The Public Square
Bill Clinton and the American Character
This is the long promised reflection on what “the Clinton affair” does or does not mean for the state of the republic. It is of course an interim reflection, since people will be trying to sort this out for many years to come. But for now at least some of the dust has settled and the main outline of the story is clear enough. I mean, of course, the story surrounding the White House intern, which, admittedly, keeps bumping into other stories. For the next little while we are stuck with a President who, beyond reasonable doubt, is guilty of perjury, tampering with witnesses, and obstruction of justice, and who probably is a rapist. That we are better off stuck with him rather than having removed him from office was, many thought, the clinching argument of Dale Bumpers, former Senator from Arkansas, during the Senate trial. “If you have difficulty because of an intense dislike of the President, and that’s understandable, rise above it,” Bumpers exhorted the Senators. “He is not the issue. He will be gone. You won’t. So don’t leave a precedent from which we may never recover and almost surely will regret….After all, he’s only got two years left.”[1]That the impeached President was not the issue in an impeachment trial was among the more curious assertions in this curious affair.
But it is true that the public contention was about more than Bill Clinton. For a year and a half we have been treated to seemingly endless discussion about what all this means for our constitutional order, our political culture, and, inevitably, “the American character.” In this reflection, it is the last question that is of particular interest. This “journal of religion and public life” does not understand public life primarily in terms of politics as that term is ordinarily used. It should not be surprising, therefore, that in this space President Clinton has seldom been mentioned since his election in 1992. In fact, in more than seven years he has been mentioned about ten times, mainly in connection with his statements and actions relative to abortion. So we have hardly been obsessed with the man.
This is not to suggest, however, that I have not had definite views about him. Permit me to begin with a personal word about how I understand his sinking of our political culture in apparently bottomless mendacity. When he started running for President he was known as a “New Democrat”—meaning a liberal mildly mugged by reality—and I was inclined to see him as among the less bad of a bad lot of Democrats. Until I came across an old video of the program, I had quite forgotten that at the beginning of January 1993, I had done an extended one-on-one interview with Robert MacNeil of what was then the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour about the impending Clinton presidency. Asked by Mr. MacNeil what I expected, I answered: “I think what I expect, and maybe what I wish as well, is that he will continue on a trajectory [of] trying to move the Democratic Party into, if not the center, at least into conversational distance with most Americans. I think he has taken the lessons of the 1972 McGovern debacle very much to heart and he could have a real opportunity, especially when he speaks of a new covenant with America, to engage in a new kind of political discourse.”
Few may remember now, but a “new covenant” with the American people was a major theme of the Clinton campaign of 1992. Because he received only 43 percent of the vote, I noted, “he knows he has to reach out in trying to rebuild trust in a deeply confused and conflicted society.” “That would be a very significant contribution. There is reason to believe he might do that. There is a lot of reason to believe he might not. We have to hope for the best now with Bill Clinton; we have to hope that what he did in order to secure the nomination, which is understandable, is not the last word. He had to really lock himself in tightly to pretty extreme interest groups on issues such as abortion, school choice, homosexual rights construed as civil rights. Now the question is, now that the party is his, can he move to make the American people, this deeply conflicted people, his constituency in something like a covenant, in something like a conversation that can elevate the politics of our time.”
In that interview, I referred to our “culture war”—a term I had been using since the late 1970s—and said it was very sad that Clinton had made the economy the central issue of the campaign, and that George Bush had allowed him to do that. “That’s not what Americans are most disturbed about today,” I said. “They are disturbed about What kind of people are we? And what kind of people are we going to be?” Was I hopeful, MacNeil asked, that Clinton is prepared to lead in addressing these questions, to which I responded, “Of course. The alternative to hope is despair.” MacNeil: “Do you think he is, then?” I said, “I want to hope he is. I hope he takes advantage of what now clearly is an opportunity that no Democrat has had since McGovern.” After elaborating on that at some length, the interview concluded with my saying: “I think that, and this now is a dreadful scenario and it’s the flip side of what I said earlier, if President Clinton were to move vigorously to get passage of the [pro-abortion] Freedom of Choice Act in Congress and if he then, as he at times said he would, put Justices on the Supreme Court for whom it would be necessary to pass the litmus test of Roe v. Wade, we would have a divide, a conflict of morality in our public life, much more intense than anything we have seen since the nineteenth-century conflict over slavery. It’s a frightening prospect.”
