This year, successful candidates are promoting the notion of decency. Character is indeed on the ballot.
Maybe Vivek Ramaswamy’s now infamous attack ad against Amy Acton in Ohio was the tipping point, the moment when things just went too far. Chris Christie, who ran against Ramaswamy in 2016, thinks so. He said this to the Washington Post, responding to JD Vance’s defense of the ad.
The pendulum is swinging not from left to right but from depraved to upright. This is brutality’s last stand, and in politics, the Year of the Mensch.
I’ve heard multiple pundits commenting over the past week that people are choosing candidates this year not based on party loyalty or policy preference, but on character.1 They are all so sick of corruption coming out of Washington, and that tipping point appears to have been past. A recent Fox News poll put corruption right at the top of the list of issues most influencing Americans’ votes, even ahead of inflation and healthcare. Additionally, Gallup reports:
“Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years, with 89% of U.S. adults saying it is widespread. That figure is up 10 percentage points from last year and well above readings in the 72% to 79% range between 2010 and 2025.”
Among the most contested races, character seems to be a key factor - indeed the prime fault line - in determining a voter’s choice, according to Marvin Olasky, editor in chief of Christianity Today, who said, “Private and public character are rarely distinct” and just as, or more important, than policy standpoints. Indeed, those candidates who are attracting the most voters of the other party are attracting them on the basis of character, not policy.
I said something similar when I addressed a No Kings rally last weekend:
Sliminess and brutality have not played well here - and in Israel too. Just yesterday a group of rabbis from Rabbis for Human Rights, along with New York congressional nominee Brad Lander were apprehended by the IDF for assisting Palestinians with the olive harvest.
How stupid is that? And how brutal? It seems that this far-right government wants to sever Israel’s relationship with American Jews. From today’s Ha’aretz:
And there’s more. As Ha’aretz and many other outlets reported last week (Click on the tweet below to see the horrific footage), a Washington Post reporter was brutally attacked by settlers.
Next week’s Israeli elections will certainly mark a turning point in the relationship between America and Israel, for better or for worse. And human decency will be a key. It is telling that this week AIPAC decided - better late than never - to cease endorsing candidates. Their ridiculous endorsement of Mike Collins over Jon Ossoff - who is a longtime supporter of Israel and a Jew - disregarding Collins’ connections to the far right, was a bridge too far. For AIPAC, it seemed, character did not matter - certainly in their endorsement of democracy deniers in many races and their eternal love for Netanyahu. Israel will be better off not having AIPAC dredging through the moral swamps for the lowest of the low on its behalf.
Here in America, a series of brutal and callous fabrications by Republican candidates is backfiring, including the false accusation that James Talarico spent time at a mental institution while he was home recovering from the flu, and now, the latest sleaze-play in Ohio, Viktor Ramaswami’s smarmy ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother belittling Acton and her account of her childhood abuse at the hands of her stepfather. When, despite fierce bipartisan backlash, Ramaswamy, incredibly, doubled down on the attack, many said it effectively ended his campaign, which was foundering in any event.
Sleaze is nothing new to MAGA, and Trump and DJ Vance continue to “go low” almost every time they open their mouths, with racist attacks and threats at every turn.
It’s happened in Israel’s current election campaign, where Bibi Netanyahu tried to mock his chief opponent Gadi Eisenkot using an AI-generated likeness of Eisenkot’s own son, a soldier who was killed in Gaza.
Then Eisenkot was ridiculed by one of Netanyahu’s shameless media proxies, Yinon Magal, for being a Sephardi Jew of Moroccan descent - he called him called a “monkey” - echoing the racist claims against Sephardim of a prior era.
And even in endorsing Netanyahu, Trump sounded like a mafioso, threatening the Israeli people that America might not come to their aid against Iran if they choose another leader.
“Nice little war you have here. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”
The good news is that these threats and lies don’t seem to be playing well with an electorate that is exhausted - and broke. What worked in America in 2024 is not working now. “They’re eating the dogs” rings hollow when a voter can’t afford to eat much of anything.
