As you all know, I don’t typically post about politics, but this post by my old friend Noah Millman: brilliantly illuminates the profound ethical failures — the abdications of ethical responsibility — that underlie many of the pathologies of our current moment:

A view of power that sees it as incompatible with any respect for law and ethics is obviously one that will trash both law and ethics. But if you follow it, you will ultimately destroy the foundation of your power as well. (Beinart would probably say that this is precisely what is happening in Israel today, and I might well agree.) The same is true for an ethics terrified of the exercise of power, though. It will obviously and directly destroy your own power, but in doing so it will also destroy your ability to act ethically or achieve ethical goals. It turns you into a supplicant at the table of those who are willing to use power, to whose consciences you have surrendered your own in order to avoid the burden of ethical choice. And what makes you think that once you have surrendered your conscience to them, those people will prove any less corruptible by that fact, any less willing to throw ethics in the garbage because that feels like power to them, than the people you once broke with because of their moral failings and corruption by power?