Opinion | How Did Trump Become Morally Acceptable?

And to me the interesting question is: What the hell happened to us? Why do 77 million people last election take a look at Donald Trump and didn’t see anything morally disqualifying? And I do not think that would have happened in America 50 years ago. I think there was a moral ruination, a loss of moral knowledge that preceded Donald Trump’s arrival on the scene. And my quick story about that is, for all of American history, we had some sense of a shared moral order. There’s a historian, George Marsden. I’ll paraphrase what he wrote, that what gave Martin Luther King’s rhetoric such force was the idea that moral law was written into the fabric of the universe, that slavery and segregation were not just wrong sometimes. They’re always wrong. And over the last 50 years, in my view, we’ve privatized morality. We said there are no shared moral values. There’s no ultimate truth. But everybody gets to come up with their own values.