The American people are driven by fairness and decency

Everyone who has a heart and conscience needs to rail against indecency if we are to retain any semblance of our American ideals.

Photo by Ferdinand Stöhr on Unsplash

Remember these two watchwords as the fight against Republican-driven autocracy moves into high gear: fairness and decency.

Let me start with fairness. It is a major motivator for most voters; people react to government policy that is seen as unfair—giving advantages or benefits to one group while other deserving people suffer or do not get what they should. I was first struck by this phenomenon in 1977, when Social Security Act reform adjusted benefits for beneficiaries who reached age 62 between 1979 and 1983. The reason? The 1972 formula for cost-of-living adjustments had a flaw, giving more benefits to those born before 1917, and the 1977 reforms fixed the formula. But that fix had an adjustment period to smooth out the old and new formulas. And the people born from 1917 to 1921 got lower benefits than those born earlier.

Boom! That group became known as “notch babies,” and they were furious—even though they were getting more generous payments than before. Though the formula did not change, members of Congress felt the wrath, especially then-Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and have been cautious since about adjusting Social Security formulas.

Fairness is a watchword now because it was a core issue in 2024, exploited by the Trump campaign against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. First, it was transgender athletes. To many, it was puzzling that an issue involving a tiny share of athletes would be the subject of an overwhelming campaign message. To be sure, it played on a broader anti-trans phobia. And it got farcical, especially when right-wing swimmer Riley Gaines became famous over her non-stop campaign built on the fact that she tied for fifth with a transgender swimmer but got the sixth-place trophy on the podium.

But, fundamentally, the anti-trans athlete attack was about fairness, and it resonated with voters. Democrats who did not want to sacrifice anyone for temporary political advantage supported trans athletes as a matter of fairness and decency were easy to portray as being too woke to recognize the perceived unfairness.

Democrats and Harris were similarly hurt over student loan forgiveness. The idea that those who had worked hard to pay off their student loans or who worked during college to avoid taking out loans got no benefit, while those in the right place at the right time got taxpayers to forgive much of the loans they had incurred did not sit right with many voters. Like the notch-baby controversy, it rankled those who missed out because of the calendar or circumstance, and they greatly outnumbered those who got relief from crushing debt.

Fairness is a powerful value. And now the worm has turned. After the passage of the monstrous “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” Democrats have a powerful case to make. Is it fair to deprive children of food, the elderly of nursing home care, millions of health insurance, rural hospitals of needed revenue to make billionaires even richer? Is it fair to increase prices for school supplies, cars, clothing, and other needs, hitting poor and working-class Americans more, so that President Donald Trump can get his misguided tariffs? Is it fair to let banks that defrauded consumers of billions off the hook while eviscerating the agency that protects consumers from predation by banks and other financial institutions? From private million-dollar dinners with Trump to giving favorable treatment to the wealthy if they buy sufficient quantities of Trump cryptocurrency, it is clear that big money rules in this White House and among many Republicans in Congress. And that is palpably unfair to most Americans who don’t have millions or billions to throw around.

Fairness in this case meshes with decency. And the actions by Trump and his minions, including his cult following in Congress, are more indecent, sadistic, and unfair than in any other presidency during our lifetimes—what Lawrence O’Donnell called “the banality of cruelty.” Start with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) brushing off her constituents’ concerns about taking away health care by saying, “We are all going to die.” Or Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) responding to concerns about the Medicaid cuts by saying, “They’ll get over it.” Or Vice President JD Vance tweeting that the Medicaid cuts were “minutiae” compared with the huge increases in anti-immigrant funding to promote the goal of deporting a million undocumented people every year.

