The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ to worthy causes. Instead, it was more of an operating foundation, which organized events where others were encouraged to donate money. Its work involved the high-level schmoozing at which the Clintons have been so adept: international conferences, speeches, prizes and the like. In 2013 the foundation took in $140 million but spent only $9 million on direct aid. The rest went toward administrative expenses—salaries, bonuses, conferences, travel and development. Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group, looked at the financials in 2015 and concluded that the foundation appeared to be run as a slush fund for the Clintons.¹⁷

      As if to demonstrate how the Clinton Foundation had become a pay-for-play network, contributions began to dry up as soon as Donald Trump defeated Mrs. Clinton. The Australian government, which had given the foundation $66 million over a ten-year period, announced plans to zero out the payments a few weeks after the election. As for the speaking fees, a wag announced that Mrs. Clinton had agreed to give a speech to Goldman Sachs executives in return for a brand-new toaster.

      The more reputable media outlets found the whole affair disturbing. The New York Times, for example, agreed with Donald Trump that “it was hard to tell where the foundation ended and the State Department began.”¹⁸ To veteran Clinton-watchers, it was all just the latest in a long list of scandals, from the commodity futures trading, Whitewater, Travelgate, Troopergate, Chinagate, Filegate, Pardongate, the impeachment, on up to the private email server. In the past, a record like this would have disqualified a person from candidacy for higher office. That it didn’t do so today, that Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee for the presidency, that there were furious apologists for every new scandal—all this seemed to tell us that we now live in a country where corruption is of little concern. With the Trump victory, we may be permitted to wonder if we were wrong, if Mrs. Clinton’s defeat was a popular repudiation of public corruption. But then it was a near-run thing, as she racked up nearly three million more votes than Trump.

Republican Virtue

      In the presidential election season of 2015–16, Hillary Clinton’s ethical lapses drove millions of voters to support the campaign of a self-proclaimed socialist, Bernie Sanders, or of a business mogul, Donald Trump. All our professional pundits were astonished, but was it really that surprising? Sanders and Trump had one thing in common, which voters appreciated: they weren’t Hillary Clinton. On economics, they were both to the left of their respective party’s establishment, but that didn’t hurt them with primary voters. The conservatives who faulted Trump for his lack of entitlement-reform plans didn’t understand the much greater cost that corruption imposes on our economy. The voters got it, however. The old liberal-conservative ideological axis appears increasingly irrelevant as a corruption-virtue axis bids to take its place.

      We’ve been here before. Two hundred and forty-one years ago. You might not think of “corruption” as the burning issue of the day in the American colonies in 1776. What about taxation without representation? Well, the tax in question was the price of today’s dinner date. What about restrictions on liberty? But Britain and its American colonies were the freest places on earth (if you didn’t count the slaves, of course). Ordinary Britons couldn’t understand these complaints, and they thought the American Patriots needed to chill. But what they missed was the colonists’ ire over corruption in the British government—the King’s Friends in Parliament, the showering of gifts on royal favorites, the patronage machines of prime ministers and of royal governors in the colonies.

      The Patriots thought they could do better. They had studied John Locke and were steeped in theories of natural rights. But they had also read Livy and thought that monarchies were necessarily corrupt, whether in ancient Rome or contemporary Britain. Kingly rule would breed a race of tyrants who surrounded themselves with a swarm of courtiers, who in turn would milk the public purse. The Patriots said we needed a republic instead, one from which selfish dealings and corrupt bargains would be banished—a government founded on the rock of republican virtue, the virtue shown by citizens who champion the general welfare in a personally disinterested manner.¹⁹

      What the Patriots were experiencing is what the historian J.G.A. Pocock called a “Machiavellian Moment.” Today, Niccolò Machiavelli is not well known as an exponent of republican virtue, but he was in fact a loyal servant of the Florentine Republic and the author of extended reflections on political morality. In his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, he praised the public-spirited Lucius Junius Brutus, who expelled the last Roman king, Tarquin the Proud, and founded the Roman Republic. The American Patriots of the revolutionary period were also steeped in classical Roman history and celebrated the republican heroes of ancient Rome. They quoted Latin epigrams, sometimes accurately, while pamphleteers such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton adopted the names of Roman republicans as pseudonyms. Patrick Henry ominously warned that “Tarquin had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George III . . . may profit by their example.” The language of republican virtue provided the Patriots with a justification for breaking away from their corrupt British overlords.

      But just how long did republican virtue persist in America? There wasn’t much left of it by 1829, when Andrew Jackson introduced the spoils system and gave plum government jobs to his supporters. As for today, the lobbyists of K Street, the hundreds of special-interest associations in Alexandria, and the dense network of political donors in America have created what Pocock characterized as “the greatest empire of patronage and influence the world has known.” Our government, he wrote, is “dedicated to the principle that politics cannot work unless politicians do things for their friends and their friends know where to find them.”²⁰

      The dream of a government free of corruption never dies, however, and in the passions excited by the 2016 electoral campaign we experienced another Machiavellian Moment. Voters noticed that government policies were tilted in favor of powerful interest groups and the wealthiest Americans, and they demanded a change. When Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page looked at survey evidence on voting preferences, they found that the wishes of the average voter don’t correlate with those of influential interest groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.²¹ Instead, there’s a negative correlation: what business groups want—subsidies for their industries, for example—is what the average voter doesn’t want. It’s the same for economic elites generally: their preferences diverge from those of the average voter. And they pay more attention to politics, are more likely to vote, and contribute more money to candidates.²² They’re also more likely to belong to the same social circle as the candidates they support financially. So they get the things they want—funding for National Public Radio, money for Planned Parenthood, favorable tax loopholes.

      In the election, Clinton was the candidate of the status quo, of cozying up to Wall Street. In a speech to Goldman Sachs, as revealed by WikiLeaks, she told the bankers that she would let them write the banking regulations: “How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”²³ She refused to release her speeches, and we now know why. As if to remove any doubt, she told another group that when it comes to policy questions “you need both a public and a private position.”²⁴

      On the other side, Trump was the candidate of change, a challenge to politics as usual, to the whole political culture that accepted Clintonian corruption. The Democratic campaign focused almost entirely on his ethical lapses. And his supporters knew he was human, all too human. What they didn’t understand was why Hillary Clinton’s supporters didn’t seem to care about her lapses. She had left a trail of public corruption in her wake, and the Trump supporters wondered why that didn’t seem to matter.

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