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Moral deregulation and moral collapse can inspire a new democratic politics that leads with values of justice, solidarity, equity, and accountability
Authoritarianism is a political system built on a logic of betrayals: betrayals of others and betrayals of self. It cultivates, and rewards, a state I call moral deregulation: a rolling back of civic and ethical norms against defrauding, silencing, bullying, and physically harming others. Democratic societies inculcate such norms in schools, religious spaces, workplaces, and other social institutions and networks. Authoritarian takeovers mean such norms are discredited and dismantled.
When moral deregulation advances because violence and corruption have been institutionalized, including in the behavior of national leaders, then a society can experience moral collapse. We hear about how authoritarians “hollow out” institutions by removing anyone not loyal to the leader and the party, but they also hollow out people to the point where they will participate in acts of violence, corruption and sabotage against their compatriots.
We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.
Rather than denounce the clear and present dangers to our country, many business, religious, media, and other elites continue to support Trump and Musk. Some do this by staying silent, while others follow hollowed-out GOP politicians and Christian nationalist charlatans in claiming that the smash-and-plunder operation masquerading as a government is “saving the nation.”
Trump as Architect of Moral Deregulation and Moral Collapse
Trump has worked hard for a decade now to encourage moral collapse among Americans. In 2016, two months after he boasted, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump raised the issue of changing collective behavior to favor violence and cruelty. "Part of the problem...is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore," he said when security guards treated protesters at a campaign rally too politely for his tastes.
The strongman’s goal is always to make his collaborators descend to his level, and Trump realized that “giving permission” to Republicans to be their worse selves was key to his domestication of the party. He made Republican elites complicit in his criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and then shocked them into submission on Jan. 6 by targeting them for physical harm.
The Jan. 6 insurrection pushed the party into a full-blown state of moral collapse: Republicans now justified violence as a way of doing politics and submitted to the leader’s needs. Politicians who had called their families to say goodbye on Jan. 6, thinking they might die, now accepted a pact of silence about their traumatic experiences in order to maintain their standing in the party.
The drama of Senator Josh Hawley pumping his fist to encourage the insurrectionists and then running for his life from those same people has a devastating third act: his silence about that near-escape from harm when he re-emerged as a MAGA loyalist. In 2022, the GOP officially declared the Jan. 6 attack to be "legitimate political discourse,” meaning the party accepted the violence that was used against it.
The capitulations continued throughout the re-election campaign. At an August 2023 GOP presidential debate which Trump did not bother to attend, all but two candidates debased themselves by pledging with raised hands that they would support Trump even if he became a "convicted criminal.” “The Republicans are very high class. You’ve got to get a little bit lower class,” Trump had commented a month earlier. On that and many other occasions, the GOP obliged him.
Trump’s re-election campaign also prepared his grassroots supporters to accept a regime that intends to ruin their lives and profit from it. In Jan. 2024, during an Iowa caucus held in subzero temperatures, Trump urged his followers to turn out for him even if they were ill: “even if you vote and then pass away, it’s worth it.” The Hill and some other media outlets assumed he was joking. He likely was not.
This trajectory of moral collapse explains how GOP elites such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, both of whom called out Trump’s strongman ways in 2016, now collude with his destruction of democracy and alliances with autocrats.
Co-President Musk set the tone for these officials by taking moral collapse global, encouraging members of the extreme-right Alternative for Germany party to stop feeling guilty for the genocidal regime of Nazism. Vance echoed him in telling European leaders they should stop shunning that party, which includes neo-Nazi sympathizers. “There is no room for firewalls,” Vance said. Dismantling firewalls against the circulation of hate speech is a good example of moral deregulation.
Of course, the GOP has been working on a domestic version of this for years now, through state legislation that bans teaching the history of institutionalized racism so that Americans don’t have to feel “emotional distress”—i.e. the voice of conscience.
As for Rubio, he provided the face of moral collapse during the Feb. 28 Oval Office Trump and Vance ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Rubio may have been feeling discomfort, but more likely he was sulking and feeling left out: strongmen often privatize foreign policy, as Trump has done through his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, reducing the foreign minister’s prestige and power.
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In fact, after his moody performance ended, Rubio sprang into action to debase himself further, praising Trump’s open prioritizing of Putin’s aims in Ukraine as patriotic: “Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before,” was his take.
Authoritarians try to normalize extreme actions through states of emergency and exception. Yet, as a Chilean victim of state torture during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship told me, “states of exception can be normalized in people too.” Moral collapse begins as an individual process and, when the conditions are right, generates new collective norms of behavior that can support large-scale repression.
Consorting with kleptocrats, dehumanizing immigrants, and banning books that speak of injustice so people don’t feel empathy for the vulnerable are among the ways Trump and his morally collapsed GOP seek to get ordinary Americans to forget their consciences so they will accept whatever abuses the government has planned.
Strike Back by Prioritizing Democratic Values and Moral Authority
This gives Democrats a big opportunity. Pro-democracy movements that claim the mantle of moral authority and show care and solidarity in the face of plunder and violence can have an impact. In fact, even a relatively tiny percentage of the population –often just 3.5%, according to the political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s study of successful civil resistance movements—can make a difference if they mobilize on behalf of democratic values in situations of tyranny.
Creating a big-tent opposition movement that includes progressive faith traditions and organized labor —two sectors of civil society that privilege values-guided action— would be key. Individuals can refuse to betray others, deciding not to stay silent and hide away as rights vanish and abuses are perpetrated. As some people disappear, being visible on behalf of others becomes even more important.
So does having conversations with family and community members who still support Trump, and explicitly raising with them questions of dignity and decency and the betrayal of national and self-interests by this administration. As the government paralysis deepens and affects everyday life, these conversations will likely become easier.
Each time we show solidarity with others, or support those who are protecting the rule of law, helping the targeted, or exposing the lies and the corruption, we are standing up for democratic values of justice, accountability, equality, and more. In doing so, we model the behaviors the authoritarian state wants us to abandon. Joining with others, we transform our individual righteous indignation into a potent moral force for good.
Republicans may feel empowered right now, but there will be a reckoning as Americans come to understand the scale of Republican sabotage of the country. Lately I have been returning to a 2016 Atlantic essay in which I warned that the GOP was setting itself on a path of self-destruction in supporting Trump. As I wrote, Italian conservatives who supported Benito Mussolini through all the early violence and corruption “never recovered from their acquiescence to Il Duce. Of the many lessons the GOP can take from its experience with Trump so far, this might be the most valuable.”