I tried, then, to put the best construction on Clinton’s election, but I’m afraid that did not last long. As I said, I had quite forgotten about the MacNeil/ Lehrer broadcast, which is not surprising, since a few days later, on January 10, 1993, I was hit with an emergency cancer operation which I barely survived. Some days later, after I had been removed from the intensive care unit, I was lying in the hospital bed, plugged with tubes and surrounded by friends. We were watching a Clinton news conference following his inauguration, at which he announced that he was rescinding the Reagan-Bush executive orders that placed pitifully modest restrictions on government support for abortion, and said the military should be open to gays. In words that have been frequently quoted back to me since then, I painfully raised my head from the pillow and announced—in what I am told was an oracular tone—“Mark my words. We are watching a man stumbling through the rubble of a ruined presidency.” I have never had a moment’s doubt about the accuracy of that pronouncement. Nobody could know all the ways he would stumble, nor how sordid the rubble would be, but whatever promise this presidency held was ruined from the beginning.
Keeping his Word
The Clinton news conference was on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the very day that tens of thousands were marching in the streets of Washington to give life a chance. There was nothing in Clinton’s words about his famous propensity for feeling their pain, nor even the slightest gesture of ambivalence about the slaughter of the innocents. Completely absent was any reference to a “new covenant,” or reaching out to create a “national conversation” about who we are and intend to be. For Clinton, it seemed, the thousands of marchers, and the majority of Americans who are morally troubled by abortion, did not exist. Those who believe the defense of the innocent is the great moral cause of our time were undeserving of even passing acknowledgment. In tones of unctuous self-righteousness, Clinton declared himself the champion of the presumably self-evident justice of a “woman’s right to choose.” It is the only promise that he was to keep.
The gays did not get what they wanted with the military, and on other major issues—for example, welfare reform, crime, and free trade—Clinton would prove himself to be what liberals call a “moderate” Republican. As for foreign policy, there, too, he is stumbling through ever deeper rubble. His only ambitious and unabashedly liberal proposal, the effort to socialize medicine led by his wife, went down in flames before it even came to a vote. Although pundits persist in calling him a successful politician, there have been few successes apart from presiding over the enactment of Republican policies. Only on abortion has he kept his word. Also in foreign policy, the one consistent element has been the effort to establish abortion as an internationally mandated human right. In the history books he will be most accurately described as The Abortion President.
Not all readers will agree, and I do not wish to overplay it, but I believe that abortion is the lie of which all his other lies are the excretion. It is said that, if one can lie about this, one can lie about anything. To be sure, many people are less than honest about abortion, but the discussion then turns to what ought to be done about it. Honest people can disagree about that. Honest people cannot deny what is done in abortion. With Bill Clinton, that adamantine denial leaves no room for the slightest suggestion that there might be legitimate cause for moral uneasiness. What is so striking is that this is the one uncompromised and uncompromisable position of his presidency. Never once in all these years has this famously lip-biting practitioner of welling empathy publicly acknowledged even a twitch of uncertainty about the unlimited abortion license imposed by Roe v. Wade. The dogmatic assertion of a right to kill the helpless and innocent is a lie so wild that it cannot be—to use the Clinton term of art—compartmentalized.
Of course there have been many other lies. His friends and political allies have said that he is a remarkably good liar. Obviously, that is not true. A good liar does not have a reputation for being a good liar. The other lies, big and little, have been self-serving and opportunistic, as is also the abortion lie. Maybe, as many who have known him claim, he was a liar from the start. His perception of reality, they say, has always been subservient to ambition and desire. In some perverse way, Clinton may, at least most of the time, believe what he says. After meeting with Clinton early in the presidency, my colleague James Nuechterlein described him as “serially sincere.” Clinton seems to be persuaded, it is observed, that he really means whatever he is saying at the time. I don’t know if that is right. Did he believe what he was saying when, in January of last year, he told the American people he had never had any kind of sexual relationship with Miss Lewinsky? If so, we are dealing here not with an extraordinary capacity for compartmentalization but with a species of autism—an absorption in self-centered subjectivity securely insulated from reality. The external referents by which truth and falsehood are determined are made irrelevant by virtue of what appears to be a self-blinding that has brought about the spectacle now evident to all, that of a man stumbling through the rubble of a ruined presidency.
