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Is Morality Missing in America? · Commentary - TJ Meadows

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So often we talk about legality. Did someone break the law?
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Was it constitutional? Could it survive in courts? Important questions, certainly,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: But legality can miss the larger point entirely. A better
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: conversation is morality. John Adams understood that. In seventeen ninety eight,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: amid fears of political extremism and factionalism following the French Revolution,
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  Speaker 1: Adams wrote to a Massachusetts militia unit, our constitution was
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: made only for a moral and religious people. It is
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Adams was
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: not merely warning. In many ways, he was reassuring. His
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: faith in free government rested on an assumption that Americans
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: possessed enough honesty, civic virtue, restraint, and moral character to
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: govern themselves without the need for overwhelming course of power
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: from the state. In adams view, a moral people would
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: make tyranny unnecessary and therefore or unlikely or even impossible,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: which raises an uncomfortable question today. Was Adam's wrong or
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: have we lost some of that moral edge? The internal
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: restraint he believed was so deeply ingrained in the American
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: character and necessary for constitutional government to survive, because constitutions
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: alone cannot preserve liberty eventually. Free societies depend upon cultural norms,
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: civic expectations, and the moral character of both the people
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: and their leaders, which brings us to President Donald Trump
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: policy aside, Trump is arguably not, on balance a moral man.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: The examples are numerous and well known, nor is he
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: the first president to flirt with crossing moral lines. But
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: if Adam's hypothesis is correct, then controversies involving political retribution,
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: demands for personal loyalty, intimidation, and even the slush fund
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: controversy are not isolated incidents. They're symptoms of something deep
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: erosion in the moral framework the Constitution quietly depends upon.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: That's why more leaders should be willing to speak up publicly,
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  Speaker 1: not only about legality, but about motives rooted in vengeance, fear,
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  Speaker 1: and absolute loyalty. Little good comes when loyalty becomes more
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  Speaker 1: important than honor, more important than what is right. Yet
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: increasingly that appears to be the expectation. Support the president
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: completely are risk political destruction. Just ask Thomas Massey, Bill
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Cassidy are John Cornyn and Adam's warned about this too.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Later in that same letter, he wrote that if Americans
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: ever became the kind of people who publicly praised justice
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  Speaker 1: and honesty while privately tolerating corruption, selfishness, and deceit. Then
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: America would become quote the most miserable habitation in the world.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: The language is old, the meaning feels modern. Are we
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: there yet? Hopefully not? But are we drifting in wrong direction?
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: That question is becoming harder and harder to avoid