It’s been a pretty good week for James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, and a pretty bad week for Graham Platner, the probable Democratic Senate nominee in Maine. Talarico got his ideal opponent in Ken Paxton, who won the Republican Senate primary despite being (if I may use a technical term) an epic sleazeball. Platner, meanwhile, got another round of scandal, this time from the revelation that he sexted multiple women during his first two years of marriage, indicating that he will be the epic sleazeball in the Maine Senate contest.
Assuming that Platner remains in the race, that a campaign-ending skeleton isn’t knocking around in his oysterman’s shed even now, it will be very interesting to see whether he or Talarico ultimately performs better in November. In a world where the Texas Democrat with the youth pastor aura squeezes past Paxton while Platner’s scandals help Susan Collins win yet one more term in office, we’ll be talking about the revival of character as a key factor in close elections, maybe a post-Trump turn away from partisan amoralism.
A world where Talarico disappoints and Platner cruises, on the other hand, will suggest the resilience of what Donald Trump revealed — not just a shrugging attitude toward bad behavior, but maybe also an active preference for certain kinds of sleaze over certain kinds of moralism.
Why would anyone prefer sleaze to morality? Because early-21st-century Americans are profoundly divided about what being moral means.
We have enough of a consensus to keep society together, which is why there aren’t a lot of people out there arguing, say, that it’s actually good that a politician cheated on his wife. But once you get beyond the theft-murder-adultery basics, we’re in a world of factional moralities and profound metaphysical divides, which separate Republicans from Democrats but also create deep fissures inside the two coalitions.
For instance, the evangelical Christian, the tech-right accelerationist and the New Age-y MAHA advocate might be operating out of profoundly different moral paradigms despite all being on “the right.” Likewise with the churchgoing African American Democrat, the Silicon Valley effective altruist and the Hasan Piker-watching socialist inside the left-of-center coalition.
In this environment, the upright moralist becomes an inherently untrustworthy figure — not because he might be secretly a hypocrite but because he might be entirely sincere, and in his sincerity end up imposing a stringent morality that’s alien to to your own. Whereas the sinner, the disreputable character, seems more reassuring because his vices double as a promise that he won’t be too fanatical.
I am speculating here, but I think there were Trump voters for whom his sins and selfishness played a version of this reassuring role — secular or nonevangelical voters who felt alienated from right-wing Christian moralism and found in Trump’s moral flexibility an indicator that he wouldn’t take his party’s social conservatism too far.
I feel a version of this impulse myself with Talarico and Platner. The Texas Democrat seems sincerely religious, even zealous, and having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism, I should be very happy to have a Democratic politician making biblical arguments for his positions, even if they aren’t necessarily positions that I share.
But then I encounter Talarico’s concrete religious persona, the specific blend of piety and Peak Woke moralism — embodied not just in his famous “God is nonbinary” line, but in a consistent style that invokes the Annunciation to justify abortion and accuses white people of spreading the “virus” of racism “wherever we go” and treats the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas like holy writ when it suits progressive ends. And my reaction is allergic, in a way that’s similar, I’m sure, to the reaction that a liberal Christian might have to a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism. It’s a vision of political morality that I don’t share, and the piety makes it more threatening, not more congenial.
This is part of why Talarico’s religious background isn’t an electoral asset with conservative religious voters. As the election analyst Sean Trende puts it, in a useful analogy, “imagine a liberal enclave with a heavy secular/reform Jewish population.” The Democratic nominee is morally compromised, and then Republicans “nominate a likable, ethical, sincere super conservative ultra-orthodox Rabbi.” Does a shared Jewish identity help him win over Jews who disagree with him profoundly on theology and politics? Probably not.
But it’s also why, if you’re a swing voter who isn’t on board with either side’s zeal, someone like Platner, with his checkered past and dubious tattoo and Reddit indecency, might actually seem preferable to someone like Talarico. Imagine that you want to punish Trump Republicans but you don’t want the oppressive ideological climate of 2020 and 2021 to suddenly return. There’s a case that you’re better off with the guy who nobody would mistake for a moral exemplar than with the guy who might think that God is on the side of whatever mania progressivism thinks up next.
This is not a happy state of cultural affairs. But it’s hard to get back to a place where public virtue is rewarded and egregious vice is punished without forms of public morality that are more unifying than what’s on offer at the moment. This is why the quest for a religious center matters: Piety and probity will be rewarded only if they’re linked to a moral vision that seems reasonably unifying, a sacred canopy beneath which a majority of Americans can feel secure.
