Our morally unserious president on display in Kenosha

Through it all, Attorney General William Barr has decided to play the part of the ingenue. Watching his interview on CNN, in which he denied there was systemic racism in the judicial system, I wondered how a man so obviously intelligent could think his stance believable, or think we, the American people, would find it believable? Barr, recall, was attorney general back in 1992 when Los Angeles experienced riots after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King. Barr apparently learned different lessons from the rest of us.

Trump's opponent in the upcoming election, former Vice President Joe Biden, is a morally serious person. He delivered an important speech this week in which he confronted the canard that he was indifferent to the looting that has accompanied some otherwise peaceful protests. "I want to be clear about this: Rioting is not protesting," Biden said. "Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting — it's lawlessness — plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted." That certainly was clear enough, even for a Fox News host!

Biden, however, recognizes that the broken storefront windows and the stolen merchandise are not isolated events. He understands that those windows are related to the wounds in Blake's back, and that keeping America safe requires more than bemoaning a storefront that has been vandalized while ignoring the justified anger that led to it. "I want a safe America. Safe from COVID, safe from crime and looting, safe from racially motivated violence, safe from bad cops," Biden said. "Let me be crystal clear: safe from four more years of Donald Trump."

The Democratic candidate also pointed out that political leadership demands a very obvious moral attribute, a willingness to tell the truth, not your truth, or my truth, or the truth of what you just saw on Twitter. The truth. Biden said: "In the early days of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt told the country, 'The news is going to get worse and worse before it gets better and better, and the American people deserve to have it straight from the shoulder.' Straight from the shoulder: The job of a President is to tell the truth. To be candid. To face facts. To lead, not to incite. That's why I am speaking to you today." I am sure Biden, like all politicians, like all human beings, has told his share of lies, but nothing like what we see from the incumbent.

Trump appears incapable of denouncing violence by those who support him or of sympathizing with the suffering of those who don't. The man simply has no empathy and lacks the moral knowledge to recognize that moral evaluation is not dependent on whether or not we like someone.

Biden is a man of great empathy. He also has enough moral education to know that while a political leader can and should condemn all violence, there is no moral equivalence between shooting an unarmed man in the back, or kneeling on his neck until he is dead, and breaking a storefront window. Biden knows that law and order without justice is available to tyrants, a fact that would not disturb Trump. Biden's moral knowledge is imperfect, as is yours and mine; He is a politician not the savior. His inability to see the violence that is abortion is deeply regrettable, but it is not disqualifying, at least not when compared with the ample moral inabilities of the president.

As this summer of injustice comes to an end, the moral claim of anyone who opposes Trump is strong. The fact that the champion of that opposition is a decent man, with a great deal of empathy and some semblance of moral education only strengthens the case.

[Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.]

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