays, with Lee Greenwood’s risible Proud to Be an American as the usual soundtrack—was, in fact, the most radical revolution in world history at the time. And the resulting Constitution, though written by slaveowners, was the most advanced and progressive national charter ever to be seen. On paper, it provided the foundation for the most democratic and egalitarian society of its age, offering life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, separation of powers and democratic safeguards against tyranny.

Generations of Americans, despite their personal flaws and hypocrisies, and often to the degree of arrogant chauvinism, tightly embraced and clung to those founding ideals. The last 150 years or so saw the abolition of slavery, massive improvements in civil rights and civil liberties, a marked decrease in racial and religious prejudices, the empowerment of women, a blossoming of sexual freedom, a rejection of antiquated social taboos, and, with all of its shortcomings and flaws, a general sense of decency, if not strict morality, prevailed.

Donald J. Trump is many things, but most importantly—and most worrisome—he has become the pinnacle of a new age of profoundly anti-American national immorality and selfish indecency. It’s a historical shift that began 45 years ago with the rise of Ronald Reagan.

This essay continues after this short announcement:

(At the end of each Coop Scoop I make a funding appeal. Now I am making an emergency request. The Trump administration is already creating a needed tsunami od push back which means a lot more work for the small Coop Scoop work team. A lot more. As a retired journalist I started the Scoop as a casual hobby. It will now require many many more hours of work to stay current and relevant, We have picked up hundreds of free subscribers in the past couple of months and that’s great. But is is paid subscribers that keeps us up an running with free content and no paywalls. To keep it that way I am making this appeal to please convert to a paid subscription of only $31.00 or $5 a month. Most every other substack costs $80 and with a paywall that excludes free subscriber. Can I ask a hundred of you to convert today to paid status? There are also about 500 subscribers who over the last couple of years made a one time donation on paypal or another platform. Most of those have “expired.” If you are among that group, I ask you today to convert to a paid substack sub using the button below. Thanks to all. I hate doing this but it is existential to this publication, Thanks again, and now read on)

Continuing:

It was the Great Communicator, a B-list actor, a virulent anti-Communist, and a former corporate commercial shill who inaugurated the Age of Gordon Gekko and the ethos that “Greed is Good.”

And yet, even this gospel of wealth and privilege was couched by him and his speechwriters in the cheery language interwoven with the national shibboleths, portraying us as The Good Guys, the Shining City on the Hill, and the purveyors of world freedom, albeit with ICBMs loaded with world-destroying warheads.

LBJ and Nixon used the same language of intrinsic American morality to excuse their war crimes in Vietnam. And Americans, on all sides, still held to the notion that we were an arsenal of morality—or that arsenal, while still existent, was being undermined. We remained a fairly unified country, and I would argue that a certain base level of human civil decency weathered those betrayals.

Concurrently, the economy did not cooperate with the national mythos. Labor unions were smashed. Wages stagnated and have continued to stagnate. Though the Democrats (and Republicans) celebrated the newfangled globalism, American manufacturing got outsourced, and millions of workers and middle-class families were punished. Well-paid industrial workers were forced into low-level service indenture. The economic inequality gap opened up an historic, class-based chasm. The fictional Gordon Gekko became an everyday material reality, richly celebrated on magazine covers and “serious” TV talk shows. The Democrats abandoned the urban working class, and much of rural America was written off as the Clintonites became the heroes of Davos. You weren’t anybody anymore unless you gave a TED talk on the new global order, with that annoying trademark microphone hanging next to your cheek.

Meanwhile, nobody noticed that much of the common citizenry—much of the electorate—began to fume with resentment. They saw their future, and that of their children, short-circuited by Tom Friedman’s ebullient chats with foreign taxi drivers, along with the other skip-load of globalism bullshit and self-delusion, of which Friedman was only a trivial piece.

The Republicans were clever enough to at least catch this drift in the national consciousness and were not afraid to politically exploit it—raising fears of Willie Hortons and degenerate gays marching in San Francisco.

But they were only dabbling, as they could not and would not realize they were also part of the problem that the people were pissed off about.

To his credit, George W. Bush in 2004 was supportive of genuine and humane immigration reform and stayed away from demonizing others. Even after 9/11, he made appeals to the American people to be tolerant of Muslims, even as he leveled half of Iraq for no good reason.
It wasn’t until a degenerate, mentally twisted sociopath and con man named Trump came along who figured out how to stoke and aggregate this simmering resentment and discontent that was ignored by Davos and the Democrats.

