Party Without Honor

Perhaps it is time for the Democrats to talk about a concept that has all but disappeared from American life: honor.

Can there be any question that the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney has driven every semblance of honor from the halls of power? By their nakedly dishonorable conduct, the Bushies have inflicted upon the national honor a stain at least as dark and lasting as any left by any other administration, ever.

That Bush himself is not an honorable man would seem to go without saying. An honorable man does not rely on family connections to avoid combat and then shirk even the duty to report for the cushy billet thus secured. He does not mock a woman he has sent to her death. Indeed, honorable men do not launch unjust wars, consign legions of innocents to needless death, torture other human beings, or imprison children without recourse to law. An honorable man, having taken a solemn oath to defend and protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, does not denounce it as "just a goddamned piece of paper," or -- what is obviously far worse -- treat it like one.

But I am sure that Bush at least imagines, in the flickering light of his fading intellect, that he is a honorable, or at least righteous, man. With his cohorts Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the question of honor can hardly even arise. Both have made clear by their actions that they acknowledge no constraint on their wills other than failure. Both seem to revel in the power to act dishonorably, as if it somehow confirms their freedom from all earthly impediments. And indeed, in their contempt for principle they embody the worst characteristics of the Greek and Roman gods -- having their way with lesser beings because they feel like it, and because they can.

The essence of honor, of course, is self-restraint, scruples, ethical principles that transcend expediency and advantage. The Republicans under Bush have traduced the very concept of honor and replaced it with the sodden fuzz of "values" which, reduced to essentials, means little more than "prejudices." Honor is an unwavering guide for one's own right conduct; "values" are an excuse to make others conform to conceptions (often debatable) of what is permissible or proper.

Some Republicans may continue to behave honorably in their own lives, but those who do can hardly help but be corrupted by their support for a leadership whose rank hostility to any kind of moral compunction is a constant betrayal of their own real "values."

The corruption goes deeper than that. By nurturing a politics of unreasoning fear and hatred, the Bush administration has been subliminally training Americans to dishonorable habits of thought, undermining the very notions of civilized interaction and of ethical principle as a basis for self-governance on both a collective and individual scale. The Republicans have been teaching Americans to think like children, to acknowledge only the law of the playground, the tribe. If some brown people bomb us, they are "evildoers" and not only they and their supporters, but anybody who gets in the way, or who even looks like them. or for that matter who symbolizes them in some vague way, is a fair object of our fearful vengeance. This is worse than the law of the playground; it is the law of the barnyard dog who, frustrated in his efforts to catch a flea in his teeth, bites the cat. It is insanity. Such excesses, such errors, are part of what honor is supposed to guard against. But no correction, no hindrance of any kind, is to be brooked here, for with the Republicans of George W. Bush, it is all about power.

I suspect a large part of John McCain's appeal as a party leader is that, as a military man and, by consensus reality at least, a war hero, he is presumptively a man of honor. I will not say he is not a man of honor; I do not know, and I suspect his weaknesses make it irrelevant, because even an honorable man may act without honor in a fit of temper, or of lust for power, and McCain has a demonstrated susceptibility to both. I do know that over the last six years, we have seen many examples of more obviously honorable people, in and out of the military -- people who have sacrificed careers, and more than careers, rather than succumb to the tide of dishonor pouring down from above.