The death of a good person saddens me, for their passing is a loss to the world. But I do not rejoice when a wicked person dies, for their death is also a loss, albeit one of potential. They could have been good or at least attempted redemption.

It is accepted wisdom that even the best of us are flawed beings, so no one is perfectly good. But our flawed nature, ironically, also entails that none of us are perfectly evil. One might even say that it is the defect of the wicked to have some good within them. As has often been claimed, “Hitler loved dogs.”  On a completely unrelated note, Lindsey Graham died recently.

Graham was, as many politicians are today, a polarizing figure. Some praised him for his servitude to President Trump while others damned him for this. In reading the various narratives of his life, everyone agrees that he spoke out against Trump at times.

Before Trump became president, Graham correctly described him as a “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and a demagogue. He also predicted, correctly, that nominating Trump would destroy the Republican party. But once Trump was elected, Graham served him well until a moment of dissent in response to January 6, 2021. But Graham quickly returned to serving Trump.

Graham was obviously not unique in correctly condemning Trump before becoming one of his servants. J.D. Vance once correctly compared Trump to Hitler and now he is his Vice President and dancing monkey. Trump attacked Ted Cruz’s father and wife, but Cruz also became a little dancing monkey for Trump. I suspect that this is part of Trump’s appeal to his MAGA base: he can make powerful people, including billionaires, become his little dancing monkeys. For people who are sick of the ruling elites, this humiliation can be enjoyed as a form of vengeance against people who are otherwise untouchable and unaccountable.

Trump is indisputably a terrible person, which everyone knew when he first ran for office. He said racist things, bragged about sexual assault, mocked people with disabilities and so on. These would have all been career ending incidents for almost any other politician but seemed to increase Trump’s appeal to what became his MAGA base. When he attacked John McCain, I briefly thought this might alienate some people. After all, only a wicked and petty bastard would mock someone who suffered so much for his country. While Trump did face some pushback in his first term, people still served his will. He, or those running him, learned their lesson and ensured that only the incompetent, ignorant and servile serve in the Trump II sequel. But some might wonder about people like Graham, Vance and Cruz who once opposed and attacked Trump. What happened to them? Did Trump corrupt them or did Trump merely reveal the evil that had always been there?

There is the old saying that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But Robert Caro made the excellent point that power always reveals, noting that people often need to hide their true nature while climbing the ladder but are free to be themselves when they reach the top. From a philosophical standpoint, the question of whether power corrupts or reveals is an interesting one and has been indirectly addressed by thinkers over the centuries.

Plato’s brother Glaucon took the view in the Republic, at least to make a case for Socrates to argue against, that by nature people want to be unjust but are usually too weak to act upon this desire. He claims that someone with power would not be constrained by justice and would simply do as they wished within the limit of their power. Given this view, Glaucon would surely agree that power reveals rather than corrupts. Thomas Hobbes would probably take a similar view.  

Thinkers like Mencius and Rousseau would probably take the view that power can corrupt, as they seemed to think that people are basically good but can be made worse.  Aristotle seemed to think that people were born neutral (albeit with some tendencies) but could become corrupt or virtuous through habituation. One could also take the view that some people become corrupted by power and that some have their badness revealed by power.

From the standpoint of people hurt by the evil deeds of those in power, whether they became corrupted or were bad all along does not really matter. For example, if ICE agent Sam was always eager to hurt people and seized an opportunity to murder Joe, knowing he could just claim that he was “afraid for his life” and get away with it, then Joe is dead. If ICE agent Saul was a tolerant young man who grew up in church believing thou shall not kill but became corrupted by years of MAGA and seized the seized the opportunity to murder Joe because he became corrupted by power, then Joe is still dead. Even if a residue of the man he once was made Saul feel a bit bad for a second as he saw Joe’s blood spilling onto the ground as Joe’s wife and young daughter screamed in horror and anguish.

Likewise, if Senator Sam was always eager to make a profit and inflict pain while in office, the people he hurt are hurt. If Senator Sally was once idealistic and wanted to help people but became corrupted so she now only cares about her power and profit, then the people she hurt were also hurt. That said whether someone’s evil resulted from corruption or was merely revealed does matter.

If we are asking whether a person was always evil or became corrupted, then that means we are unsure. After all, the behavior can be the same whether someone was cautious to conceal their evil or was not evil until they were corrupted. But from a moral standpoint, there is a difference. After all, an evil person revealing their evil because they now have power is bad mostly because of the harm they do. But a person who becomes corrupted and does evil is also a victim of whatever corrupted them and they might even be a tragic figure. While this does not excuse their evil, corruption might mitigate their moral accountability in some ways. After all, they had to be transformed before they did evil. Then again, one might argue that the corrupted are worse, because they should have done better. Once again, whether someone became corrupted or was always evil matters little or not at all to the people they hurt. But in terms of preventing evil, whether people are “born bad” or must be corrupted does matter, even if this varies between individuals.

If, as Glaucon and Hobbes thought, people are basically bad, then power just reveals their badness by giving them the means to exercise it without consequences. This means that if we do not want people in power doing bad things, then we need to have the means and the will to stop them. Otherwise, like Trump, they will just do bad things because they are bad people and power frees them to act on their evil.

If people are not bad but can be corrupted by power, then we need to find ways to recognize such people and keep them away from power. But we must also find ways to modify power so that it would be less likely to corrupt people, in case we are unable or unwilling to keep corruptible people out of power. This assumes that we want to do this, after all Trump either revealed the pre-existing evil of millions of Americans or corrupted them into his MAGA base. America might decide it loves corruption.

But what about Lindsey Graham? Well, he is dead and I am a kind soul that tries not to speak ill of the dead, unless it is a dead philosopher I disagree with, like the slave owner George Berkeley.  

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