I am not going to take up much space here reviewing the outrages of his first week in office. He is only doing what he promised he would do and what a plurality, a virtual half of the country, voted for. I will address later, perhaps in a few days, the nuts and bolts of his first days in office and the fact that he could easily fail.

But my indictment runs much deeper than howling about this or that specific cabinet appointment, his executive decrees (already being reversed in the courts), or his absurd and primary electoral promises—such as egg prices, now being projected to rise this year, or the expectation that gas prices will drop, or the Russian war against Ukraine suddenly ending after Day One.

No. I hold Trump guilty over the last decade for smothering, perhaps fatally, that underlying sense of morality and basic decency that held this country together.

I would go as far as saying he has so expertly plumbed the pool of popular resentment that he has actually changed, for the worse, the collective national character of our people. He has given a glaring green light to the populace to unleash and even celebrate their bottled-up selfishness, resentment, grievances, unfounded fears, distrust of simple truths, open cruelty, callousness, and a certain hatred of “others” that threatens all basic civility and decency, let alone any adherence to a higher morality.

I offer as Exhibit A, his 2024 election. His win in 2016 was an electoral college fluke. His 2024 victory was clean and decisive. And discounting the 2016 aberration, this is the first time in recent presidential history that the more dour, sour, and pessimistic candidate has won.

Every political consultant will tell you that, almost invariably, it is the more optimistic, upbeat, and happy presidential candidate who wins.

But not this time. Trump won as the most bitter, negative, and cruel candidate possible because he won the most votes among a populace that resonates with his disdain for all that is decent and compassionate. This is a startling fact, and while there’s still half the country on the other side, it suggests the other half couldn’t care less about the more noble American and human values of compassion, solidarity, concern for their neighbor, or any remote hope for a better future—other than inflicting cruel pain on their imaginary “enemies within” that Trump has successfully conjured.

Donald Trump campaigned on two main issues: the economy and “immigration”—the latter being nothing more than a cheap euphemism for nativism, racism, and pure xenophobia. In his first week, he has turned all attention to that deepest circle of hell known as “the southern border” and who it allows into the country. He’s already given up on inflation, saying that after he’s elected, Americans don’t really care about it. And as rock-stupid as he is, he knows very well he has zero power to lower the prices of eggs, gas, or anything else.

He has decided to focus almost exclusively on fear of “the other.” Gays and trans people are being pushed around, but the real hammer of the government is coming down on “migrants.” Sorry to bring up Hitler, but Trump’s hysterical statements that we have been “invaded” by “millions of criminal immigrants” is a copy of the way Der Fuhrer instructed Germans to hate Jews.

Satanizing “migrants” was bad enough. Adding the modifiers of “millions of criminal migrants” is an incitement to an American Kristallnacht. The opening up of snitch lines to denounce “illegals” by the government and allied fascist-adjacent satellite groups is a page out of the East German Stasi operation manual.

That the American labor force—especially its retail workers, agricultural industry, and much of the construction industry and small businesses—is entirely dependent on migrants seems to be of no concern to the president, nor to the half of the country who supports him. It is gross ignorance, stewed with fear if not outright hatred.

While the country’s “patriots” went apeshit over Biden’s exit from Afghanistan, supposedly leaving behind our allies—in spite of the largest airbridge in history that brought in 140,000 refugees—these same patriots today express no regret over Trump cancelling ALL current refugee assistance programs, thereby endangering the legal status of those Afghans and their children we saved. And on Fiday morning Trump closed the border to all asylum requests.

We are becoming a cruel, heartless, and ignorant country, mired in a moral crisis of immeasurable depth.

To defeat Trump and MAGA, we are going to have to do a lot more than tinker with the pathetic Democrats’ “messaging.”

Yes, we are going to have to do everything possible to block and stop every one of his moves and completely reject those who say—like 55 Democratic lawmakers—that they will work with him where they can. Our opposition, which I am naïve enough to believe will eventually emerge in a short matter of months, is crucial but still insufficient. We must also forge a positive movement of renewal of civility and basic human morality in order to offset the darkest of possible scenarios and to offer a future to bitter and depressed Americans..

I have no idea if this is possible, but if we don’t try, we have already lost. Somewhere out there, there has to be a new Martin Luther King Jr. who can help us lead a crusade of both opposition and human righteousness.

---