Sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden will undoubtedly be exploited by the Republicans as a way to reduce progressive voter turnout. Interestingly, their own candidate’s far worse sins will not dampen right wing exploitation of this allegation against Biden, which will succeed in helping convince some progressives to stay home or to cast a “protest vote” on Election Day. Moral foundations theory suggests that these progressives will abandon the Democratic nominee based on their principled moral objection to the harm allegedly done to Tara Reid and the contribution excusing it would make to the oppression of women. Meanwhile, religious conservatives will continue to pray and vote for Donald Trump, despite dozens of much more credible accusations of sexual misconduct against him, because, while their moral intuitions also power their political behavior, these intuitions are more complex and focused on a bigger picture.
According to Moral Foundations Theory, there are six moral bases from which our beliefs and commitments spring. The reason why liberals are less forgiving of moral transgressions than conservatives is that while conservatives weigh all six foundations of moral intuition equally, judging beliefs and conduct using all six, liberals rely almost exclusively on just one or two of the six. For the progressives calling for Biden’s head, supporting Joe Biden would be excusing the oppression of women, which is a moral price too high to pay. For conservatives, on the other hand, Joe Biden’s unforgivable sins are far worse than sexual misconduct.
Donald Trump’s dishonesty and sexual misconduct, however, does not activate intuitive moral outrage among religious conservatives because they see him as a powerful weapon against the spread of far greater evils, the evils of liberalism, which violate all six of the moral foundations posited by moral foundations theory. While liberals obsess about personal moral transgressions, conservatives blame all liberals for liberalism, a plague that attacks people’s souls, destroys personal liberty by degrading personal responsibility, unfairly taking from and condemning the deserving while giving to and praising the undeserving. Liberalism rewards disloyalty to America and disrespect for proper authority and mocks sanctified moral icons, patriotic and religious. To religious conservatives (who have become the most politically potent faction of the GOP), Donald Trump has emerged as a powerful antagonist to the purveyors of all this advancing evil, who’s character flaws have been greatly exaggerated by liberals trying to distract voters from their insidious liberalism. The fact that he is personally flawed may even be understood by religious conservatives as a blessing in that it has tied the enemies of God into knots and prevented them from effectively blunting their divinely ordained crusade against the evils of liberalism.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt stresses the value of moral foundations theory as a vehicle for increased empathy across the political spectrum, as a means of increasing civility and tolerance and decreasing polarized partisanship and political violence. In the face of an actual plague and an election with existential stakes, I think the implications of moral foundations theory need to be much more well appreciated by liberals and progressives, not as a means of healing the right-left divide, but as a means of reducing the intra-left divide in time to unseat the most dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent President in American history.
Attacking Joe Biden’s candidacy on the basis of alleged sexual misconduct is not a principled stand. It is neither morally nor intellectually defensible, which is why it has to be reduced to shallow and vacuous claims of hypocrisy. COVID-19 is one catastrophe among many today that can only be stopped by science, expertise, and the public’s respect for both. Trump’s GOP and their millions of dis-informed followers are the most powerful science denying and expert disrespecting movement in American history. Neither Joe Biden’s nor Donald Trump’s personal character should enter into voters’ calculations in November. The 2020 election is about the character and conduct of American democracy. Political calculations that do not respect the scale our present moral and intellectual reckoning are “fuzzy math.” Politicians love to say that elections are about us not them, about America writ large. Cynical voters treat this sort of rhetoric like fluff or filler when the reality is that, despite overuse, it is sometimes the most substantive and honest rhetoric in America’s political conversation.
In 2020, cynical Americans (right and left) need to see the truth of what they are conditioned to discount and the folly of what they are conditioned to presume. There is a right side of history and right now in America it is quite clear which side that is.