But those callous comments are nothing compared with the indecent actions. DOGE began its activities by blowing up the U.S. Agency for International Development, which one federal judge deemed likely violated the law. Cutting off food aid to countries with widespread famine and stopping vital drugs for AIDS, river blindness, and other deadly diseases resulted in over 300,000 unnecessary deaths worldwide—and could mean 14 million lives lost over five years if nothing changes. All was made worse by the brutal fact that AIDS medications and food were either sitting in warehouses or rotting there, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio blocking their distribution.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began his tenure as secretary of Health and Human Services by firing massive numbers of scientists and doctors, shredding the capacity of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to combat pandemics and other disease threats, stopped clinical trials for cancer in their tracks, and began his crusade to stop all vaccines—even as measles outbreaks emerged in many states. Then he cut off American support for the global fund to provide vaccines to children at risk, likely causing more unnecessary deaths. From flu to Covid variants, more Americans will be more vulnerable, and many will die unnecessarily. DOGE and Trump’s secretary of Veterans Affairs aim to cut veterans’ health benefits, including support for veterans at risk of suicide. The proposed cuts in education funding will devastate families with kids who have special needs. And, without explanation, the department just blocked $7 billion of appropriated funds for after-school programs, teacher training, and more services.

The drastic cuts at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administrations, laying off meteorologists and eroding the government’s ability to forecast hurricanes and violent storms, combined with the Defense Department cutting off its own weather forecasting as hurricane season approaches, have to be combined with Trump’ goal of eliminating FEMA and federal emergency assistance—showing, at best, indifference to the suffering of those likely to be devastated by coming natural disasters—even as Trump refused to send promised aid to North Carolina after its continuing travails from the last hurricane season and ridiculed California after its disastrous fires.

Much of the viciousness of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol has been captured on video. Though they promised to target violent criminals, the reality has been different. The first sign of unparalleled sadism came when people were rounded up and frog-marched to a plane and taken to a notorious hellhole prison in El Salvador, all illegally without required hearings, followed by cosplaying Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem prancing in front of the prison with her $50,000 watch. Now we have Trump expressing delight at the oppressive conditions in a pop-up tent prison with cages in the alligator- and snake-infested Everglades with record-high temperatures and no protection as hurricane season looms.

Every day brings more horrific stories. NBC’s Jacob Soboroff, the indefatigable immigration journalist, posted a picture of a slew of agents in full battle gear raiding a Home Depot where immigrants gather for day labor. A dozen agents in battle gear used explosives to blow off the door of a suburban house where a women and her two young children were, evidently searching for a man who had accidentally rear-ended one of their vans. He was not home.

Then there was the jarring video of Narciso Barranco, an undocumented gardener with no criminal record, mowing the lawn at an IHOP when he was jumped by masked agents, thrown to the ground, pepper-sprayed, punched, and manhandled while not resisting at all—despite the lies from DHS spokespeople that he had assaulted the agents. Barranco, it turns out, has three sons, all U.S. Marines; one visited him in what is a shocking, fetid detention center, 70 people in a small cell with one toilet and water once a day for each of the prisoners.

That story was followed by that of Isidro Perez, who arrived from Cuba legally 49 years ago in 1966, arrested at age 75, who died in detention. The monstrous Tom Homan callously brushed it off in an Ernst-like “people die” everywhere comment. At least nine of the people placed in detention centers have died under questionable circumstances, including a 49-year-old Canadian, Johnny Noviello, who was a legal resident.

It is a regular feature now. We are beset with visible videos of agents or others roaming around and grabbing people off the streets by what I and others call the American Gestapo. But the Gestapo and the notorious brown shirts in Nazi Germany did not wear masks.

Trump is doubling down on his deportation evil, with the opening provided by the Supreme Court in the birthright case, threatening to deport naturalized citizens, including New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, and has claimed deporting citizens might be “the next job.”

When norms of behavior decline, the new normal is the more debased behavior—what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down.” Actions that should induce horror and demands for justice are no longer viewed as obscene; outrage is replaced by indifference. And the failure of so much of our mainstream media to treat these abuses seriously, to instead normalize the abnormal, doesn’t help. This is the time to double down on attacking indecency.

I am not unusual in having relatives and others I know who voted for Trump but are fundamentally decent people, those you can rely on if you face trauma or trouble. Many will respond appropriately to the evil perpetrated daily and often gleefully by Trump and the people in his government. It is not just Democrats who need to rail against indecency and its impact on our society and the world. Everyone who has a heart and conscience needs to do so if we are to somehow retain any semblance of our decent and humane society as we navigate through the hellscape Trump created and expanded.

Norman Ornstein is a political scientist, co-host of the podcast “Words Matter,” and author of books, including “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”

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