The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley
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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.
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 the question is not to know whether one accepts or rejects violence, but whether the violence with which one is allied is ‘progressive’ and tends towards its own suppression or towards self-perpetuation.”21 The same thinking brought Rubashov, in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, to confess to crimes of which he was innocent in a Stalinist show trial. As a Soviet high official, Rubashov had recognized that in order to defend his communist faith he must acquiesce in his own execution. For Western liberals, Koestler’s book was an exposé of communism’s falsity and inhumanity, but in 1947 Merleau-Ponty saw it differently. As a proponent of a “Third Way” between America and the Soviet Union, he thought there was little to choose between what he saw as liberalism’s institutional violence (colonialism, capitalism) and the legalized violence of communism. While not a Stalinist, he nevertheless sympathized with those who had believed that a reign of truth and justice might at last emerge from communism’s charnel house of lies and violence.
Similarly, the Apologist for Clinton Cash argues that Mrs. Clinton’s sins are trivial by comparison with the institutional corruption of our present system of politics, where wealthy campaign donors have an outsized voice in government policies. What matters, he thinks, is not whether she enriched her family by corrupt means, but whether her administration would have been more likely to lead in time to a virtuous, progressive state. More progressive it might be, in the Apologist’s eyes, but did he give us any reason to believe that virtue might emerge from so corrupt a vessel?
Finally, the Apologist is apt to rely on the hoariest of procedural tools to avoid substantive moral questions: the legal burden of proof. Unless one can prove a quid pro quo beyond a shadow of a doubt, he says, the Clintons are entitled to a presumption of innocence. And indeed no one has ever proved that Hillary Clinton was corrupt, as her defenders are quick to note. But that’s a long way from saying that the charges against her have been discredited, and the very American tendency to turn all moral questions into legal ones—to insist on moral innocence unless legal guilt is proved to the hilt—encourages corruption. We might not wish to charge the Clintons with crimes, but we may still wish to blame them for their disregard of the proprieties, and to hope that Hillary Clinton has paid a political price for it. We might also want a tougher set of anticorruption laws, of the kind we’ll see later in this book.
SO JUST HOW CORRUPT is America? What we’re interested in is public corruption, where public officials abuse the public trust, and not the private chiseling where one individual cheats another. To measure public corruption, we need something more than the number of criminal indictments for bribery. These might sometimes be without foundation, and themselves a corrupt method of silencing political