Even by the degraded standards of 2022, it has been shocking to watch Republican politicians and conservative media personalities respond to the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi — Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband — with lies, conspiracy mongering and gleeful disregard for the victim.
Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, made light of the assault — which left the 82-year-old Pelosi hospitalized with serious injuries — while campaigning for Yesli Vega, the Republican running to unseat Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic representative in Virginia’s 7th District.
“Speaker Pelosi’s husband, they had a break-in last night in their house, and he was assaulted. There’s no room for violence anywhere,” Youngkin said, in what appeared to be a straightforward condemnation of the attack until he added, to the cheers of the crowd, that “we’re going to send her back to be with him in California.”
“That’s what we’re going to go do,” he continued. “That’s what we’re going to go do.”
Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, used the attack on Pelosi — who underwent surgery to repair a skull fracture after he was struck on the head with a hammer by his assailant — as fodder for a joke.
“Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection.” According to Kate Sullivan, a CNN reporter, the joke landed: “The crowd burst into laughter and the interviewer was laughing so hard he covered his face with his notes.”
The American political landscape has never been a particularly virtuous place, but nonetheless an important part of our politics has been the pretense that our leaders care about appearances, even as they fight to gain and hold power by any means necessary. Abraham Lincoln was both a bare-knuckled partisan brawler and a sagacious, broad-spirited political leader. So were many of our most revered and respected presidents, from Thomas Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt and beyond.
From the beginning, Americans saw virtue — whether real or feigned, sincere or performed — as a key ingredient in the practice of republican self-government. Yes, the American system was built on the insight that institutions shape behavior and structure incentives. And yes, the main players at the Philadelphia convention tried to build a government that would harness self-interest and vice rather than rely on the better angels of our nature. But they still devoted a good deal of thought and attention to the role of virtue in their new order.
James Madison hoped that “the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom” to lead their republic. And if not? If there was “no virtue among us” then Americans were in a “wretched situation.” The reason, he explained, was that there were “no theoretical checks” that could render the nation secure in the absence of virtue: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”………