The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ Polemarchist

      To understand corruption in America, it seems that all one need do is follow the Clintons around and take notes. And yet Hillary emerged as her party’s candidate for the presidency, supported by voters who cared less about her character than about the causes she espoused. She was buoyed up by a media that draws a discreet veil between the public policies and private acts of the candidates it favors. After the Monica Lewinsky story broke, for example, Time magazine’s Nina Burleigh said that she’d be happy to give Bill Clinton oral sex “just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”¹² More recently, as a Newsweek correspondent, Burleigh labeled Peter Schweizer a “right wing hatchet” man when asked to comment on Clinton Cash.¹³

      There’s nothing dishonorable about supporting a corrupt official if his opponent is still worse. Louisiana’s Edwin Edwards was one of the most ethically challenged governors in that state’s colorful history, but in 1991 he had the good chance to find himself opposed by the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke. “Vote for the Crook” bumper stickers began to appear, as well as “Vote for the Lizard, not the Wizard,” and Edwards handily won the election. Doubtless, many Democrats supported Hillary Clinton because they thought Donald Trump little better than David Duke. It’s different, however, when the supporter ignores the evidence of corruption, winks at it, and absolves her of blame, for then he becomes an enabler and accomplice of corruption.

      A bit of that is to be expected. Just as we are biased in favor of our personal friends, we’ll tend to ignore the lapses of political friends—those who are advancing causes we believe in—while denouncing those of political enemies. But at the extreme, with the Nina Burleighs, politics is everything and personal morality becomes irrelevant. We’ll see the mote in the eye of an enemy while ignoring the beam in a friend’s eye.

      This double standard might be labeled Polemarchism, from a character in Plato’s Republic. On his way home from Piraeus, Socrates encounters several people with whom he debates the meaning of justice. Polemarchus tells him that justice requires doing good to one’s friends and evil to one’s enemies. Socrates replies that doing evil to anyone doesn’t sound much like justice. Moreover, he says, you might think your friends are good, but what if they’re not? You wouldn’t want to do good to an evil person whom you mistakenly think good. Justice requires doing good to the truly good person, not to the friend who in fact is evil. Friendship therefore is not the proper basis of justice.

      Polemarchism is the crudest of ethical theories, but it’s how American politics is increasingly conducted. It’s in the newspapers we read and the shows we watch on TV, where partisan hacks are given a respectful hearing. One finds them on both sides of the debate, though David Brock stands out as an attack dog. It doesn’t get more partisan than Brock’s Media Matters, but he’s still taken seriously as a political commentator by the mainstream media.¹⁴

      For an example of Polemarchism at work, consider the media reaction to the firing of Gerald Walpin, the congressionally appointed inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service (AmeriCorps). Inspectors general are charged with overseeing government moneys, and after Walpin uncovered that the mayor of Sacramento had improperly spent AmeriCorps funds he referred the matter to the Justice Department for prosecution. The mayor was an Obama donor and friend, however, and AmeriCorps was a favored Obama program. A White House lawyer asked Walpin to resign in June 2009, and when Walpin refused to do so he was summarily fired, in violation of the rules for dismissing inspectors general. The White House spread the word that Walpin was incompetent, and for most of the media that was the end of the story.¹⁵ In other First World countries, that would have been a major scandal, but not in today’s America. Subsequently, the Obama administration doubled down on its obstructionism by denying inspectors general unfettered access to the documents they need to do their job.¹⁶

      Let’s suppose that Obama believed he was doing good, defending the work of AmeriCorps while returning a favor to a friend and ally. In the seventeenth century, Pascal wrote that men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they believe they are following their conscience.¹⁷ They can then enjoy that most delicious of sensations, the feeling of justified hatred toward enemies. When it’s one tribe against another, Republicans against Democrats, when everyone is a Polemarchist, public virtue shrivels and everything is permitted.

      The more divided we are, the greater the appeal of Polemarchism. In recent years, partisan divisions have become more pronounced, through what the journalist Bill Bishop has called “the big sort.”¹⁸ We don’t care to live on streets where our neighbors despise us, and this self-segregation further intensifies the polarization of American politics. Liberals become more liberal, conservatives more conservative, and what we’re left with is a country in which the grimly serious business of politics becomes all-consuming. But if it’s all a matter of supporting your friends and beating up your enemies, then complaints about a politician’s corruption are hypocritical when leveled at an enemy, and naïve if directed at a friend. Indeed, the more a country is politicized, the more it is corrupt.

      This isn’t to say that political loyalties should be irrelevant, that one shouldn’t show a partiality to political friends. There’s something repellant about the paragon of virtue who is indifferent as between allies and opponents. The German philosopher Carl Schmitt was not entirely wrong when he wrote in 1932 that “the specific political distinction . . . is that between friend and enemy.”¹⁹ The political fray is necessarily agonistic, pitting one party against another, and it demands that people take sides. But there’s a limit to the merits of loyalty, which is something that Schmitt appears not to have learned. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933, rejoiced in the burning of books by Jewish authors, and then resisted every effort at de-Nazification after the war.

The Apologist

      In his more candid moments, the Clinton loyalist will admit that all is not right with the Clinton Foundation, and that Mrs. Clinton’s venality embarrasses him. He might nonetheless ridicule the prissiness of those who are too quick to see corruption in others, who recoil from the rough-and-tumble of political engagement. “It ain’t beanbag,” said Mr. Dooley (the Finley Peter Dunne character) in response to the good government “goo-goos” who looked down their noses at Chicago’s machine politics. With their patrician WASP scorn for the Catholic underclass, the goo-goos didn’t come across very well in The Last Hurrah, the Edwin O’Connor novel and later the Spencer Tracy movie. Moral prissiness can even seem ridiculous. In 1950, a story went around that Senator George Smathers (D-FL) had made some shocking claims about a challenger for his Senate seat:

      Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, he has a brother who is a known homo sapiens, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.

      Most probably this began as a joke, demonstrating that even a politician can recognize the absurdity in trying to paint his opponent as the lowest form of life.²⁰ Still, our experience with the Clintons suggests that the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive mightn’t be such a bad thing. The person who says politics ain’t beanbag is telling you that corruption doesn’t much bother him, and we might wish that it did.

      The Apologist can also be heard to plead that corruption is the way of the world, that everyone does it. The deeper question, he will argue, is whether corrupt means may be employed to arrive at the desired end of a virtuous state. That’s what the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wondered when he complained of the hypocrisy of the anticommunist liberal who objected to Stalinist violence: “He forgets that communism does not invent violence but finds it already established, that for the moment СКАЧАТЬ