The blinders come off
We defend leaders whose character we would reject in anyone we actually knew, because we are staring at the uniform instead of the conduct. We raise platforms on hollow pillars, and when they tilt, they crush everyone standing beneath them.
The turn is simple: stop asking whose side and start asking what does the conduct show. Behavior, character, conduct, not party, identity, or ideology.
And the bar cannot curve. A standard graded against your peers means that, in a failing class, a failure looks average, a slaveholder scores low in a slaveholding age precisely because the bar was never his peers.
“Everyone does it” is a confession, not a defense.
Even the best fall short of the bar. That gap is not a flaw in the scoring, it is the diagnosis: integrity is reachable but expensive, and the system charges full price. You cannot will a better politician or a better system into being. The one lever you hold is consent, who you are willing to follow. Change that, alone, today, and the rest follows. It begins beneath the platform.