I guess the question is - as always - are WE smart enough, and clear-sighted enough, have we learned the right lessons, to thread that needle? Clearly, it’s a systemic deficiency, a required structural element for our system to function properly…but we are not super-beings, and we must reconcile their intentions by overcoming these material deficiencies.
Nothing is certain except that ‘honor’ is a non-operable concept when dealing w/ those who insist on treason; we are not forced by history or the moment to do WORSE than the founders did, but “these things must be done delicately…” for sure. In any event, letting the patient (us/US) bleed out for lack of treatment seems hard to defend.
Say this a bit ago, apropos…
So much to say to or about this. I’ll restrict myself to a subtopic.
First, I may have misunderstood your original post which asked that national proceedings be conducted more honorably. This leads me to the history of trying to encompass honor’s roommate virtue, or perhaps virtuous living in a healthy society, by codification.
This leads to two different historical examples in my mind: the Pharisees and sharia law. While the common element is religious, that is incidental to my hypothesis.
The Pharisees undertook the comprehensive codification of personal and social conduct in what the translations of the New Testament I’ve seen call the Law. Let’s stipulate that the Pharisees observed reality, warts and all, and attempted to write a Manual Covering Every Possibility. It became a descent into fractally infinite detail, with fractally infinite instances where the rules did not work, leading to another iteration of expanding the code.
It failed hard enough to foster the emergence of a fairly radical offshoot of Judaism, one of whose tenets is the abolition of the infinite corset of the Law on the principle that (John notwithstanding) God is greater than the word, and thus codification.
On to sharia, or more accurately my not-very-educated take on it. It is a simpler codification with a different associated procedure: it defines a few moral absolutes, and brutally punishes perceived defiance of or deviation from them. The complexities of real human conduct are forced through the undersized door of the sharia code, with restrictive outcome.
Both approaches were undertaken with the highest and most noble goals in mind to improve the human condition (similarly, the architects of scientific socialism tried for the same ideal).
But the invariable outcome was institutional injustice and bottomless human misery.
At this point, I do not think good behavior can be effectively codified, and I saw your post as a call for that.