To Restore America, Start With Honor

The author of The Idea That Is America explains how the US lost its moral footing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
To restore America. Start with Honor by Anne Marie Slaughter.
Anne Marie Slaughter is the author of Renewal From Crisis
to Transformation in Our Lives, Work and Politics, Unfinished Business,
and The Idea That is America Keeping Faith with our
Values in a Dangerous World. Previously the Dean of the

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School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and
Director of Policy Planning at the U. S. State Department,
she is now CEO of the think and action tank
New America. Read by Mara Finnerty. At the bottom of
every test I took in college, I wrote, I pledge
my honor that I have not violated the honor code

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during this examination, and signed my name. I was used
to making such promises since the ninth grade. An honor
system had bound me and my classmates not to cheat
or lie or help any one else cheat or lie,
and also to report any others suspected violation to the school,
to be adjudicated by an honor council composed entirely of students.

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We weren't just expected to tell the truth and act
with integrity, but to stand up for what we believe
to be right, even when doing so was costly. Both
my high school and university saw it as their responsibility
to instill a set of values along with knowledge. We
relied on our institutions to shape us as students and alumni,

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we also shaped them these days. Pledging your honor sounds
very old fashioned, but the traditional definition of honor, living
consistently according to a set of moral or ethical principles,
is something we desperately need in America today. America's lost ideals.
I started writing The Idea that is America Hashet two

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thousand and seven in two thousand and five because I
did not recognize my own country. Justice Department officials were
writing memos justifying enhanced interrogation techniques, a euphemism for torture,
as long as the pain they caused was short of
organ failure or death. I was not so naive as
to think that American officials had never engaged in torture

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in violation of both national and international law. But now
the debate was about legally authorizing torture. The central question
of the book was how the United States, both our
government and we the people, could stand up for our
values more consistently in our relations with the rest of
the world. The values I identified were the same ones

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that many American leaders and thinkers have professed over the
course of our history. Liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility,
and faith. I came of age during the era of
the Vietnam War and Watergate, seeing pictures of women and
children slaughtered by U. S troops and watching televised congressional

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hearings into a cover up or ichestrated by the president. Still,
at least some of the officers in charge of the
Melai massacre were court martialed, and one was convicted and
sentenced to life in prison. President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace.
I also knew from a decade of teaching foreign law
students that the perception of American hypocrisy was widespread, but

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I could point to U. S efforts to save lives
and push back aggression in Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, and Kosovo.
The Nine eleven attacks unleashed a new level of ruthlessness,
a determination on the part of the George W. Bush
administration to do whatever was necessary to win the newly
proclaimed war on Terror. In nineteen ninety one, President George H. W.

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Bush sent troops to the Middle East to defend Kuwait
from an Iraqi invasion with approval from the UN Security
Council and a coalition of thirty five nations. In two
thousand three, the US invaded Iraq illegally without United Nations approval,
to stop the development of weapons of mass destruction that

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were never found. People around the world who had watched
the crumbling of the World Trade Center towers in horror
and solidarity now saw U S soldiers standing by while
Iraq descended into chaos. Then came Abu Grabe. As I
traveled in Europe in the summer of two thousand four,
pictures of Iraqi prisoners tortured and humiliated at the hands

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of their U S military guards confronted me at every
news stand. The one that I will never forget was
the searing caricature of the Statue of Liberty, a hooded
man in a ragged gown standing on a box, his
arms outstretched, and the electrical wires used to shock him
trailing from his fingers. Captain Ian Fishback was a U

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S Army officer serving in Iraq from two thousand three
to two thousand four. He was not at Abu Grabe,
but he witnessed and reported similar abuses at the Forward
Basis where he was deployed. He was so horrified by
what he saw that he wrote Senator John McCain a
letter complaining that he could not get clear, consistent answers

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from his superiors about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment
of detainees. He concluded with a clear credo, if we
abandon our ideals on the face of adversity and aggression,
then those ideals were never really in our possession. I
would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest
part of the idea that is America. In response, McCain

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sponsored the Detainee Treatment Act of two thousand and five,
prohibiting cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of detainees. It passed
the Senate ninety to nine and was approved by the
House on a voice vote. Congress thus made clear, on
an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, that it rejected the arguments of
the Torture Memos and that it was reinstating this standards

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of detaining treatment set forth in the Army Field Manual
and the Geneva Conventions. Both Senator McCain and Captain Fishback
explicitly invoked the moral dimension of America's ideals. In a
speech on the Senate floor, McCain insisted that u S
abuse of prisoners undermines our greatness as a nation, an

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exceptional nation that stands for a moral mission in the world.
Senator McCain and Captain Fishback have both since passed away,
and the United States has moved on. Just months into
his second term, President Donald Trump embraced a self described
dictator in the Oval Office and told him he would
need to build more prisons for home grown American criminals,

