On Decency

Photo by Noorulabdeen Ahmad on Unsplash

As we enter a holiday season built on the aspirational desire for universal good will, I find myself looking to address something that’s been on my mind for a long time.

Decency.

Simple human decency.

It is an understatement to say we live in a time when decency is in short supply. Every day brings another assault on our humanity by the Bully-in-Chief. Some in his orbit enjoy the attacks on groups or people they blame for their circumstances, but I suspect the rest of us either recoil at the coarseness or try to tune it out or accept the helpless feeling that we can’t do anything to stop it.

But at some point, you would think that people will decide they’ve had enough.

It’s happened before.

In the early days of television, Edward R. Murrow was a CBS reporter who believed in the civic responsibility of journalists to keep the public informed. He is attributed with having said, “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves”—the quote from which the name of this Substack is derived.

Murrow was not afraid to go after the wolves. The most notorious wolf he confronted was Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who in the early 1950s played on Cold War fears to accuse people of being communist sympathizers without evidence, ruining careers and lives. McCarthy grew powerful by using witch hunt tactics to bully people into submission.

Murrow’s response to this was to provide McCarthy with a televised platform where McCarthy’s own words revealed him as a fraud, then to turn public opinion against McCarthy with a call to the country to reject fear and those who exploit it.

But it was at a televised hearing several months later when Joseph Welch, a lawyer for the U.S. Army, ended McCarthy’s reign of terror by deflating his bullying with an appeal to benevolence.

Welch confronted McCarthy after McCarthy accused an attorney on Welch’s team of having communist ties.

He punctured McCarthy’s fear tactics by calling out his inhumanity: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy pressed on, Welch delivered a simple knock-out blow to the blowhard senator:

You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?

Have you no sense of decency?

McCarthy never recovered. The public deserted him, he was censured by the Senate, and he died three years later, broken and irrelevant, at the age of 48.

Could something like this happen today?

We are a vastly different country, of course. It is hard to find people with the broad moral authority of an Edward R. Murrow. It is impossible to focus national attention in one place as happened routinely in 1954, and our media thrive on outrage rather than reason.

Still, people have their limits.

After the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner, Donald Trump tweeted a response so offensive that even a few Republicans felt compelled to condemn it. I am not going to link to what Trump said, but I will note the humanity in the comments from Republican officials who publicly objected to it—even some who have been a big part of the problem.

Rep. Mike Lawler called it “wrong” and said the deaths were “a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion.”

Rep. Thomas Massie said Trump’s post was “inappropriate and disrespectful.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene rebuffed Trump for turning a “family tragedy” into an attack on his “political enemies.”

Sympathy. Compassion. Respect.

It has been missing from our politics.

It has been missing from our discourse.

Will there be a moment when people say: enough? Is there a point when we will be able to see ourselves in each other, when the human desire for connection takes over and the pendulum swings away from the ugliness of this divisive time?

In this season of good will, I try to imagine a time when our humanity will reassert itself.

When moral leaders will call out the cruelty and recklessness of this era’s bully.

When someone will step forward and ask: Have you no sense of decency?