The President We Deserve?
But what does this tell us about “the character of the American people”? After all, they elected him, and did so twice. Not by a majority, to be sure, but by enough to secure his claim to the office, and securing that seems to be his main goal and achievement. The failure of the political process to remove him from office has been turned by some into an indictment of the character of the American people. The people, we are told, got the President that they deserve. In 1976 Jimmy Carter campaigned by promising America a government as good as its people. Now it is said that America has a government, or at least a President, as bad as its people. That, I believe, is a conclusion not to be lightly accepted.
Shortly after the Lewinsky scandal broke, I wrote in this space: “If, as almost all informed parties seem to believe, Mr. Clinton has during his term of office had sex with one or more women other than his wife, and if he has directly looked the American people in the eye and lied through his teeth in denying it, and if the American people know this and still allow him to continue in office, I promise critics who say I have an excessively hopeful view of the American character that I will engage in an agonizing reappraisal of my position.”[2] Obviously, I have some explaining to do, and it will take some little doing. I trust it will not be excessively agonizing for the reader.
A most doleful conclusion about the American character was announced by Paul Weyrich, President of the Free Congress Foundation, on February 16, 1999, and has been the subject of widespread commentary.[3] Weyrich is an old war-horse of conservative causes and in the late seventies he was the one who suggested to Jerry Falwell the name “moral majority.” Now he has concluded that it was all a dreadful mistake. “What Americans would have found absolutely intolerable only a few years ago, a majority now not only tolerates but celebrates.” Until now, he says, “we have assumed that a majority of Americans basically agrees with our point of view.” “I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values.” The United States “is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture.” We must now face the fact, he says, “that politics itself has failed.” Conservatives must now “secede” and form “some sort of quarantine” from the general culture. Paraphrasing the sixties slogan, “turn on, tune in, drop out,” Weyrich urges conservatives to turn off, tune out, and drop out—in the hope that they can “find places, even if it is where we physically are right now, where we can live godly, righteous, and sober lives.”
It is hard to know how to take Weyrich’s statement. Within weeks he was back at his old political stand, touting Republican presidential candidates, just as though politics had not failed after all. But he says he is deadly serious about his announcement of the end of politics. If so, it is depressing that he labored for more than thirty years under the deadly delusion of there being a moral majority that already agreed with his positions and was only awaiting the opportunity to give that agreement effective political expression. That was not the case and is not the case, and is probably never going to be the case. Most people most of the time are thoroughly indifferent to politics, which is probably just as well. For most who do pay attention, politics is mainly entertainment, much like following baseball. The public contention for moral truth is always a minority vocation; it is a task to be pursued, in St. Paul’s words to Timothy, “in season and out of season.” To say that politics has failed is to say that the American experiment has definitively failed. There have been and are today societies in which politics—free deliberation and decision about how to order public life—is precluded. It is the better part of wisdom to know that, in whatever form, it could happen here and may be happening here—as, for instance, in the judicial usurpation of politics. But the claim that it has happened here, that politics has failed, is an apocalyptic excitement to be kept on a tight leash.
There are other religious and political conservatives saying, in effect, that for thirty years they tried to wake up America and have now concluded that it can’t be done. This is the message of columnist Cal Thomas and Michigan pastor Ed Dobson in their book Blinded by Might. In fact, Dobson, after a stint with Falwell’s Moral Majority, invoked a pox on politics many years ago, and it is hard to know how seriously to take Thomas on this score. He, too, is back to his old political stand in his syndicated column that runs neck and neck with George Will’s in being the most published in the country. But after the failed impeachment effort, the Weyrich-Thomas-Dobson line seems to be gaining ground. To the extent that they are issuing a caution against the dangers of politicizing religion and are underscoring the limits of what can be achieved through politics, their statements should be welcomed. But it is more than that. It expresses a painful deflation of political expectations that can only be explained by a prior and thoroughly unwarranted inflation. In addition, it purports to know much too much about the character of the American people.
