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“Having honor means being entitled to respect,” philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes in his seminal book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. Honor involves both doing right for the sake of doing right—being a person of integrity and high moral values—and also doing right because to do wrong would mar one’s reputation, and crucially, decrease one’s standing in the community. Honor, he writes, is a code adhered to and socially enforced by groups, and while it may differ between identities (honor may be different for a soldier vs. a civilian or a man vs. a woman) and can demand acts of profound immorality in its service (honor killings, for example), it can also function as a moralizing force that demands prosocial behavior and the treating of others with dignity. He writes that “if you want to know whether a society has a concern with honor, look first to see whether people there think anyone has a right to be treated with respect. The next thing to look for is whether that right of respect is granted on the basis of a set of shared norms, a code. An honor code says how people of certain identities can gain the right of respect, how they can lose it, and how having and losing honor changes the way they should be treated.”
Much has been written about President Donald Trump’s lack of integrity, lack of morals, lack of shame. But as the president demands that his party redraw congressional districts in the states they control so that they might undermine public will and maintain their own majority—so that, to put a finer point on it, they might cheat to win—what I see is a partywide, and increasingly countrywide, end of a long-held code of honor. Trump and his MAGA-fied GOP have broken American institutions, norms, and even laws. And in a remarkably short period, Trump’s own lack of honor has swallowed up the code that once shaped American public life, replacing it with something more expedient, and far hollower.
Right now, Trump is worried that his party is going to lose big in the 2026 midterm elections. He is an unpopular president, with approval ratings well below those of nearly every president in the last two decades at this point in his term—the only president who was less popular was Donald Trump in his first term. Voters were so angry back in March that the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee told Republican House members to stop holding town halls. Since then, Trump has pushed through a variety of wildly unpopular policies, including Medicaid cuts and inflationary tariffs.
But it’s not enough for Republicans to simply stop interacting with voters in public. Trump wants his party in power, whether they’ve earned the votes to get there or not. That’s why he has told the leaders of…
Read More: American politics just lost something major. Both sides will suffer.
