Noah Smith blogged in March 2025:
I’m going to talk about the geopolitical and domestic political implications of Trump’s Zelensky meeting in a bit, but first I want to place Trump and Vance’s contempt for Ukraine in the context of something else that’s been bothering me more and more recently — a general collapse of America’s public morality.
The world is not made up of heroes and villains, like in Star Wars or a Marvel movie. Instead, like the Game of Thrones universe or a dark edgy comic book, the world is made up of antiheroes and villains. The kindest person you ever meet will have some moments of cruelty in their life; even the most upright and honest bend the rules once in a while; even people fighting for noble causes will have times when they’re selfish, arrogant, and greedy.
And yet even so, there are enormous moral differences between individual human beings. There are people for whom greed, selfishness, and cruelty are not occasional lapses, but a way of life. There are true villains in this world. Everyone knows this on some level, and we’ve organized large parts of our societies around trying to police the true villains and keep them from attaining power. But society is always at a disadvantage, because villains work around the clock; people who crave power and dominance spend all of their waking hours trying to get it, while normal, flawed people can only spend part of their time policing them.
If normal people were heroes, it would be easier to keep villains out of power. But normal people are antiheroes — they will kowtow to power when sufficiently threatened, they will take a bribe if it’s sufficiently large. Every man has his price, and the villains have deep pockets.
And the villains have a lot of practice using normal people’s flaws to divide them. When society is politically divided, power-hungry people exploit those divisions to rise to the top — we tell ourselves “He may be a bad guy, but he’s a bad guy on my side.” At least Hitler will fight the communists; at least Stalin will keep the capitalists at bay.
And like a movie antagonist who says “We’re not so different, you and I,” real villains are always screaming at the top of their lungs about the tiniest flaw in the moral character of their opponents. If Star Wars were real, the galactic internet would be flooded with screeching tirades about Han Solo’s criminal past, how Princess Leia got her position through nepotism, or how Luke Skywalker once made out with his sister.
Americans who pay attention to the news — conservatives and liberals alike — are slowly starting to realize that the people we’ve put in charge of our country are among our morally worst.
Well, what can be done now? The worse bit is this is not happening for the first time. It happens over and over again across time, across countries. People keep electing strongmen (usually men) believing that their country needs astrongman to help them get rid of crises and conflicts. They never realise that most strongmen are amoral and have no sympathy/empathy for people. Such leaders rise to power crushing people, opposition and voices. Strongmen hide behind nationalism and commit all kinds of crimes. The citizens cheer these actions initially only to realise that eventually they will be called out as well. Amoral individuals can go to any extent to get and retain power.