Enter the Neo-Puritans
Last October Andrew Sullivan set the party line for one liberal reading of what has happened to conservatism.[4] In a New York Times Magazine article, “Going Down Screaming,” he depicted conservatives as embracing a neo-Puritanism that increasingly rails against a decadent culture. This journal, he said, is “the spiritual nerve center” of a new conservatism of “moral righteousness” (he meant self-righteousness, of course) that sounds increasingly like a twisted replay of the radicalism of the sixties. Alan Wolfe is a sociologist at Boston University who directed interviews of two hundred suburbanites and concluded in One Nation, After All that America is a country of more or less happy liberals. He, too, has had fun with the Weyrich-Thomas-Dobson claims, noting the similarity with sixties radicalism, and suggesting that we may be witnessing the breakup of the alliance between economic conservatives and the “moral regulators” in the Republican party. Both kinds of conservatives, he says, subscribed to a “new class theory” which claimed that sundry elites were radically at odds with the values of most Americans. The Clinton affair, he says, gave the majority a chance to take a stand against the “relativism” of the elites. “But the opposite happened. As the President’s popularity held steady and even grew, conservative moralists decided that the problem was not Bill Clinton but the large majority of Americans who wanted him to remain in office. Faced with its first test, the new class theory failed.”[5]
New class theory was and is a good deal more sophisticated than Alan Wolfe suggests, but that is another argument. I cite him only to illustrate the uses to which some liberals are putting what they take to be conservative despair of the American character. Columnist William Safire is a conservative of a strongly libertarian bent, and he reaches similar conclusions. He is puzzled that so many are so fanatically loyal to a rascal like Clinton. (Forget that George Stephanopolous, Dee Dee Myers, and a host of other associates do not seem to be terribly loyal. The White House calls them the “commentraitors.”) Based on his admittedly unscientific reading of responses he has received, Safire suggests that, if people feel they have to choose between Clinton and the neo-Puritans, they’ll take Clinton. “There we have a snapshot of… this President’s remarkably solid support. The loyalists’ Clinton: not a reckless predator of women but a victim of an elitist-moralist plot; not a breaker of solemn oaths but a breaker of moral chains; not a cornered con man but a hero to all who feel hunted. Is this the new, much different, Silent Majority?”[6]
Among conservatives, Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal offers a vigorous riposte to the claim that the failure to remove Clinton is an indictment of the American people.[7] “Those who know Paul Weyrich,” he says, “understand that he will focus on the hole in any donut. But now he sees a hole and calls it an abyss.” Gigot recounts the conservative successes of the past twenty years, from winning the Cold War to welfare reform to the ascendancy of school choice. He cites data suggesting that only 40 percent thought Clinton’s offenses did not deserve impeachment, but more who worried about the disruptive effect of removing him from office, many of whom found the prospect of Al Gore as President “scary.” “This narrow definition of political self-interest,” says Gigot, “may be regrettable, but it isn’t irrational or morally corrupt.” I note in passing that editor James Nuechterlein and the former editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, both indubitably conservative, also opposed removing Clinton from office because it would be too disruptive and polarizing. But this is a Catch-22 situation. If sixty-seven or more Senators had voted to remove him, the action obviously would not have been dangerously polarizing. The prospect of removal was so polarizing only because Democrats (including some who publicly said he was guilty as charged) marched in partisan lockstep toward a predetermined acquittal.
