According to some witnesses, Bergdahl may have been drunk when he was ambushed and captured by the enemy. Not only did he receive a Dishonorable Discharge, but he was sentenced to 25 years to life for second-degree murder and 25 years to life for assaulting a child.

Another fairly well-known example of a Dishonorable Discharge happened to Charles Ng , a Chinese immigrant who came to the United States with a student visa. Despite not being a United States citizen, he joined the Marine Corps using false documents in He was later arrested and charged for stealing heavy weaponry and machine guns from the Marine Corps base in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.

He received a Dishonorable Discharge and was sentenced to serve 14 years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He only served 18 months thanks to a plea bargain.

Ng was later convicted of 11 counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in A dishonorable discharge is the lowest form of military discharge one can receive at the end of their military career.

In the civilian world, it would be the rough equivalent of getting a felony. While there are various reasons, the most typical reason one would receive a dishonorable discharge is by committing a reprehensible act. The consequences of a dishonorable discharge are severe, and can result in a prison sentence, affect future employment, and cause a loss of civil rights. As you can see, a Dishonorable Discharge is a serious matter that is akin to being convicted of a felony.

It is considered incredibly shameful to other military personnel, and it will impact your ability to receive any financial assistance or find employment. Since most of the actions that will result in a Dishonorable Discharge are illegal, many military members who do receive a Dishonorable Discharge will also have to face other legal consequences that might include fines and several years in prison.

On the other hand, there are few things that are more shameful than violating the Code in the most despicable ways possible. As with any criminal action that can lead to serious legal consequences, this kind of discharge should be avoided at all costs. Has this been changed? You have to do something really bad to get one Murder, Rape, etc.

I had a terrible CO — he was very much a sadist and enjoyed tormenting his troops. He did a surprise barracks inspection on my platoon right after a hour night guard shift. He used a master key to enter my room and started screaming while I lay there asleep.

I panicked, jumped out of bed and kicked him in the head, breaking his nose. I was severely injured a few weeks later. He refused to allow me any medical care for a broken neck. Unfortunately, lasting and significant disrepute seems improbable for Trump administration officials.

We too easily let ourselves believe that those who hold prominent public office must have been worthy of it, which is a high bar. Seeing such a person fall into disgrace can perversely stir sympathy in many who are unmoved by the harm done to unknown and powerless people by public misdeeds.

Henry Kissinger remains an honored public figure; those protesting his war crimes are subject to official opprobrium that he himself never is, at least not in the United States. That Sarah Huckabee Sanders was once asked to leave a restaurant , that Steve Bannon was once disinvited from a prestigious and lucrative appearance as a celebrity intellectual — these indignities were widely commented on as signs of grave injustice and intolerance.

A year ago, the Niskanen Center committed itself to a disassociation with Kirstjen Nielsen and any organization that employs her, for her role in the family separation policy at the border. As far as I know, no other organization did likewise, and no other ex-official has been named persona non grata anywhere.

Three and a half years so far of disgraceful public acts will leave almost no one in disgrace; shameful maladministration will, for the most part, not lead to anyone actually being shamed.

Many are old enough, rich enough, or both, to simply retire; the younger Trumps and Kushners are rich enough to cushion any slight social discomfort they may feel among Manhattan elites. Other Trump administration figures young enough to aspire to respectable political careers might find little favor with voters. They can nevertheless expect a soft landing at conservative think tanks and congressional offices, and will probably eventually enjoy appointed office under another Republican administration.

Dynamics beyond those identified by Smith further protect the reputations of the living and recently powerful. For example, the ordinary impulse to flattery, the insincerity or a-sincerity of which distinguishes it from Smithian excessive but genuine admiration, will always be with us. There will always be people whose ambition is greater than their pride and they will always curry favor with anyone closer to power than they are.

