This shows there are some divisions in the GOP.
David Luban, Just Security: The Case Against Serving
In a powerful essay written half a century ago, Hannah Arendt warned about lesser evils (pp. 35-36):
If you are confronted with two evils, thus the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Those who denounce the moral fallacy of this argument are usually accused of a germ-proof moralism which is alien to political circumstances, of being unwilling to dirty their hands. …
Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. …
Why do they forget? It isn’t hard to fathom. Once you are inside, your frame of reference changes. The work is challenging and invigorating and cutting-edge. You see that many of the people you’re working with are decent and likable. You tell yourself that decent people like these wouldn’t do anything indecent. Gradually your moral compass aligns with theirs (and you don’t notice that theirs are simultaneously aligning with yours); and gradually all your moral compasses align with The Program. You develop team spirit, and you don’t want to let your team down by shirking; you can’t be a nay-sayer on everything. You lose your sense of outrage, which is, after all, a feeling we experience when we see something abnormal. Once the abnormal becomes routine, outrage fades.
So the alarm is going up from people in the security field and people who know actors sounded out about positions in the Trump administration.
It turns out that the LOTE decision has to do with whether you think you have the power (and are not deluded) that you can change policy from within the structures.
Note that the ICS at Purdue University has scanned in the Arendt document to require that it be printed of rejiggered with a PDF editor.
