The rapidly dwindling interest in character

This is one of those posts that comes from synthesizing several pieces and news items I've come across during a morning.

Let's start with the one I actually read last. Remember the discussion about Kimberly Guilfoyle leaving Fox News in a post the other day? Man, oh, man is there some backstory to that.

When it was revealed last week that longtime Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle would be leaving the network, some Fox News and White House insiders were surprised that she was choosing to move on from the cable news channel and head to a pro-Donald Trump super PAC. For nearly two years — even once rumors eventually kicked up that she might join the Trump administration — Guilfoyle said that, as a single mother, she had to think of her son’s financial future and couldn’t afford to leave the high-paying gig, multiple sources told HuffPost.Guilfoyle’s departure was initially billed as her decision. However, as HuffPost first reported last week, multiple sources said she did not leave the network voluntarily. They said Guilfoyle was informed her time at Fox News was up following a human resources investigation into allegations of inappropriate behavior including sexual misconduct, and that her lawyers had been involved since the spring. Sources also said that despite being told she would have to leave by July, Guilfoyle repeatedly attempted to delay her exit and tried to have her allies appeal to Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, to let her stay at the network.
This story is based on interviews conducted over the past year with 21 sources inside and outside Fox News and 21st Century Fox. All sources spoke to HuffPost on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak to the press, did not want to raise Guilfoyle’s ire or have signed nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from speaking to others about their experiences.

Just what was the inappropriate behavior?

Six sources said Guilfoyle’s behavior included showing personal photographs of male genitalia to colleagues (and identifying whose genitals they were), regularly discussing sexual matters at work and engaging in emotionally abusive behavior toward hair and makeup artists and support staff.

And she seems to have had a penchant for trying to stoke divisions within the network:

The current and former Fox News employees who have spoken to HuffPost over the past year said Guilfoyle, who has a reputation for being unfailingly loyal to certain people, caused a rift among women at the network after former network host Gretchen Carlson sued Ailes for sexual harassment and retaliation. Some of those sources expected Guilfoyle to be pushed out for leading the charge against Carlson and others, and were surprised when she managed to hold on.

Guilfoyle called female on-air talent at Fox News in the summer of 2016 and asked them to make supportive statements about Ailes publicly, sources said. Five sources who said they received calls from Guilfoyle said she framed it as making a decision as to whether they were “Team Roger” or “Team Gretchen.”  

There's more. She'd tried to protect herself by buttering up the late Roger Ailes, and was particularly close to Eric Bolling, who was, like Ailes and Bill O'Reilly, ousted from FNC.

HR had had enough of her shenanigans, however.

According to sources, Guilfoyle was the subject of a human resources investigation that started last year and involved interviews with Fox News employees, including hair and makeup artists and producers. Sources said HR warned Guilfoyle about her behavior several times, including a stern warning from Kevin Lord, the head of Fox News HR, in the fall of 2017. HuffPost also began investigating Guilfoyle’s workplace conduct last year.

Check out the final stunt she pulled before the plug was pulled:

Days before she left Fox News for the last time, Guilfoyle got herself booked on Steve Hilton’s Sunday program ― even though she had been told she was no longer going to be on air. According to two sources, she told Hilton he should tell Fox News brass he wanted her as a regular. Hilton, according to sources, didn’t know that Guilfoyle was leaving the network.

Now, I don't want to narrow this down to some kind of "Trump camp" observation. We are all fallen creatures in need of grace. But think about the nature of her recent pals (and paramours): Eric Bolling, DJT, Jr., Steve Hilton. Trumpists all.

As I said in the post from the other day, my first reaction is just deep sadness at how far our culture has deteriorated. The Left has no problems with its people acting like idiots, charlatans and sybarites, but in the wake of the Trump phenomenon, much of the right is now inured to the same kinds of antics coming from its spokespeople.

Which leads me to David Limbaugh's Townhall column today, in which he takes exception to The Weekly Standard's Andy Smarick for still - at this late date! Can you believe it? - finding Donald Trump's behavior and the example it sets objectionable. His grounds are the argument you hear a lot these days: The Very Stable Genius is getting results!