Private flattery merely degrades the flatterer, but public flattery, which is never in short supply, reinforces the Smithian dynamic. Even when flatterers are insincere, and know that their praise is undeserved, the audience might not. Other trends are peculiar to our time and place: the current shape of celebrity culture; hyperpolarization, including the emergence of polarized media cultures; and the desire of elite institutions to stand above and outside politics.

With a little bit of willingness to bear up under ridicule, Sean Spicer took advantage of the first of these: being a famous and familiar face is apparently enough to become a guest on late-night talk shows and a performer on Dancing With The Stars.

Our economy of fame runs on a bottomless appetite for the appearance and reappearance of people we remember, whatever we might remember them for. There are limits. Eventually, Harvey Weinstein reached genuine disgrace. Many former officials will turn—or return—to careers or paid side gigs as commentators at Fox News.

The shared media culture of the days of Walter Cronkite is long gone; there are now paid media niches available to match the polarization and fragmentation of American politics. In light of all that, consider the institutions that thrive on prestige and proximity to power: not only think tanks and lobbying firms but also corporate boards, elite media such as the New York Times, elite universities, and the celebrity-intellectual circuit of ideas festivals and televised debates.

In the case of the university, this is the difference between maintaining academic freedom for students or faculty members who advance a range of ideological positions and awarding honorary degrees or prestigious platforms, such as commencement addresses or endowed lectures, to persons whose claim to fame just consists of their time in politics and public office. Students and faculty members must be free to argue in favor of for example closed borders and the end of rights of asylum and refuge.

They should also be free, in their various clubs and departments, to invite speakers to a campus to advocate those ideas. Why should they get more credence than something that somebody said yesterday? Jacob Levy: From just a thought that someone had on Twitter yesterday.

But giving them credence is something different. The claim is not every traditional, canonical book on the university curriculum of Western universities is right. Part of my answer is a matter of reconciliation with other things, what a Rawlsian would call reflective equilibrium.

There are some really discrete moral facts that I feel pretty sure about there. Some really discrete social facts that I feel pretty sure of. What is it that reading this book helps me understand about the world? What Rousseau calls amour propre and this is a great deal of why Rousseau has been such an enduring important thinker because-.

Will Wilkinson: No, no, no. This is a crazy dude who really has an insanely accurate bead on certain aspects of what people are like. Jacob Levy: So, my interest here is in the accuracy of that bead. I think Smith does that a lot more often than Rousseau does. I think Rousseau ends up misleading people about the shape of the world quite a lot of the time. Will Wilkinson: I think those are good answers, Jacob. But just coming up with this is a promising possibility for the way things might be.

And a lot of people just lack imagination. So they basically never really come up with any interesting hypothesis even if they may be brilliant at testing them. Will Wilkinson: One of my favorite genres of writing is hearing mathematicians talk about when it was that they solved a proof that had been outstanding for decades and decades and decades. And that is a crazy kind of intuition that is profoundly valuable because nobody gets anywhere without it.

But not that many people have it. And I think some of the greatest thinkers are people who have that-. Jacob Levy: In order to have it in a productive way. Jacob Levy: Not everyone who puts in the years of study also has the insight, but the years of study are a precondition for the insights to be available as a way to synthesize the right material.

I know a ton of empirical stuff about human psychology-. And we would have moved on. And it fits, it is important that it fits into what I know about psychology. They just seem to be pretty well empirically validated. Jacob Levy: I would want to emphasize that Smith, especially of the people that you named, but to a lesser degree Hume and some of the others, they align all of those basic human flaws and foibles that you identified with the capacity for genuine moral knowledge and genuine moral growth.

But for Rousseau, that points us in the opposite direction from moral truth. Whereas for Smith and to a lesser extent for the others, it orients us roughly in a direction that allows us to get somewhere better. Will Wilkinson: But it also does suggest that individual moral rectitude is going to be very, very difficult in a society whose economy of esteem is sort of systematically distorted.

And all societies are going to be, to some extent screwed up that way. Will Wilkinson: But that speaks to… An important question that I had for you about these pieces is, why does it matter? Forgiveness is one thing. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. There was, well, the Red Hen or something. A staff that unsurprisingly in the food service industry, included a fair number of first-generation immigrants.