Returning to Paul Gigot, he writes: “Voters weren’t saying they share Mr. Clinton’s morals. They were saying this President isn’t much worse than most politicians, all of whom they mistrust. Throw in the public’s ambivalence toward sexual harassment charges, and Mr. Clinton’s survival seems preordained. The miracle is that he got himself impeached.” Of the readiness of Weyrich and others to throw in the towel, Gigot says, “This tendency always exists on the religious right, which cares more about salvation in the next world than in this one. They tuned out at least once earlier this century, after the Scopes trial.” One rather hopes that they care more about salvation in the next world, and one notes that Weyrich, although his constituency is largely evangelical Protestant, is an Eastern Rite Catholic. But Gigot’s point stands. There is in fundamentalist-evangelical Christianity, as among some Catholic traditionalists, an apocalyptic temper conducive to hyperbolic renderings of both successes and defeats. It is a very unconservative conservatism.
“Conservatives,” Gigot concludes, “used to understand that all political change is slow, that in fact it ought to be slow, and that the task of political persuasion is never done. Russell Kirk, who forgot more about American culture than Mr. Weyrich remembers, liked to say that ‘There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.’ Conservatives can’t save America by becoming anti-American.” (Actually, it is Kirk quoting T. S. Eliot, but that point, too, stands.) Similar arguments are made within the worlds of evangelical Protestantism. Charles Colson, for instance, writing in the mainline evangelical publication, Christianity Today: “On all sides I hear battle-weary evangelicals talk about abandoning cultural engagement and tending our own backyard instead. I can’t imagine anything more self-defeating, or more ill-timed, for two reasons. First, it is unbiblical. Scripture calls us to bring Christ’s redemption to all of life; despair is a sin. Second, to leave the cultural battlefield now would be to desert the cause just when we are on the verge of making a historic breakthrough. I believe John Paul II is exactly right in predicting that the year 2000 will usher in ‘a great springtime for Christianity.’”[8]
Colson cites a number of evidences that “the tide is turning in the culture war”—including declining rates of divorce, abortion, births to unwed teens, people on welfare, and crime. As to ideas, it is clear that the false gods have failed. “The only remaining ‘ism’ is postmodernism, which is not an ideology but… the admission that every attempt to construct a comprehensive, utopian worldview has failed. It is a formalized expression of despair.” Knowing his evangelical audience, Colson’s conclusion is not untouched by the above-mentioned hyperbole: “The dawn of the new millennium is a time for Christians to celebrate, to blow trumpets and fly the flag high. To desert the field of battle now would be historical blindness, betraying our heritage just when we have the greatest opportunity of the century. This is the time to make a compelling case that Christianity offers the only rational and realistic hope for both personal redemption and social renewal.” No dropping out there.
An Obituary for Outrage
Among conservative intellectual heavyweights, few carry more weight than William J. Bennett. Seven months into the Monica Lewinsky phase of the continuing chronicles of the Clinton scandal, he published The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. The book is an exemplary instance of the venerable genre of the jeremiad, made more effective by his fair-minded statement of opposing arguments. Bennett’s conclusions, however, offer naught for our comfort. “What explains this seeming public indifference toward, and even acceptance of, the President’s scandals? The explanations most often put forth include very good economic times; scandal fatigue; the fact that a tawdry sexual relationship makes people queasy; the President’s hyperaggressive, relentless, and effective spin team; the inclination to withhold judgment until more facts are known or give the President the benefit of the doubt; the fact that there are few leaders in any realm (religious, business, and the academy among them) who have articulated the case against the President; and the fact that Republican leadership—the Loyal Opposition—has been quiescent and inconsistent in its comments about the Clinton scandal, apparently afraid of voter backlash. These are plausible explanations. And still. I cannot shake the thought that the widespread loss of outrage against this President’s misconduct tells us something fundamentally important about our condition. Our commitment to long-standing ideals has been enervated. We desperately need to recover them, and soon. They are under assault.”
Bennett wants to resist the thought, but he is inclined to believe that this is a moment of truth about who we are as a people. “When, rocked with serious, credible allegations of grave misconduct and violations of law, the President retreated for as long as he could to a gilded bunker, obstinately and ‘absolutely’ unwilling to rebut troubling allegations made against him. And the history books may describe how a diffident public, when confronted with all the evidence of wrongdoing and all the squalor, simply shrugged its shoulders. And, finally, that William Jefferson Clinton really was the representative man of our time, when the overwhelming majority of Americans no longer believed that presidential character mattered, and that no man, not even a President, was accountable to the law.”