Here, I think Smarick is guilty (not morally, mind you), of the "sin" he decries. He is the one missing the forest for the trees. He is the one ignoring the overwhelmingly positive impact of the Trump presidency and unduly magnifying (and distorting) the actions and statements of Trump that he finds objectionable.

Trump is sui generis. He is like no other president we've had or will ever have again. He is so refreshingly outside the box that his supporters are growing stronger rather than weaker in their support -- because they're seeing results and they're witnessing Trump's extraordinary fulfillment of his campaign promises -- even the ones some of us feared, like tariffs.

Trump's personality may lend itself to developing superficial, personal relationships with tyrants, but that is only troubling (for the most part) if it leads to bad policy results. Who cares if he is chummy with Putin, so long as he continues to restore our military and implements prudently hawkish policies against Russia that serve America's interests? In the overall scheme, who cares if stroking Kim Jong Un's ego and appealing to his greed is what entices the dictator to dismantle his nuclear program and, possibly, begin to open up his markets? And if Trump's hard-core trade rhetoric results in significantly better deals for the United States, with only minor short-term damage, then this former skeptic may become a believer on that score as well.

Flimsy stuff, coming from a guy whose Christianity ostensibly shapes his worldview.

Juxtapose that with Jonah Goldberg's column in the same venue:

. . . it seems to me that we've passed some kind of tipping point.

I don't know when it happenedbut the trend stretches back a long way. Some might want to start the timeline in the radicalism of the 1960s or the selfishness of the "Me Decade" 1970s. Others might lay blame on the alleged greed of the 1980s. The point is that Americans, regardless of ideology, are more inclined to go with their own moral or political instincts than to rely on experts or defer to institutions.

The consequences of this cultural revolution are a familiar lament for many conservatives. Self-esteem is valued over self-discipline. Regular church attendance has been in steady decline (the numbers are debated, the trend is not), while the number of people who say they are "spiritual but not religious" has been steadily growing. According to the Pew Research Center, 27 percent of Americans describe themselves this way. In other words, a growing number of Americans haven't lost their religious sensibility -- for want of a better word -- they've simply decided they can be their own priests, as it were.

In short, our understanding of the world has become increasingly personalized, governed by our own judgments, instincts and feelings.

Which brings me to that other category of people: charismatic celebrities. From Oprah to Jordan Peterson, Americans seem less interested in putting trust in institutional "brands" and more interested in following the advice of charismatic people with whom they've formed a personal bond. 

When I use the term "charismatic," I don't mean the colloquial sense of "charming." Originally, a charismatic leader was a king, general or prophet who seemed to be imbued with, or anointed by, divine authority. ("Charisma" comes from the Greek "Kharisma," meaning "gifted with grace.")
German sociologist Max Weber updated the term. Charismatic leaders, he wrote, have a "certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities."

In contemporary America, and perhaps throughout history everywhere, the hallmark of a charismatic leader is the ability to form a personal relationship with his or her followers. People invest their faith in the leader, not in the formal institutions or organizations that traditionally serve as gatekeepers or validators of ideas or programs. 

Today, political leaders -- along with celebrity "influencers" from all manner of vocations -- have discovered that the key to success isn't in a particular platform or institution, but in having a personal following.
Institutions no longer fight to fend off mavericks or upstarts; institutions now try to attract them.

Political parties are late arrivals to this trend. Historically, they served as gatekeepers and validators of candidates. That's no longer really the case. 

With all due respect to Limbaugh, and the entire type of pundit for which he stands in here, it's clear he's fallen for this fascination with a personality. He may couch it in terms of things getting accomplished that please conservatives, but the fascination with Trump as an individual comes across sound and clear. For one thing, he's banking on concrete results coming from Trump's face-time encounters with Kim and Putin, which is pretty speculative at this point. Limbaugh even leads off his second-to-last paragraph by saying, "Call me a cheerleader if you want."

