“Moral authority.” Hmm. Who shoe-horned that notion into the national conversation? According to former Vice President Joe Biden, moral authority is the property that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam forfeited when a photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook page came…
Moral authority.” Hmm. Who shoe-horned that notion into the national conversation?
According to former Vice President Joe Biden, moral authority is the property that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam forfeited when a photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook page came to light and he couldn’t clearly say whether or not it depicted him in blackface or Klan costume — though, he conceded, he once blackened his face for a Michael Jackson costume. Calls for his resignation resounded. Biden chipped in with gusto.
How the governor, on Biden’s showing, forfeited his “moral authority” isn’t 100 percent clear. Maybe his willingness 35 years ago to kid or mock African-Americans showed his essential worthlessness.
Or maybe — a trifle likelier — the vitality of the Democrats’ alliance with African-Americans required Northam’s leperization, to which deed Biden applied himself by appealing to the moral norms as defined by… well, Biden.
As the former VP and prospective president raises the question, we might want to gaze over Northam’s anguished head and ask: What, after all, is moral authority these days? And who has the right to talk about it?
I hazard a guess: Moral authority is anything that political expediency obliges politicians to say it is. This is because politicians mostly run our lives these days, having wrested, through the ballot box and sheer presumption, the power of defining right and wrong.
