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The first Republican primary debate, held in Milwaukee on Wednesday, was an unusual one: it featured no one who currently stands a chance of being the party’s candidate in next year’s presidential elections. The only man who does, Donald Trump, decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
“I am leading the runner up, whoever that may now be, by more than 50 Points,” the four-times indicted former president wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Friday. “People know my Record, one of the BEST EVER, so why would I Debate?”
Trump confirmed on Sunday he would “NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!”. Instead, he decided to sit down for an interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News anchor who said in private text messages in 2021 that Trump was a “demonic force”, but who has since backtracked, telling a conservative radio host this year: “I love Trump.”
A meeting of cowards, no doubt. And yet one can see that Trump has a point in asking why he should bother with the debate. Despite mounting legal problems, the former president continues to be streets ahead of the competition: he is at 55.4 per cent in RealClearPolitics’ polling average, while Ron DeSantis is trailing at 14.3 and none of the other Republican candidates have broken out of the single digits.
Furthermore, Trump knows he would have to square up to opponents such as Chris Christie, who has spent his campaign bragging that he would beat Trump in a real fight and making it his explicit mission to bring him down. Showing up would only really have one clear benefit for the former president, and it’s not the kind that he tends to be terribly interested in. It would show that he is in possession of an important moral virtue: courage.
Courage, though, seems to have fallen out of fashion. And not just for Trump or Carlson, or those in the Republican party who repeatedly refuse to call out the former president for any wrongdoing. A similar lack of backbone was on display when UK prime minister Rishi Sunak decided not to show up to the vote on whether former prime minister Boris Johnson had deliberately misled parliament over “partygate” (Sunak apparently had “longstanding engagements” that day).
And the problem is much broader than politics. Society itself seems to be suffering from a crisis of courage. This is clear when corporations succumb to social pressures by firing employees to protect their brands, or when they use the Pride flag in their social media avatars but not in the Middle East. Virtue signalling might be endemic, but courage, like honour, is not deemed a virtue worth signalling. Indeed all the incentives are stacked on the opposite side: there is little to lose from going along with what everyone is saying, even if you don’t believe it yourself, and much to gain from proving that you are on the “right” side.
Moral or intellectual courage — sticking your head above the parapet and saying what you really think — can, conversely, get you into a huge amount of trouble, and, usually, you are not rewarded for it.
The mere mention of courage has been in decline for a long time. A 2012 paper in the Journal of Positive Psychology that tracked how frequently words related to moral excellence appeared in American books — both fiction and non-fiction — over the 20th century, found that the use of the words courage, bravery and fortitude (which were grouped together) had fallen by two-thirds over the period.
During the years that the US was involved in the second world war, the average frequency of these words was almost 19 per cent higher than the four years before and after its war involvement. Selin Kesebir, associate professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School and co-author of the paper, tells me that one reason why we in the west now speak less of courage is that, at present, we live in relatively safe times. Our lack of need for physical courage, in other words, precludes a focus on moral courage in the public conversation.
“If there is a real threat, then courage becomes necessary,” Kesebir says. “But in environments where there aren’t any very real threats, we don’t need to invoke it as a virtue.”
Moral courage does not equate to recklessness, and neither does it mean being a provocateur for the sake of it. According to Aristotle, courage should be thought of as a kind of mediator between cowardice and recklessness.
But if we want our societies to thrive, we must be courageous enough to think for ourselves and stand up for what we believe in. The late writer Maya Angelou was right when she said: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practise any other virtue consistently.”
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