Category: Ethics
What connects Trump’s demagoguery to ESG concerns is that both flow from our contemporary neglect of ‘public’. What connects Trump’s demagoguery to ESG concerns is that both flow from our contemporary neglect of ‘public’. What connects Trump’s demagoguery to ESG concerns is that both flow from our contemporary neglect of ‘public’.
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Introduction
Shocking as last week’s events were, it has all been seen and said before. WB Yeats’ lines from a century ago read like a dispatch from the steps of the US Capitol:
‘Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’
Even an ‘innocent ceremony’ to drown is appropriate here; the certification of the Electoral College results in most years is a procedural non-event.
Yeats powerfully captured the two dynamics that repeatedly enable demagogues like Trump: the emptying of society’s middle ground, and that: ‘all that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’
The latter is the troubling dynamic o…