Moral equivalence

There was a time when Republicans -- led by William F. Buckley, Jr. -- hated moral equivalence. For Buckley, it was a lifelong crusade.

"He believed that when elite institutions ceased upholding certain time-honored truths, failed to distinguish in the official voice between truth and faslehood, and no longer proclaimed one economic or political system or religion superior to others, the nation's moral fiber would decay...." [Source: A Man and his Presidents]

He used this analogy to illustrate his point. "A man who pushes an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus should not be likened to a man who pushes an old lady into the way of an oncoming bus on the grounds that both men are pushing old ladies around." [Source: A Man and his Presidents]

That changed when Donald Trump appeared on the scene, and Republicans couldn't deal with the cognitive dissonance of supporting both religious morals and a thrice-married loudmouth who bragged about how he could sexually assault women and get away with it.
At that point, Republicans could be seen performing amazing mental gymnastics, such as comparing Trump's infidelity and divorces to Ronald Reagan's experience in getting divorced. [Source]

Moral equivalence, by necessity, is a surface-level judgment -- suitable for memes and innuendo -- but not for a real understanding of matters.

And as Jesus admonished the crowd in John 7:24, we should "Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly." [John 7:24, NIV]

Yet moral equivalence seems to be de rigeur for the GOP these days.

Torch-wielding and hate-spewing neo-Nazis met at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. In "the president's remarks afterwards, when he described the crowd as including some "very fine people," [he] implied a moral equivalence between white supremacists and anti-racist protesters." [Source]

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is no different.

Following multiple conspiracy charges against the former president related to the 2020 presidential election, Rubio responded with fake bitterness. "Apparently it is now a crime to make statements challenging election results if a prosecutor decides those statements aren’t true," he wrote. [Source]

Then came the moral equivalence. "So when should we expect indictments of the democrat (sic) politicians who falsely claimed Russia hacked the 2016 election?" As MSNBC columnist Steven Benen characterized the comparison,

"The truly amazing part of his missive was the senator trying to link together Trump’s election scandal and those who have the audacity to believe the Russia scandal. As Rubio characterized it, there’s an equivalence between the former president trying to overturn an election and seize illegitimate power, and those who 'falsely' accused the Kremlin of targeting the U.S. elections in 2016 to benefit the Republican ticket." [Source]

What's crazy about this is the fact that Rubio was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that concluded that "The Russian govemment directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure' at the state and local level." [Source, page 3]

This is the sad state of American discourse. Those who once championed convictions about what is right have sold their souls, with no regard for what the one-time conscience of conservatism would have had to say.

His legacy puplication, the National Review, recognizes and laments this.

The possibility for an intellectual conservatism still exists, even if the social and political conditions that would enable such conservatism to reach a popular audience do not. This intellectual conservatism might adopt Buckley’s élan, his belief in the importance of ideas, his verbal dexterity, quick-wittedness, and talent for ridicule, as well as his loathing of moral equivalence, “policy misfits,” and “welfare populists” whose politics are cover for the further centralization of power.[Source]