Integrity

In the New Republic , Leon Wieseltier writes an essay he titles ” Against Integrity .” It starts with various swipes at Republican hypocrisy, but then moves to this point:

the truth is that Sarah Palin is a woman of integrity. I do not say this sardonically. I find nothing phony in her, nothing cynical. She lacks the detachment from one’s own purposes that phoniness and cynicism (and genuine thought) require. She is too immediately what she is. Palin is the sort of supporter of the war in Iraq whose son is shipping off to the war in Iraq. This I must respect. She is not a Palm conservative, pausing over the creamed spinach to raise another glass to the America in which she chooses not to dwell. Whatever the Christian conservative way of life is, Palin is living it. And so her grotesque and fascinating candidacy broaches an interesting subject, which is the moral insufficiency of integrity.

The blogger Ann Althouse calls the essay ultimate gas-baggery , but Wieseltier is actually in pursuit of an interesting point. He doesn’t manage to catch it—how can we avoid the politics of integrity when the only moral storyline the press knows is hypocrisy? When Wieseltier himself opens with that storyline?

Nonetheless, it’s true that integrity is only a formal characteristic, and we still have to ask what material content fills a person’s integrity. Better a hypocrite than a person with an evil consistency.