Jacob Levy: Yeah. We think that we know Sarah Huckabee Sanders. We can imagine her face, we can imagine her voice. Can you imagine being her and being asked to leave a restaurant? Well, can you imagine being the waiters and the waitresses and the cooks in this restaurant and being asked to put on your deferential service face to someone who has now famously lied, after lied, after lied in the service of racism and the persecution of immigrants. Clearly that person has-.

Jacob Levy: Has a moral complaint. Has a genuinely normatively important thing to say. They are going to be part of our public life and the question of how they are received and how their time in office is remembered, is a problem that a lot of institutions are going to have to face one by one institutionally.

Jacob Levy: And the institutional attraction to people who have or used to have power, is very strong. This is above and beyond the Smithian psychology. There are lots of elite institutions that really run on an economy of prestige.

And so the normal habit among American elite institutions, is to think that everyone who was in office is honorable. Honorable in the literal sense of being worthy of being honored such that we can have their time and attention, such that their presence among us can confer some of the halo of their time in office-. Will Wilkinson: And so some of the things you have in mind are like a visiting fellowship at a prestigious university or-.

Will Wilkinson: Institute of politics [crosstalk ] and things like being asked to give a public address. Some people might not understand how much the speakers on these, most big universities will have some speakers series and they choose people who are supposed to be important or interesting or whatever.

Jacob Levy: Right. Those send different messages. I mean, the honor is being invited to give this address in a prestigious series that the university promotes relentlessly to its students and community. The key…. It was The New Yorker festival from which Steve Bannon was uninvited triggering one route of my thinking about this. He was famous. He was famous because he helped get Donald Trump elected.

The hard part is resisting. And you make that point that universities in particular have to make a conscious, positive commitment to not honoring people for having done bad things in effect. Will Wilkinson: Think tanks too. If a lot of people get these plum think tank gigs after they leave an administration, because it adds prestige to the institution-. Will Wilkinson: And they probably can bring some donor along or something.

It really will take an active, conscious commitment not to retroactively normalize having been in office in the Trump administration. So just people are going to completely disagree with each other about whether what people who served in the Trump administration did was praiseworthy or deserves our scorn and contempt. You think they were good people, they were doing the right thing. So how do we deal with that? Jacob Levy: A couple of answers. One is it is going to be interesting, just [inaudible ] political scientists, I think is going to be interesting to see what the afterlife of the Trump administration is relative to the afterlife of the Nixon administration.

Nixon in particular had to labor for decades in order to re-burnish his reputation as the elder statesman who went to China, and it never entirely worked. The first thing for which Richard Nixon will always be remembered is Watergate and resigning in disgrace. Jacob Levy: It might be that party politics and ideological conflict in the United States is now so much more negatively polarized than it was in , that we can no longer get anything like cross-party agreement on the concept of disgrace.

And we know the line because people have been trying it out in their anonymous op-eds. I thought that it was my duty to do my best to make the administration go as well as possible.

That is remaining there, even remaining there, telling yourself a story that what you were doing was mitigating the damage, made you a part of the damage. And I think that concepts like shamefulness and disgrace need to be part of the vocabulary.

Will Wilkinson: You know what? Will Wilkinson: But I actually think that people forgive that, in a weird way, because that is the temptation to which people are prone. It worked awesome. Jacob Levy: I think there would be indulgence for it at pretty junior levels. I was going to get an appointment. And this is what paying your dues looks like, is serving for a couple of years in public office. I wanted to just underscore the point about the deep-seatedness of this bias toward overpraising the powerful and famous.

Clearly, lots of Trump administration cronies are going to do just fine. The question is whether they get on the CNN panel or they get invited to the Institute of Politics at Harvard or whatever. Then you can tell yourself the story. Are you including enough conservative voices? Will Wilkinson: So wrapping it up, I just wanted to ask you this.