Too Easy Forgiveness

Following an exchange with a member of parliament, one question obsesses me: why do we so easily forgive the moral failure of those who govern us, when their function demands exemplary probity?

The genesis of indignation: the denial of fault

My unease took root in a specific conversation, almost seemingly trivial, with a member of parliament. We were discussing the chairman of the parliamentary inquiry commission on TikTok, whose dishonesty appeared flagrant to me (I documented it in detail in the article The evolution of law and symbolic powers in the age of social media. What struck me was not so much the chairman’s proven fault, but the disconcerting indulgence of my interlocutor, this elected representative of the Republic who dismissed with a wave of his hand what I considered an unforgivable failing. His forgiveness seemed so easy, so automatic, that it became in my eyes a form of passive complicity. How could someone whose mission is to control public action and legislate in the name of the people show such clemency in the face of a manifest breach of democratic ethics?

This reaction reveals a deep fracture in our conception of power. The function of an elected official is not a simple job; it is a charge, a mandate based on a contract of trust with the nation. The social role he chooses to assume confers upon him duties that transcend his person. To forgive the dishonesty of a political leader is to accept that a judge could render justice arbitrarily or that a doctor could neglect his patients. It is to admit that the rules that form the foundation of our social pact do not apply to those who are precisely charged with embodying and protecting them. This indulgence is not magnanimity; it is a betrayal of the implicit oath that binds him to his fellow citizens.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted on the fact that political action unfolds in the public space, under the gaze of others. It is not a private affair. Each act, each word of an elected official engages not only his own reputation, but the credibility of the institution he represents. In this sense, dishonesty is not a simple personal fault, but a wound inflicted on the entire political body. It damages trust, that invisible cement without which democracy is nothing more than an empty shell. Easy forgiveness then becomes a denial of the gravity of this wound, a way of saying that, ultimately, political speech has no weight and that truth and justice are adjustment variables, as long as one embodies the “right” values, but according to whose criteria?

The requirement of probity: beyond human error

One could retort to me, of course, that “to err is human.” This adage, while a consoling truth in the private sphere, becomes a pernicious excuse when applied to holders of public authority. Of course, no one is infallible. But there is a fundamental difference between an error in judgment, clumsiness, or an involuntary fault, and a deliberate breach of probity. Dishonesty, lying, concealment in the institutions of the Republic are not errors; they are moral faults that vitiate the very principle of representative government. If we accept that such faults be trivialized, then we renounce the very ideal of public virtue.

The requirement that weighs on the shoulders of an elected official is not an option; it is the sine qua non condition of his legitimacy. By accessing his function, he accepts to submit to a superior level of exemplarity. This is not a question of perfection, but of acute awareness of his responsibilities. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: “It would take gods to give laws to men” (The Social Contract, 1762, Book II, chap. 7). But he completed by: “Now, as soon as a people gives itself representatives, it is no longer free” (The Social Contract, Book III, chap. 15), thus underlining the fragility of the link between representative and represented and the requirement of virtue necessary for the exercise of power. If he recognized the difficulty of the task, Rousseau especially emphasized that the legislator must tend toward an ideal that surpasses him. Probity is therefore not an accessory quality, but the beating heart of the political function. Not to observe it is to break the moral contract that founds popular sovereignty.

Therefore, forgiveness cannot be granted, a fortiori when these failings become systematic and notably on the left, as is the case in this example. An isolated fault could, strictly speaking, be debated. But when dishonesty becomes a habit, a strategy, a culture within the political class, forgiveness becomes a collective fault. It signals our renunciation of demanding better. To systematically forgive is to teach the powerful that their acts have no consequences, that they evolve in a sphere of impunity where common morality no longer applies. It is precisely this impunity that feeds the arrogance of power and the feeling of being above the law, and thereby the feeling of injustice, which legitimately nourishes defiance and contestation.

Culpable indulgence: this breeding ground of distrust

It is precisely this jaded acceptance, this culture of excuse at the top, that prepares the ground for the most radical contestation. The indulgence I perceived in this member of parliament is not an isolated act; it is the symptom of a system where cronyism and protection of the caste take precedence over responsibility to the people, and this in all good conscience of duty accomplished, in contempt of respect. When citizens observe that the faults of the powerful are systematically minimized, relativized, or forgiven by their peers, how could they not feel a sense of injustice and dispossession? The gap widens not only between the governing and the governed, but between justice as it should be and justice as it is practiced.

Faced with this spectacle, the question then becomes brutally logical: how can one, in good conscience, grant one’s vote to such people? How can one not want to contest a power that seems to have lost its moral compass, a power that legitimizes itself in a closed circle, far from the aspirations and values of ordinary citizens? The vote becomes an act of defiance or absurdity, and contestation, no longer an option, but an ethical necessity. The feeling of injustice, when it is so ignored, can only transform into anger and rejection. This is what feeds extremism.

Thus, contestation, long the prerogative of the left and progressivism, migrates today toward other horizons. As historian Pablo Stefanoni shows in Has rebellion moved to the right? (2022), “the contestation of the established order, yesterday associated with progressive movements, now invests the right-wing margins, where the will for radical rupture with the political system, its elites and its codes is expressed.”. Similarly, sociologist Félicien Faury analyzes, in Ordinary voters. Survey in a bouleversed France (2024), the way in which “the loss of confidence in institutions and in political elites feeds a generalized distrust, breeding ground for a rupture vote once marginal, now trivialized”. This evolution is confirmed by political scientist Vincent Tiberj, for whom in The French rightward shift (2024): “The radical right now knows how to capture popular resentment, because it presents itself as the only one to refuse the collusion of elites and the impunity they enjoy”

This rightward shift of anger is not a simple ideological accident, but the product of a repeated failure of elites to embody the exemplarity expected of them. The contestation of democratic norms, sometimes crude and dangerous, is often the consequence of a massive feeling of injustice and powerlessness. The real struggle against extremism is therefore first that for irreproachable probity. If one claims to defend democracy, then it must be done “on our end,” that is to say by demanding from so-called democratic governors a flawless moral rigor.

I refuse to see in this rise of contestation a pure populism or the mark of social derangement. I also see there, according to Albert Camus’ words, “I revolt, therefore we are” (The Rebel, 1951), a surge of democratic health, a minimal requirement of justice. The revolt against too easy forgiveness is not a whim, but a collective affirmation: we still exist as a demanding political city. We do not want forgiveness to serve as a mask for forgetting or for the resignation of those who represent us.