Yes, Trump has accomplished enough good things to allow us to breathe a sigh of relief that we're not now into the nineteenth month of a Clinton presidency. But, like the artificial relations one sees between personalities on FNC (or any such channel, really), all these people have a great deal of phoniness within their constitutions. Consider the famous photograph of DJT, Melania, Bill and Hillary yokking it up at the DJT-Melania wedding reception.

I've just had it with this deliberate ignoring ofwho these people are on the moral level in order to gush about a rising GDP and a vague trade agreement with the European Commission.

Which leads me to the final piece that helped form my thought process as I went about my day: a Charlie Sykes essay in Time in which he states bluntly what's going on:

Republicans tell themselves they are getting a lot of what they want. (Politics is always transactional, right?) They rationalize their acquiescence to Trumpism by pointing to tax cuts, deregulation and conservative judges. Even if Trump’s conduct becomes indefensible, they can always fall back on attacking Trump’s critics, especially in the media.

Yet what Republicans in Congress have found is that rubber-stampism can be addictive and all-consuming; every time they allow a line to be crossed, it is harder to hold the next one, even if that next one is more fundamental. Republicans have made it clear that they have no intention of providing a meaningful check on Trump, and the next Congress could be even worse: from Georgia to Wisconsin, GOP candidates are vying with one another in their pledges of fealty to Trump rather than to any set of ideas.

As a result, what was once a party of ideas has morphed into a virtual cult of personality. Or perhaps, it was never really a party of ideas at all, but instead merely what Lionel Trilling called a movement of “irritable mental gestures” that was willing to surrender its principles for a slogan on a hat.

The problem for conservatives should be obvious: by failing to stand up for their core values in the face of serial Trumpian outrages, they are effectively letting Trump redefine conservatism. A movement that once insisted that “character matters,” has now internalized Trump’s own moral vacuity, accepting a win-at-all costs ethic, even when the costs are all they said they believed in. Republican elected officials barely raise an eyebrow over evidence that suggests Trump lied about and attempted to cover up hush-money payments to porn stars and Playboy models with whom he had extramarital affairs. The party that once championed free markets now sits by as the President picks winners and losers, proposes massive bailouts and browbeats dissenters in the private sector. Rather than defending constitutional norms, some congressional Republicans have been active participants in the campaign to obstruct and undermine Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. This week, 11 conservative House members filed articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the probe. 

I suspect that many Republicans imagine that they will be able to reset the party after Trump leaves the political scene. But this seems increasingly naïve; by allowing themselves to become the party of Trump, they make the stain indelible. They are not servants of the public; they are servants to power.

Unfortunately, it’s hard not to see this as a watershed. Republicans have not only ceded ground to the President, they have done so at profound cost to the norms of liberal constitutional democracy. Power ceded is difficult to get back; moral authority squandered is often lost forever. (See: the acceptance of presidential lies, embrace of incivility and indifference to sexual misconduct.) 

The bottom-line problem is not Trump, nor chattering-class-financial-world-political-realm licentiousness, nor Republican squandering of moral authority. Those are all second-tier ills resulting from the main crisis: the utter rot of our culture.

Trump is a product of the cultural rot of the past 60 years. So is his son. So is Kimberly Guilfoyle.

So are any of us who don't make a personal stand and look deeply into how to reverse this, beginning with ourselves.

Let's start with stating what is is we want:

• Our own humility and unwavering devotion before our Lord
• television personalities who aren't ruthless, thoughtless, hypocritical horndogs
• elected officials and politicians who are driven by principle 
• people generally comporting themselves with dignity and self-control

Insist on these things in ourselves and others. Now, obviously, I can't change the behavior of some pol or talking head, but I can blog that it is unacceptable.

The dismal state of our culture's health is why we had such a grim choice between presidential candidates in 2016. And a whole lot of people - people I used to admire - need to stop kidding themselves that the choice wasn't grim and that the consequences haven't been grim as well.

Quit trying to ignore the spiritual level of all this.