The ethics of politics can appear perplexing.
For instance, if you’re a special-ops soldier cashing in on your inside knowledge of the president’s war plans, you can expect to be prosecuted.
But if you’re a top-tier insider profiting from that same knowledge, you can count on the fact that neither Todd Blanche’s Justice Department nor the majority party in Congress will care.
Similarly, if you’re the influence-peddling son of a Democratic president leveraging your connections for cushy corporate positions, you’ll be appropriately vilified by right-wing media for corruption. But if you’re the influence-peddling son of a Republican president leveraging your connections for cushy corporate opportunities, the same right-wing media will help you promote your ventures.
It’s baffling—under traditional ethics, in which rules of proper conduct are supposed to apply universally. But under postliberal ethics, the apparent double standards melt away: The president’s friends, family, and allies are properly treated one way while everyone else is properly treated another.
People aren’t supposed to be treated equally under postliberalism. They’re supposed to be treated the way they “deserve.”
Or so it seems to me. To the average populist, all of this will sound like nonsense.
The whole reason postliberalism caught on in the first place, he or she would note, is because traditional ethics don’t actually apply universally in practice. Trump spoke candidly about that in 2016 when he declared America’s supposedly equitable liberal system of government “rigged.” Getting ahead in the proverbial swamp is all about who you know, he maintained, and he had the receipts to prove it. The elites monopolize power for themselves, exploit the average joe, and smugly pronounce the arrangement “fair” and “ethical.”
So there’s no such thing as “postliberal ethics,” our hypothetical populist would conclude. The president is practicing the same ethics as his predecessors. He and his toadies have merely dispensed with the lofty hypocrisy around such things, dropping the hollow pretenses of propriety.
The fact that Trump’s second term is already the most freakishly corrupt presidency in American history, in which tapped-in criminals are regularly set free while the commander in chief shakes down his own government for billions, is wholly coincidental, you see.
Which brings us, somewhat unexpectedly, to Hasan Piker.