Talarico’s response to the shameless smears on everything from his health to his manhood to double down on decency. And it’s working, in part because of his expertise in Christian doctrine and text - which scares the hell out of his opponents - and the moral contrast to James Paxton. He’s attracting notable Republicans to his side, including, this week, a longtime Texas Republican judge, who said he’s crossing party lines to vote for Talarico “because he has character.”
But these boors can’t help themselves. They are completely tone deaf to the cultural change that is occurring, this disgust with disgusting behavior. It’s because of their excesses, so not surprising - the ICE raids and killings, the West Bank settlers’ attacks, the cruelty, corruption and coarseness - that the electorates of America and Israel have become so repulsed.
Even Susan Collins, who played up her so-called exemplary character when her opponent was the morally-challenged Graham Platner, has chosen to take the low road in attacking her new opponent Troy Jackson’s family. Like Ramaswamy’s depraved ad, Collins’ Trumpian gambit will not work.
“The Cruelty is the Point,” proclaimed Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay and book about the Trump era. That was and remains true, but for most voters now, the corruption has become the point.
The cruelty is his point, and it should be ours.
Click below to download a packet I put together for a class I taught this week on the essence of Judaism, with a focus on ethics and character.
The Year of the Mensch
MAGA should learn what Jews have known for centuries, that manhood is not about dominance, it is about kindness and taking responsibility. I literally wrote the book about being a mensch. For Jews, the ideal model of a man is not a musclebound intimidator. Incidentally, although in German the term clearly refers to males and connotes masculinity (or, in the case of Nietzsche, uber-masculinity) for Jews it is not gender-specific - a woman can be a mensch too. As I wrote in Mensch-Marks:
In the Talmud, Hillel the sage states, “In a world that lacks humanity, be human.” In a world as dehumanizing as ours has become, simply being a kind, honest and loving person, a man or woman of integrity, has become a measure of heroism – and at a time when norms of civility are being routinely quashed, it may be the only measure that matters. Hillel is saying that when everything seems to have become unhinged around you, just persevere with the singular focus of being the best human being you can be, and everything else will follow from that. If you can get your own act together, at some point others will follow your lead.
Leo Rosten, who wrote The Joy of Yiddish, defines mensch as “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character.” Dr. Saul Levine writes in Psychology Today, “The admirable traits included under the rubric of mensch read like a compendium of what Saints or the Dalai Lama represent to many, or others whom you might think merit that kind of respect. These personality characteristics include decency, wisdom, kindness, honesty, trustworthiness, respect, benevolence, compassion, and altruism.”
But one does not need to be a saint just to be a decent, thoughtful person. To be a morally evolved human being means in fact to be fallible and imperfect, but always striving to do better. It means to seek justice but never at the expense of compassion. It means to connect, to family, to one’s people and one’s home. It means to seek transcendence, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, to love unconditionally, to serve a higher cause and live a life of dignity and integrity.
In other words, to be a man is to be the opposite of the MAGA-strongman model, and the opposite of people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump.
And that needs to be our message, not only for the final week, but for all time. We can’t allow Americans to forget it. Especially men.
That is in fact the message that is being shared by candidates promoting decency, who in almost every contested Senate race, rate higher in character than their boorish counterparts.
I’ll end with some upbeat vignettes…
This celebration of peace, with hundreds of Israeli young people singing the Song of Peace - the hopeful song that was on Yitzchak Rabin’s lips moment before he was killed, became a viral video in Israel last weekend. See this clip below.
And below that, an amusing Seinfeld parody calling on Israelis (and by extension Americans) to get out and vote.
From the NYT-Siena poll analysis by Nate Cohn as to what is the key for Democrats’ leads in red states:
Ingredient No. 2: Candidate quality
In all five states, Democrats have something more going for them, even beyond Mr. Trump’s extraordinary unpopularity: a significant advantage in candidate quality.
Let’s take the simplest measure: favorability. In all five states, more voters view the Democrat favorably than unfavorably, while more voters view the Republican candidate unfavorably than favorably.
This is a real triumph for Democrats in such reliably Republican states. They’ve managed to find candidates who are both personally appealing and ideologically acceptable to red-state voters.
In all five states, voters say that the phrase “has good character” describes the Democratic candidate better than the Republican.
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