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dismantled foreign aid to the starving and the sick, and
bombed a sovereign nation without telling the UN Congress or
u S allies. His administration has detained and deported foreign
students who are legally here, and block the entry of
foreign citizens for their political speech. He has attacked judges
who rule against him, and allowed important members of his administration,

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from the Vice President to his Homeland Security adviser, to
argue that some judicial decisions are illegitimate and can be disregarded.
The President paints these choices as fulfilling political promises. The
necessary response, however, is not only political, but moral as well.
On May thirty, first, Senator Cory Booker stood and talked

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to his fellow senators for twenty five hours to protest
Trump's actions. The present moment, he argued, is a moral moment.
It's not left or right, it's right or wrong. Decay
and decline. The decay of our moral life has many
causes across the ideological spectrum. On the left, postmodernism holds

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that truth is constructed and relative. Postmodern thought has enabled
many oppressed groups to challenge received wisdom in valuable ways,
yet it also seems to deny the very possibility of
distinguishing between truth and falsehood. On the right, the law
and economics movement, which revolutionized antitrust and contract law in

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the last decades of the twentieth century, taught that it
was perfectly fine to breach a contract as long as
you were willing to pay the penalty. It substituted economic
costs and benefits for legal rights and duties, and scoffed
at the idea of something as old fashioned as keeping
one's word. Both of these movements gave rise to important

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and valuable insights for scholars, practitioners, and activists. Both also
made it much easier to reject traditional ideas of morality
outside the academy. Explanations are legion, disgraceful behavior by elected officials,
reality television, social media algorithms, declining religious u faith, geographic segregation,

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political correctness, the growing gap between the halves and have noughts.
The list goes on and on. We can imagine a
huge stack of factors piling on top of one another
and finally reaching a tipping point. Historian of authoritarianism Ruth
Bengiet writes of moral deregulation a rolling back of civic

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and ethical norms against defrauding, silencing, bullying, and physically harming others.
She now sees us heading toward full moral collapse. Amid
this landscape of moral erosion, it becomes crucial to remember
where moral responsibility ultimately resides. Our national morals depend on

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the strength and resilience of our institutions, and our institutions
are composed of and supported by individuals. The character of
our nation ultimately depends on the character of our people.
Principles to live by the final chapter of the idea
that is America is entitled stars to steer by. Quoting

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the great nineteenth century Civil War general and Missouri Senator
Karl Schures, a German born naturalized American who loved his
adopted country deeply. Ideals are like stars, he wrote, You
will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but
like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you
choose them as your guides, and following them you will

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reach your destiny. I was writing then about national values
embedded in the American Creed, the great civil religion that
our leaders have invoked over centuries to knit us together.
To day, I would bring the stars down to earth.
The next chapter would be called Principles to Live By.

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They are not catchy or illiterative. They wouldn't sell a
self help book, but they are what we need. Here
are three. Number one, win with integrity. The dominant American
value to day appears to be winning at any cost.
Many of us grew up with the maxim it's not

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whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.
That is one interpretation of the phrase winning isn't everything.
The other, attributed to various great football coaches, is winning
isn't everything, It's the only thing. That version has won out.
President Trump divides the world into winners and losers, losers

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are suckers or chumps. In his book Trump Nation Bloomberg Opinions,
Timothy L. O'Brien captures Trump saying I win, I win,
I always win. In the end, I always win. No
surprise that he is incapable of acknowledging defeat. Yet Trump
is reflecting our times as much as shaping them. The

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frantic competition for riches among billionaires includes the majority of
fortune five hundred CEOs. In twenty twenty one, CEOs at
the top three hundred and fifty companies in the US
earned three hundred and ninety nine times the pay of
an average worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In

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nineteen eighty nine that ratio was fifty nine to one,
and in nineteen sixty five it was twenty to one.
Boards justify these salaries on the grounds that they are
just keeping up with the competition, referencing consultant reports that
support an ever rising scale. What gets left out is
any sense of internal fairness, of the gap between the

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lowest and highest paid employees relative to what they do,
how long they have worked, and what they need to
live on. Much of academia, like big law, has moved
from traditional lockstep salaries based on seniority to a star
system where those who shine most brightly reap the biggest rewards.

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A handful of winners can impose substantial costs on the
morale of their less flashy but hard working colleagues and
undermine norms of institutional fairness. Leaders, including myself, justify the
system in terms of keeping up with the competition, ensuring
that we can hire those who bring in enough income
to keep the entire institute going. Yet if winning that

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way means gutting both the morale and the morals of
that institution, is it worth it? Even a few principled
leaders can begin to change the game. Imagine if the
managing partners of the law firms who decided to settle
with the federal government had decided to stand for the
rule of law despite the risk to revenue. Or if

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some of the CEOs of the Business Roundtable stood up
to challenge the administration's at tax on efforts to ensure
that their workforce reflects the population that their business serves
and to mitigate historic discrimination. Or if more members of
Congress follow the examples of Representative Thomas Massey and Senator
Tom Tillis, both of whom have chosen to tell the

