UNWRITETN RULES

We are inundated with furious arguments about whether Trump broke the law. Sure, it matters if he did, but it might matter more even if he didn’t.

If he did, we could get rid of him and future Presidents would know what they cannot do. If he didn’t, and if he simply avoided being a criminal by being an unremovable cheat and liar, then he will have set a standard for future Presidents that is so subterranean it could change the essential nature of the country we have loved.

See maybe more than the written law, the unwritten law is what keeps us civilized. It is the stuff that we all accept as “things you just never do” that allows us to cohere as an effective society. Relationships are guided by our reasonable expectations of how other people are going to behave. Of course, we expect those we deal with to obey the law. That’s a given. But, it goes beyond that.

Now I’m a child of the sixties. That’s the perspective of this blog. So, I’m not talking about dress codes or hair length or profanity. Those standards are bullshit.

No, I’m talking about the kinds of things that Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their book, “How Democracies Die,” call, “a thin tissue of convention.”

When glowing new parents show you a picture of their newborn, if the kid’s ugly, it would not be illegal to tell them that, but we just don’t. When a friend invites you over for dinner, if the food sucks, it would not be illegal to tell them that, but, we just don’t. And when Presidents of the United States lie to us over 10,000 times, it’s not illegal to do that, but, until now, they just didn’t.

Trump is teaching the future that just because people in the past felt the need to abide by unwritten norms of behavior, that doesn’t mean that they still have to. After all, violating those norms worked for him. But, when we abandon those essential unwritten rules, the glue that keep us together loses its grip. Among the most important of those rules is credibility.

If Trump told us that we were facing an imminent crisis and instructed us on what we needed to do to save ourselves, how many of us would believe him? How many of us would rally to our country’s defense? Not me, and I doubt that I’m alone. And if it happened on the off chance that Trump might once be right, well, we’d be fucked.

Trump’s mendacity has impacts far beyond mere criminality. It has rendered untrustworthy the office in which we most need to trust. Don’t worry about tradition, he says. Don’t worry about standards. None of that matters anymore. Only the criminal law is the boundary for legitimate conduct. Ethics? Silly. Morals? Worthless.

When we open the gates to those who have abandoned those limits, we allow in all kinds of charlatans. One got in this time. That can happen. The tragedy, though, will be if we don’t learn our lesson and if we don’t make sure that the gate is locked the next time.