“Country First?” – The Question of Loyalty

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/18114

“Country First?” – The Question of Loyalty
2008 Elections
by Ernest Partridge | October 22, 2008 - 2:44am

snip//

Instead, I will focus on what strikes me as the over-arching reason for the apparent collapse of the McCain/Palin campaign: John McCain has lost, and Sarah Palin has failed to gain, credibility as qualified occupants of the offices that they seek. They have thus disqualified themselves by the quality of their campaigns, by their performances in the debates (which can be seen here in full), and by their brazen willingness to assert and repeat demonstrable lies. In McCain’s case, these include the assertions that Obama’s political career was launched in the apartment of William Ayres, and that Obama would raise the taxes of most Americans. In Sarah Palin’s case, the claim that she opposed the so-called “bridge to nowhere,” and that she was “completely exonerated” by the official Alaska “Troopergate” investigation.

Unlike charges of “liberalism” or “socialism,” which are vague and thus open to endless interpretation and dispute, the above assertions are flatly false, provably false, known by both McCain and Palin to be false, and therefore correctly described as “lies.”

Faced with candidates that have thus disqualified themselves, with a party that has abandoned its conservative principles to religious fanatics and charlatans, and with an opposing candidate who, in his campaign, displays integrity, poise, legal education, and competence, what is the traditional Republican to do?

That hypothetical Republican is presented with a fundamental moral conflict and a test of moral maturity.

In his monumental treatise, A Theory of Justice (1971, pp. 490-1), John Rawls describes the growth in moral capacity from a “morality of authority” through a “morality of association” to a mature “morality of principles.” (I have much more to say about conflicting loyalties and moral development in my “On Patriotism”). Applied to the present case, these hypothetical Republicans, along with millions of independents and a few wavering Democrats, must choose between conflicting loyalties: to their political mentors (morality of authority), to their political affiliations (morality of association), or to the founding principles of our republic, in addition to an acceptance of the “reality-based” account of the planetary emergency as described by the sciences (morality of principles).

Upon that choice, rests the future of our country and, given the environmental and economic policy issues before us, the future of our planet.

“Country First?” That remains to be seen, in two weeks and beyond. Whatever the outcome of the election, the struggle is not over. It simply enters a new phase.