Self-Defeating Moralizing

Just another day in America, 2026. The corrupt, demented president lies with abandon about his record and storms off an interview set rather than respond to even slightly aggressive questions. The pointless war he started again threatens to spiral out of control in the Middle East. MAGA District Attorneys in the south threaten nullification of a law banning assault weapons. Never has it been more important for the opposition party to put differences aside and concentrate on winning elections.

Of course, the Democrats are doing nothing of the sort. Instead, too many of them are falling back on their favorite pastime: moralizing, and insisting on purity tests for possible presidential candidates.

Consider what is happening with one of the most interesting potential candidates on the 2028 horizon: Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff. In recent weeks he has received copious, largely favorable attention for a series of hard-hitting speeches ripping the Trump administration for its blatant, over-the-top corruption—the issue on which the MAGA coalition may well prove most vulnerable. He is young (39), handsome, smart, serious. He does not come across as smarmy, like many of the other Democratic hopefuls. He won a Senate seat in the Deep South in 2020, and looks likely to win reelection this year, demonstrating his appeal to the center. Not surprisingly, mainstream liberal commentators have begun to tout a possible Ossoff candidacy.

And already, shrill anathemas are filling the air against him. In particular, his votes for the Laken Riley Act allowing expanded detention of migrants, and for funding ICE, are seen as irredeemably tarnishing. California representative Ro Khanna called the Laken Riley vote “disqualifying” for Ossoff. The progressive commentator David Klion has called Ossoff “DOA with the left.” And portions of the progressive left have other litmus tests in mind as well. Corey Robin recently called for the left to support a candidate who “commits to cutting off all nonmilitary and military aid, including all weapons shipments and all weapons sales, to the State of Israel.” That’s a test that Ossoff—and every other Democrat currently being discussed as a strong candidate—would fail (although Ossoff has criticized Israel more aggressively than most leading Democrats).

Obviously, it is far too early to predict what will happen in 2028. But it is all too easy to imagine a scenario in which Ossoff, or another relatively moderate Democrat, wins the nomination but then limps into a ferocious general election campaign against a Vance or a Rubio, dripping political blood from wounds inflicted by members of his own party, and still fighting off attacks from a splinter candidate in the disastrous spoiler mold of Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.

The attacks on Ossoff are a classic example of moralizing. Moralizing is not simply an insistence on acting and speaking in accordance with moral values. It is the practice of taking for granted one’s own moral rectitude and superiority and condemning opponents as irredeemably tainted by allegedly immoral actions and attitudes. Moralizers operate according to what Max Weber called the “ethic of ultimate ends.” As he put it, “the believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels ‘responsible’ only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quenched.” Weber opposed this to “an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable result of one’s action.” Moralizers do not judge political candidates on the whole of their records, or according to calculations about how to produce the most desirable political result. They deal in absolutes.

Moralizers tend by their nature to occupy the political extremes, the territory of the absolute. And for many years, moralizing functioned in relatively similar ways in our two main political parties. Moralizers on the hard left and the hard right alike attacked more moderate figures for political impurity. The Bushes, father and son, John McCain and Mitt Romney all suffered from moralizing attacks from the right, just as the Clintons, husband and wife, Al Gore, John Kerry and Joe Biden incurred similar attacks from the left (Barack Obama proved more immune).

But then came Donald Trump. His hard right captured the Republican party, aimed its moralizing fury squarely at the Democrats, and crafted a populist message that resonated sufficiently with Americans who felt abandoned by political and economic elites to seize control of the government. Trump moralizes against members of his own party as well, purging those who have shown insufficient personal fealty to him. In doing so, he has sometimes inflicted significant political damage on his own side, as in the 2020 Georgia Senate run-off elections won by Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. But he has also kept MAGA in line as a political machine without precedent in American history.

Meanwhile, attempts on the left to appeal to alienated Americans and craft a populist message that might compete with Trump’s have been hobbled by the left’s own most self-destructive moralizing tendencies: above all, that of training its moral fury on the United States itself. As my cousin Michael Kazin pointed out this week in a beautiful essay for The Atlantic, for most of American history, prominent figures on the left professed a fervent love of country. Even when they criticized the United States, they mostly charged it with not living up to its own admirable ideals. But since the 1960’s, this immanent critique has given way, for much of the left, to a radical critique that treats the country’s founding ideals as little more than a hypocritical sham, a blood-stained veil covering a long and shameful history of genocide, enslavement, dispossession, discrimination and imperial aggression. As Kazin points out, besides its one-sidedness, this critique does not exactly provide a basis for electoral success. American voters who take pride in their country, who have sacrificed for it, and whose families have sacrificed for it, don’t like to be told that the country has done evil, and must come to a reckoning for its past sins.

Jon Ossoff, like Barack Obama before him, is a political figure who knows how to mobilize a progressive version of American patriotism. It’s not the least of his attractions as a potential presidential candidate. Of course, it is far too early to know whether those attractions will prove durable, and effective, in scorching heat of an actual presidential contest. But he should be given the chance. Democratic voters should judge him, and the other candidates, according to a Weberian ethic of responsibility, asking which choice is most likely to produce the best outcome. Crossing a candidate out in moralizing fashion because of certain votes or positions peremptorily judged beyond the pale is simply not a responsible way to operate in political life.