The Moral Difference Between the Two Parties

This piece has been published as a newspaper op/ed in newspapers in Virginia in early July, 2026.

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The case of Graham Platner in Maine has put on display something important about the difference between the two political parties.

Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate from Maine, has been accused of sexual assault. He denies the charge. But, because the charge seems more plausible than the denial, the Democratic Party – Democratic leaders in Maine, and major national Democrats – have called on Platner to withdraw. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has reportedly made clear it will not support him if he remains the nominee.

Now compare that with how the Republican world has dealt with Donald Trump.

In his first run for President, the Access Hollywood tape showed Trump bragging that sexually assaulting women was something he did and got away with. When Republican leaders began moving away from Trump, their voters made it clear that they were sticking with him.

By the time Trump ran for President a second time, a jury had found him to have sexually assaulted an innocent woman in precisely the way he’d bragged about. Yet Trump again became the standard-bearer of the Republican Party.

In an earlier era, disgrace was disqualifying in the Republican world. But the moral culture of that Party has changed.

Trump is not the only proof of that. Consider the case of Ken Paxton, currently the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Texas.

Paxton has a long list of scandals — from a securities-fraud indictment, to impeachment over corruption allegations, to adultery apparently entangled with abuse of office. His opponent for the Senate nomination in the recent Republican primary was John Cornyn, a long-serving, conventionally conservative Republican incumbent in good standing with the party.

The voters had an alternative to serial disgrace. But they chose the multiply-disgraced Paxton—and by a landslide margin.

Having observed the way of the Democratic Party closely — how they dealt with John Edwards, how they dealt with the minimally scandal-tainted Al Franken — I can say with some confidence: no Democrat with a record of known scandals like Paxton’s could ever win a Democratic primary. In that Party, as with Platner now, disgrace is disqualifying.

So what does this difference between the parties signify?

There seems to be a different emotional orientation to what the voters seek in their representatives.

The Democrats want to be seen as moral — in a political battle to do the right thing. So character matters.

So if Platner would taint the Party, he must go.

(Many voters on the right think of Democrats as immoral—because Democrats’ positions on e.g. abortion run contrary to the conservatives’ view of morality. But those who favor the right to abortion, or gay rights, etc., think of their position as morally right. By contrast, nobody thinks that sexual assault or political corruption are right.)

The Republicans, by contrast, want to be seen as strong — in an Us-vs-Them battle for power. So what matters is loyalty and ferocity.

So if Paxton will help us defeat our foes, he’s our guy.

That is not a minor difference. It is the difference between a politics in which power is sought to achieve the Good, and a politics in which Power IS the Good.

(That “winning is the ONLY thing” kind of politics can still wear moral clothing. It can speak of law and order, family values, patriotism, religion, liberty, and saving America. But if we can see that those values do not restrain the Party’s own champion, we can infer that they are not really moral commitments. They are weapons.)

When it comes to “moral culture,” it is worth noting — for a country in which many political leaders invoke Christianity — that Jesus’s moral teachings run directly counter to understanding the world in an Us-vs.-Them perspective.

“Love thy neighbor” is already a great widening of the moral circle: not Me-vs-Other, but the Other held as one holds oneself.

But “Love your enemies” goes still further. No division between Our side, whose sins we don’t care about, and Their side, whom we are entitled to hate and smite. Even with “enemies,” it is love and not enmity that is supposed to prevail.

That is what seems to have been lost in the political culture that can embrace a Trump or a Paxton. It’s a culture in which the question is not, “Is this person aligned with the Good?” but, “Will this person smite the foe?”

All of this touches directly on what is at stake in the battle between Good and Evil over which of those two forces will rule the human world. Part of the heart of that fundamental battle is whether power will be the servant of the Good, or whether Power alone is what matters.

Can we achieve Justice in this world? Or will that terrible dictum from the ancient world still hold considerable sway: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

It is a close alignment between Power and Goodness that makes the human world better. Giving power to anyone whose character shows a scandalous lack of alignment with doing right — like Platner, Trump, and Paxton – takes things in the wrong direction.