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truth about the impact of the big, beautiful bill on
their constituents. Number two exercise self restraint. The value of
values starting with basic manners is that they teach us
essential habits of self restraint. We must wait to serve ourselves,
finish chewing before talking, and let others finish speaking even

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when we want to say something. Later, we move from
manners to morals, learning to use our words rather than
our fists, and to do our own work instead of
copying from our friends. We learn to restrain ourselves from
behavior that harms others. At our best, we learn to
substitute behavior that actively helps others. It's these self imposed

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restraints that enable us to live harmoniously in a family,
a school, classroom, and a community. They also prepare us
for the rule of law. First year law students quickly
learn that law and justice are not the same. Law
is a set of rules that a polity has set
down for itself. The legitimacy of those rules depends on

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not varying too far from what a society understands to
be just. But even when we dislike laws like the
requirement to pay taxes, most of us abide by them,
we restrain ourselves. We do so to ensure a collective
freedom as a nation. Every year, at commencement, Harvard University's

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president greets the new law school graduates by telling them,
you are ready to aid in the shaping and application
of those wise restraints that make men free. Individual habits
of self restraint translate into institutional norms that require those
same individuals to put others first, to check their primal

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impulses for the sake of larger goals. It's a recursive process,
a fancy life for continually learning from and reinforcing one
another in ways of being that benefit us. All number
three way means and ends very carefully. The idea that
winning is everything is another way of saying that the

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end victory justifies the use of whatever means are necessary
to win, including cheating. In many cases, of course, ends
do justify the means. All of ethics and a great
deal of moral philosophy attempt to balance utilitarianism seeking the
greatest good for the greatest number, with a Kantean command

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to follow a universal moral law, regardless of the consequences.
As individuals. However, our principles are supposed to dictate the
means we are prepared to use to accomplish our goals. Similarly,
we are supposed to design institutions that allow for careful
deliberation about means and ends. We have had a recent

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reminder of this complex balancing from Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson
of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, who is asked
to decide whether the administration was doing everything necessary to
facilitate the return of the deported US resident Kilmar Abrego
Garcia from a prison in El Salvador, in line with
a unanimous directive from the Supreme Court. Wilkinson warned the

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administration that it has the power to deport individuals who
are in the United States illegally, but only in accordance
with the law. He also made clear that the executive
branch has substantial powers in foreign affairs, but added that
with powers come restraints. Moreover, he continued, it is the
job of the judiciary to articulate those restraints. The executive

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is inherently focused upon ends, the judiciary much more so
upon means. In other words, it is the judges who
are responsible for ensuring that the means are awful, no
matter how compelling. The ends might be, we can extrapolate
from the Framer's design of our government to our own behavior.

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We have an executive function in our brains which directs action,
but we also have a reflective or deliberative function. We
certainly face situations in which it is necessary to use
immoral ends for a moral purpose, as philosophers from Machiavelli
to Michael Wahlzer have argued. But when those cases arise,

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we should proceed with care, deliberation, and public justification. Retaking
the oath. On May First Law Day, the group Lawyers
for Good Government called on lawyers across the country to
gather and retake their bar oaths, the oath that all
lawyers must swear on being admitted to the bar of
their particular state. On a sparkling spring day, some five

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hundred lawyers gathered in front of the Supreme Court in Washington,
d C. Some of us where regulation government lawyer attire,
a gray suit, white shirt and sober tie. Others were
a little jaunier with a bow tie. All of us
carried signs with revolutionary slogans like defend the Constitution or

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protect the rule of law. The half dozen or so
members of Congress and attendance recited the borrows from their states,
from Oregon to Texas to Florida. Predictably, all of them
include language swearing to uphold the state and national constitutions
and laws. More surprisingly, almost all included more personal commitments

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to act fairly and with civility and integrity as both
the representative of a client and an officer of the court.
The Delaware oath recited by Senator Chris Coons, dates to
seventeen twenty one. After swearing to support the US and
Delaware constitutions, the oath taker continues, I will behave myself

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in the office of an attorney within the court, according
to the best of my learning and ability, and with
all good fidelity, as well to the Court as to
the client, that I will use no falsehood nor delay
any person's cause through lucre or malice. Many professions have
similar oaths or codes of conduct, versions of the oath

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that the President takes at his inauguration to preserve, protect,
and defend the Constitution. Both takers swear to conduct themselves
honorably as members of a profession and thereby uphold the
honor of the profession itself. When I and my fellow
students pledged our personal honor to uphold the values of
our school. We were living up to standards set for us,

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while at the same time strengthening and shaping those standards
over time. To recover and restore the idea that is America,
we must start here with the idea of honor, with
our own behavior, and with the behavior we expect of
the peaceeople who teach, represent, counsel, heal, defend, judge, serve,

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and govern us. If we the people cannot restrain ourselves
in accordance with a set of principles and values in
our personal lives, then we cannot come together in the
service of national ideals. That is the path of strength, integrity,
and independence.