You Can't Shame the Shameless

This week brought news of physical proof that GOP Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker paid for an abortion. Like others of his political ilk, Walker supports strict bans on the practice and punishment for those who engage in it.

The news was intriguing, but not surprising. I am sure there are plenty of other conservative politicians out there who have done the same. What would surprise me is this revelation causing significant damage to Walker’s election chances.

People expecting the charge of hypocrisy to land are seriously naive. There’s no way they could have missed years of Christian evangelicals giving their fervent support to Donald Trump, a man whose personal behavior is pretty much the antithesis of what it means to live the Christian life. To turn back the clock, Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde made hay about Bill Clinton’s infidelities, and when their own were revealed it was like nothing happened. Repubicans across the country have been calling teachers child molestors when their own longtime House Speaker, Dennis Hastert, was a molestor himself, something which there has been next to zero acknowledgment of in the Republican Party.

I actually think conservatives aren’t even being hypocritical in these instances, for whatever their professed values, there’s a deeper maxim they never fail to follow: “Above anything else, we have to win and they have to lose.” That maxim is based on a worldview that defines conservatives as “real Americans” and the left as the enemies of “real America,” ready to tear it all down. To stop this threat, anything is justified. Democrats taking power is a fate worse than death, so ANYONE who would prevent it must be supported. Hasn’t the love of Trump proven that already? They love him so much because of his shamelessness, not in spite of it.

The last seven years of American life have proven that you can’t shame the shameless. Trump has known this for decades. Here’s a man who in the early 90s went through an ugly public divorce and went bankrupt, but ten years later was completely able to rehabilitate his image as a business genius. He figured out that the media is too weak to actually tear anyone down by themselves. They report on all kinds of shameful things, then expect the malefactors to confess in public and apologize. Instead of doing that, Trump just doubles down and the media turns it all into a “he said-she said” hash. Other Republicans have followed along. For example, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has had a cloud of scandal hanging over him for years but he ignores it like the process server he recently dodged.

They know they can do this because their supporters don’t care. All they care about is maintaining power so conservatives are in charge and their enemies are kept subservient. Conservatives discovered their shamelessness would allow them to break unwritten rules with impunity, always to their advantage. They got control of SCOTUS, for example, by simply refusing to hear any of Obama’s nominees, and then by ramming through Amy Coney Barrett right before the 2020 election. A lot of people called them “hypocrites.” Did that make even the slightest bit of difference? Nope. Their shamelessness was the key to their success.

A lot of liberals don’t seem to get this because they can be so childish in their insistence that politics is a morality play instead of the pursuit of power. They see McConnell manipulate the judicial nomination process and they cry out “how is he allowed to do this?” appealing to imaginary referees who they think will make everyone play by the rules. Trying to shame the shameless is a fool’s errand. Liberals need to stop wasting their time trying to do that and see that gaining power and wielding it to accomplish their goals is the sum total of their mission.