Life provides us plenty of opportunities to mess up and get things wrong. Our capacity to offend, make mistakes that hurt others, and commit painful errors is a daily reality of the human condition. Fractured relationships are typically the consequence. But forgiveness, or the quest for it across multiple religious traditions, helps restore a surprising number of those broken relationships. And apology, while not an explicitly theological concept, does its own good work to heal the world from our missteps.
It now appears, however, that we’re in a political and historical moment when the idea of delivering a genuine apology has fallen out of fashion. Public leaders who admit fault, own a mistake, feel a sense of regret, and have an interest in restitution are about as rare as a candidate who refuses a political endorsement. “The idea now is to never apologize, never back down,” says Amy Walter, editor in chief of the independent, nonpartisan newsletter The Cook Political Report. “If you do apologize, you’re going to lose the support of your base, because they want you to be a fighter.” Walter shared this assessment in the aftermath of Joni Ernst’s refusal to apologize to constituents in late May, following the Iowa senator’s sarcastic response to voters’ concern that people could die if cuts to Medicaid were implemented. She doubled down with derision the next day, mocking her critics and displaying disdain for the whole idea of apologizing.
To be clear, the resistance to admitting mistakes is a bipartisan or, more accurately, a completely human affair. But in the Trump era, we’re witnessing what I would call cultivated transgressiveness: leaders vice signaling their lack of interest in apology for the sake of demonstrating toughness and defiance to their base. “Never apologize, Mister, it’s a sign of weakness,” John Wayne’s character famously says in the 1949 western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Seventy-five years later, is Wayne the model for public officials trying to look aggressive?
