Dec 28, 2020 5 min read

Although I don’t know who said it, an aphorism I find to be true is: “How you win shows some of your character; how you lose, shows all of it.” It is easy to be magnanimous in victory; it is much harder to be gracious in defeat.

Unfortunately, President Trump has demonstrated the truth to this principle. At this point, he has lost the popular vote, the Electoral College, and more than 55 lawsuits trying to overturn the election. While it is crystal clear to all the people who ran the elections around the country, Democrat and Republican alike, there was no significant voter fraud, Trump still claims the election was “stolen” and refuses to concede. This is not new for him; he has spent his life avoiding responsibility and blaming others for his failures. But we should expect better from the president. The president should model virtuous behavior.

Virtue is having high moral standards, and making a habit of living by them. Virtue is the foundation of good character, and used to be important, especially to conservatives. Beginning in the 1960s they gained a lot of support with traditional voters as they decried the moral depravity of modern society as we have moved away from traditionally (often biblically) defined morality. They complain of “moral relativism,” a criticism that is usually aimed at liberals who have become more tolerant of historically prohibited behavior, such as homosexuality, drug use, or sex outside of marriage. President Clinton’s sex scandal highlighted these different views. Most liberals thought Clinton’s behavior was not appropriate, but was a private matter between him and Mrs. Clinton. Conservatives argued his behavior made him unfit to be president and impeached him.

The Founders valued virtue. When “the people” are in charge, they believed the people must be virtuous for society to thrive. One of their great concerns was if people would live up to the challenge, which is one reason most states initially restricted the vote to people they considered more likely to be virtuous – property-holding, white men.

Republican forms of government rely on their citizens being virtuous, whereas authoritarian regimes rely on force and fear to make their citizens behave. Democracies are founded on the rule of law; it is how we hold ourselves accountable. Authoritarian governments act on the whims of the leader, as Trump has tried to do when he pressured election officials to void election results or punish his enemies by pursuing baseless investigations. Fortunately, there have been people in government who resisted Trump’s pressure.

Notably, some Republicans, such as the governors of Arizona and Georgia, resisted Trump’s efforts to get them to overturn the election results in their state, as did state officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well as many judges. Senator Pat Toomey has criticized Trump’s extralegal efforts to overturn the election. While he is retiring so Trump cannot hurt him politically, it is always admirable when a politician is willing to stand up to his party on principle. But these examples are notable because they are so rare.

Virtuous people are willing to sacrifice for the greater good. Trump does not understand sacrifice because he sees everything as a zero-sum competition in which if you don’t get more than the other guy, they win. He embodies the saying, “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” But if everyone thinks like that, we are back in a competitive Hobbesian state of nature where life for all but those at the very top is “nasty, brutish and short.”

Fortunately, most Americans are not like that. Most people who participate in group functions want to give more than they receive from the group, and when everyone does that, the group becomes stronger. For example, the Boy Scouts (among others) make it a practice to leave a campsite cleaner than they found it. Most people recognize that we have an obligation to try to make the world better for our children, and are willing to sacrifice in order to do that. People who do that are admirable, not “suckers.”

Living by your principles is a way to be accountable; you’ve declared your standards (even if only to yourself) and then you try to uphold those standards. The character of leaders matters because their behavior influences their followers. When COVID-19 first became an issue, Trump feared the immediate impact on his political fortunes, so he downplayed the threat. His refusal to wear a mask encouraged his followers to resist efforts to contain the pandemic, making the U.S. response one of the worst in the world. Leaders will always be presented with unforeseen problems; a virtuous leader can be trusted to attempt a resolution that will lead to the best outcome, whereas a leader without principle will do what’s best for him, regardless of the consequences for everyone else.

In a community, there are always some people who will benefit more from a communal decision. A virtuous person will have no problem being the person who does not benefit, because he or she will want what is best for all. In these days of economic and public health crises we need to restore virtue to the public square and look beyond our own short-term wants and dedicate ourselves to making the world a better place. When the world becomes better, we all benefit. We need to move away from the transactional politics of the Trump era and aspire to be virtuous, willing to sacrifice for the greater good.

Kent James is an East Washington resident and has degrees in history and policy management from Carnegie Mellon University. He is an adjunct professor of history at Washington & Jefferson College.