Seven months later, after the impeachment and Senate acquittal, Bill Bennett publicly opined that he had been forced to the conclusion that his most doleful analysis had been vindicated, that he has for years been wrong about the American people, that maybe he was simply out of touch. In a Wall Street Journal article he reviews again the arguments offered to exculpate the American people, and he finds them wanting.[9] “These wishful assertions do not square with reality,” he says. Restating the articles of indictment against a nation that has lost its capacity for outrage, he writes, “These are unpleasant things to realize. But it is the way things are, and it is always better to accept reality than merely wish it away….. There is no escaping the fact that Bill Clinton’s Year of Lies—told and retold, not believed but accepted—has been an ignoble moment for a great people.” In his book, Bennett spoke frequently about “we”—meaning we Americans. But at one point in the book he slips: “We—and by ‘we’ I mean in the first instance the political class itself—need to reclaim some of the high purpose of politics.” There, I believe, he slips into a truth that deserved more attention in his diagnosis. The political class, including political intellectuals inside the beltway, should not be confused with the American people. The political class—notably congressional Democrats who unanimously and shamelessly defended a President whom, one must assume, most of them knew to be guilty of removable offenses—is deserving of Bennett’s outrage. Of course, such politicians calculated that the voters would let them get away with what they did. But that is a somewhat different question, to which I will return. It may also turn out to have been a grave political miscalculation.
The Media Made Us Do It
It is not only conservatives who say that this has been a moment of truth revealing some unpleasant facts about the kind of people we have become. Since liberals generally defended Clinton, at least by opposing impeachment and conviction, they, unlike Bennett, do not take that as an indication of moral turpitude. Many blame the year of horrors on the media. The media made us do it. That is the suggestion of Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, for example.[10] His wrap-up reflection is portentously titled “Exorcism,” and he begins with the line from Troilus and Cressida: “Take but degree away, untune that string. And, hark, what discord follows!” The electronic media, says Lapham, have untuned the string of public reason. Citing Marshall McLuhan as his authority, Lapham asserts that the habits of mind derived from the electronic media have deconstructed the texts of civilization founded on the print media, which leads him to the thought that “maybe the argument at the root of the impeachment trial was epistemological, not moral.” Well, that’s a relief, assuming we can get our epistemology straight.
But, of course, Lapham is on to something about the electronic media, and he puts it nicely: “Sympathetic to a pagan rather than a Christian appreciation of the world, the camera sees but doesn’t think; it cares only for the sensation of the moment, for any tide of emotion strong enough to draw a paying crowd. A plane crash in the mountains of Peru commands the same slack-jawed respect as Mick Jagger in a divorce court, Monica Lewinsky eating Belgian chocolate, cruise missiles falling on Baghdad.” And there is more: “Because the camera doesn’t know how to make distinctions—between treason and fellatio, between the moral and the amoral, between an important Senator and an important ape—its insouciance works against the operative principle of a democratic republic. Such a government requires of both its politicians and its citizens a high degree of literacy, also a sense of history, and, at least in the American context, an ethics derived from the syllabus of the Bible. None of those requirements carry any weight in the Kingdom of the Eternal Now governed by the rule of images. Bring narrative to Jay Leno, or hierarchy to Howard Stern, and you might as well be speaking Homeric Greek.”
Lapham covers his political backside by describing the impeachment as an “attempt at political assassination dressed up in the rhetoric of high-minded conscience.” Yet he seems to be not entirely without sympathy for the congressional Republicans who “objected to the society’s order of value and wished to overturn it.” But in the kingdom of the camera and celebrity, it is simply too late for that. Since they couldn’t impeach the electronic culture, it is understandable that conservatives turned on Clinton. “Who better to bear the blame for everything else that has gone so badly wrong in the once happy land of Christian print?” Henry Hyde’s concluding speech was “a prayer for the safe return of an imaginary American past, and when he finished, the nearly perfect silence in the Senate chamber again brought to mind the ritual stillness of a world out of time. For a long moment none of the Senators moved in their chair
