“The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — For how long must we endure the end of decency in public and private life in America?

Is it possible that the historically critical election of 2024 is as much about decency as it is about the future of freedom and democracy?

Will this ultimately be the end of Donald Trump? Is this his biggest miscalculation, that at the end of the day, it will be his lack of decency that dooms him to the punishment of the courts and history?

While he takes his fun by farting while sleeping in court as the ultimate show of disrespect for the Supreme Court of New York in the Stormy Daniels “hush money” trial, a trial that will prove he is devoid of decency as if we needed any more proof, his contempt for the legal system as a whole and even the people who vote for him should spell his doom, if not in this life than surely in the next.

It should be his doom in this life and this election, that is if decency matters anymore in these crazy times.

My concentration was more focused on the lack of decency on the part of certain U.S. Supreme Court justices this week as they shockingly held a hearing and had the unmitigated gall to actually hold a public debate on whether a president as bad and corrupt as Trump might have some form of “immunity” from prosecution for either his public or private acts. As the New York Times reported it, they did this without even addressing the facts about the case supposedly under their review, instead tossing out hypotheticals about future presidents and worrying about what they might do with or without some form of immunity.

Never mind that there is no way any of the founding fathers of this country who wrote, debated and passed the Constitution of the United States could have in their wildest worst nightmare imaged a president as bad as Trump. If original intent of the Constitution is what these conservative justices are after, it seems they were debating the rise of a crook like Trump when they passed the limits on presidential power.

But I must admit it was a little hard to totally ignore the first actual criminal trial of a former president of the United States, even though it was not televised. He clearly engaged in a corrupt conspiracy to violate U.S. campaign finance laws by authorizing the payment of $130,000 to reimburse the National Enquirer for buying and killing a story about Trump having sex with porn star Stormy Daniels to prevent the news from coming to light before the 2016 election. It worked at the time. But it’s all coming out now, with witnesses under oath.

Decency

It has been said by more than one writer in history that what endures is decency. We will see about that.

“Decency is why we are all here tonight,” Saturday Night Live Weekend Edition co-anchor Colin Jost said in praising President Joe Biden for his decency during his comic address to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night. “Decency is how we are able to all be here tonight.”

Throughout his comic routine, Jost used lines we have all said to ourselves, our friends and family and even on social media over the past few years.

“Everything feels strange now,” Jost said more than once. “Nothing makes sense anymore.”

“When you look at the levels of freedom throughout history and even around the world today, this is the exception. This freedom is incredibly rare,” Jost said in a serious closing note. “And the journalists in this room help protect that freedom. We can never take that for granted.”

But he also gave a nod but a warning to the print journalists in the room. He got his start out of college at the Staton Island Advance before veering off into television and comedy. Now the words of print journalists, he said, are being used to train the AI bots that will replace them (us).

“We’re living at the end of traditional media,” Jost said.

It appears he is right. We are not immune.

Comparing the Decency of Biden to Trump

You don’t have to take his word for it or mine that Joe Biden is a decent human being and Donald Trump is not. Even authors at Psychology Today have debated as much.

“As much as Joe Biden personifies decency, Donald Trump has in many ways often seemed to embody its antithesis,” one psychologist and author wrote. “Often rude and vulgar, striving to be bigger than life, guided only by the desire to be a winner, or at least to be seen as a winner, and now apparently incapable of conceding defeat.”

Therein lies the difference, he says.

“Decency doesn’t seek greatness; it isn’t goal- or outcome-oriented. Being decent means not being bigger than life; it marks behavior that is not outsized, but rather just right, humble, aware of its limitations,” he wrote. “Decency is an inner moral compass, projecting ‘the right thing to do’ as born from an intrinsic motivation.”

This is not the same thing as fairness, he points out, like the golden rule of treating others the way you would want them to treat you.

“Decency means being fair even and especially when there is no competition in play, no power to be accumulated, no greatness to be achieved. Decency means obeying the truth whereas fairness simply assures that each side has an equal chance to win.”

Perhaps that’s where mainstream media has gone wrong in this country, and the part of the formula missing by the hacker/programmers who created social media programs and now seek to create a form of machine learning or artificial intelligence to make us all obsolete.

For more lessons, check out the book The Decency Code: The Leader’s Path to Building Integrity and Trust, by Steve Harrison and James Lukaszewski, career management and crisis communication experts who provide a blueprint for decency-based leadership.

They committed to the term “decency” for their title to emphasize “that small, constructive institutionalized gestures build great companies, families, and communities.”

“By fertilizing the foundation of corporate cultures with decencies,” they argue, “there’s a likelihood that real engagement will improve, and a better than even chance that compliance initiatives can more easily take root.”

Their ultimate goal is not greatness. It is resilience.

I believe this message is embedded in another American professional tradition, that of the National Park Service Ranger.

“You may show decency simply by refraining from the small and all-too-common indecencies at the workplace: passive-aggressive behavior, sharing gossip, or spreading rumors.”

The “small decencies” they lay out include “praising people in public, criticizing in private; greeting visitors promptly and enthusiastically; valuing receptionists; or rejecting executive pomposity.”

The word decency originates from the Latin decentia, which means “being fitting,” as in being appropriate and fitting the moral standards of one’s environment.

Synonyms include decorum, respectability and gentility.

“Decency is not our common ground,” it is said. “It is our higher plane.”

Even Proverbs in the Bible has a lesson worth mentioning here, although it will be lost on the world’s most famous Bible salesman.

Related: Trump the Bible Salesman: Ridicule Could Mark the End of The Donald

“A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”

The tongue may be only a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts.

“Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”

Trump not only pours gasoline on every divisive dumpster fire he sees. He lights the fire and then pours more gas on it.

All this goes to prove that, the sense of decency is no pallid and unnatural growth of a too respectable age, but is an eternal and universal part of human nature.

Aristotle makes this point emphatically in his book on Ethics.

“There is a difference,” he says, “between the jocularity of the gentleman and that of the vulgarian…. The difference may be seen by comparing the old and the modern comedies; the earlier dramatists found their fun in obscenity, the moderns prefer innuendo which marks a great advance in decorum.”

Trump only learned the lessons of the corrupt, ambitious vulgarians in professional wrestling, and never encountered a teacher or succumbed to the alternative lessons of some who may have tried to temper his worst tendencies to worship the authoritarians for their perceived power and control.

Related: How Wrestle­ Mania Trumped Intelligence in U.S. Politics

Trump will get his punishment in the end one way or another in the judgement of history. It would be fitting if this price included actual jail time or at the very least exile.

But what it can’t include is a second term in the White House.

I’m afraid this would mark the end of all decency, as well as freedom and American democracy. If there is any decency left in a majority of the American people, enough of them will realize this by Election Day in November.