As of late August 2018, American politics has become so debased that people fall over themselves praising the integrity, civility and honor of someone who:
- attempted to bring an aggressively know-nothing, say-anything internet troll into the White House before deciding to occasionally criticize another one who actually made it there;
- made much fuss about the senate and “regular order” before voting to approve a massive betrayal of serious policymaking;
- chuckled at his own “joke” of singing “bomb bomb, bomb bomb-Iran” in response to a serious question about policy.
This isn’t really a record of decency or any of those other things; it’s a record of “decenciness.” As with “truthiness,” it provokes an emotional feeling of genuineness, which large numbers of people happily embrace as being just as good as a substantive, reasoned case, if not better.
