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True, but do you want to live in a society where the rich and powerful are all the sort of people who cheat on their wives?
As in the 90s so too today, right wingers get fed up of virtue-signalling lefties and campaign for putting amoral bastards in charge. This backfires, because:
They’re not conservative, and therefore not interested in rolling back left wing cultural victories. The assault is paused but not repelled.
It gives conservatives a bad reputation. (Which they often later try to repudiate by embracing left wing ideas).
Amoral bastards are amoral and will drop you in a heartbeat once it looks like you’re losing power.
Dream big! Hold out for competence and virtue.
I'd like to reply to both you and @raggedy_anthem on this: what if competence is a virtue unto itself? We may then just be prioritizing for different kinds of virtues.
I don’t think you can separate effectiveness from goals. I don’t want someone who strangles women and eats their livers for fun to get better at it! To take an extreme case, obviously.
If you mean these people are competent in their standard jobs, but have bad social lives, then I get that. It’s why I voted for Boris Johnson - I thought he was an amoral attention seeker but smart enough to know where his support was coming from. In the end he was an amoral attention seeker who prioritised the good opinion of his wife and her friends and landed us with terrible plans for net zero and a country that is veering open-borders left just as Europe is finally getting its act together.
Let’s face it, we aren’t spoilt for choice a lot of the time and we have to take what we can get. But not valuing virtue at all is silly imo.
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We do live in that society, though, and I don’t think there has ever been a society that was not like that, unless they simply defined cheating in such a way as to exclude rich powerful men committing adultery.
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