Amorality Tales (with Jennifer Reitman)
Politicians who lack a moral compass are confounding.
How can they do that? Don’t they realize how much harm this will cause? Do they really not care? How do they sleep at night?
Many times in the last decade we moral humans have asked those questions of transactional, cold-blooded politicians like Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Joe Manchin, and especially Mitch McConnell. Time and again we are astonished when Collins votes to confirm a lying drunk with a yen for sexual assault to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court, when Romney votes against protecting voting rights, when Manchin pulls reasons out of his ass to support the filibuster, when McConnell sounds off on almost anything. This is because we who have functioning moral compasses find such behavior utterly confounding.
“This is a problem with Democrats at large, frankly,” explains Jennifer Reitman, the founder and publisher of DAME Magazine and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “I think it’s a problem with not just elected Democrats. I think it’s a problem with us, with people like me. Genuinely good-intentioned people have a failure of imagination, oftentimes.”
When Donald John Trump was elected, Reitman recalls, her parents, like many optimistic humans, hoped that the office would change him, that he would mature into the position. Needless to say, this did not come to pass, because Trump isn’t wired like her parents, or her, or me, or you. The Orange Menace, as she calls him, is an entirely different breed of cat—and completely feral.
“Well-intentioned people just have this failure of imagination at how grotesque, how nefarious, how dangerous” people like Trump are, Reitman says. Just as a deep-sea fish can’t fathom a world without water, so we who have souls have difficulty grasping the fact that not everyone does. “It’s a lot easier to understand immorality than it is amorality. And I think the problem is, we’re dealing with an issue of amorality.”
How can they do that? Don’t they realize how much harm this will cause? Do they really not care? How do they sleep at night?
The truth is, they don’t care, they sleep just fine, and if they realize it, it doesn’t bother them one iota. That’s why they are where they are! Remember a few years ago, when a very small group of peaceful protestors accosted Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao on their way from the restaurant to the car? He looked confused that this was happening—like he couldn’t wrap his brain around the fact that many millions of Americans hate his guts with the nuclear intensity of a thousand suns.
How about Joe Manchin, eluding the media and the protestors by slipping away in his ostentatious Maserati? That venal tick-turd may have been irritated that his cushy routine was disrupted, but he didn’t give a flying fuck about why people were furious with him. I’m sure when he laid his ugly head on his silken pillow that night, in the cabin of his fancy yacht, he drifted off to sleep just fine.
Susan Collins is, I’m sure, irked at all the attention she’s getting this week, in the wake of the Alito opinion overturning Roe. But she doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what Alito did and its ramifications. If she did, she’d never have voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court to begin with.
Part of the reason politicians like Collins are so infuriating is because we don’t understand how they do what they do and still live with themselves. We wouldn’t behave that way, so we can’t conceive of any reason why they, who have so much power to do good, would act so cold-bloodedly. We assume they are tormented, because we would be—but they aren’t.
“They just are utterly devoid of morals,” Reitman says. “These are people who just. Don’t. Care.”
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S3 E7: Amorality Tales (with Jennifer Reitman of DAME Magazine)
Greg Olear talks to his friend Jennifer Reitman, the founder and publisher of DAME Magazine, about the notion of fight, why amoral people befuddle the good guys, the status of the January 6 investigation, Democratic messaging, the pitiful state of legacy media, and the reasons for hope. Plus: 007 as you’ve never seen him before.
Follow Jennifer Reitman:
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https://www.damemagazine.com/
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Photo credit: Shirley Li/Medill. Susan Collins in 2010.
As my mom likes to say, "I'm not geared for this!" Usually, she's talking about some computer thing, or because the 3G network is coming down to make room for more 5G, her new smartphone, which is NOT a Jitterbug, but an Android that I've set up to be as problem-free as possible and still there's, almost daily, "I'm not geared for this!"
Well, I'm not geared for THIS! I have tried so many times to understand the mindset of politicians that are supposed to be representing ACTUAL people that will mindlessly, it seems, vote against their own constituents. I understand morality, and immorality, but I have a REALLY hard time with amorality. Amorality should be saved for descriptions of serial killers and other sociopaths. This almost leads me to state that Republicans especially, and some select Democrats are not only politicians, but sociopaths. And yet, they keep getting elected over and over and over, which sort of implies that some voters are sociopaths too!
Someone else here said that 75% of the voting public pay no attention at all, and they're right. If I were in charge, gods forbid, people eligible to vote would be REQUIRED to do so or be fined. Getting REALLY tired of being ruled by the sociopathic minority!
Good read. I'm old enough to remember Trump saying if he ran for president he would make money. He sure did/does.