As a voting public we cannot forgive former governor Eliot Spitzer for wrecking his personal life; but we can forgive a president for wrecking his nation. Is there something wrong with this picture?
The question we need to ask is "Why is it that we can forgive one but not the other?" Why is it that when Dubya and the company he works for wreck a nation - when they wreck its free press, its military, its financial system, its system of justice, and its standing as a moral leader in the free world - we yawn and say "goodnight, Johnboy," as if that's precisely what is supposed to happen. No big deal, right?
We might argue that Dubya was too stupid to wreck the nation. If it is true, then it suggests that we prefer in our leaders a kind of sheer gross incompetence that is capable of wrecking a nation to the kind of weakness that is capable of wrecking little more than a marriage. Or we prefer presidents too stupid to recognize when policy is in the public interests. Wrecked marriages are terrible; but when a politician's marriage breaks up it does not mean another hundred thousand people out of work or another million people are cast out of their homes for failure to pay the mortgage. Moral perfection is ideal in political leaders; but to paraphrase Bill Buckley, "as reality approaches the ideal, the costs become astronomical." When it comes to political leaders may need to choose our flaws.
Just as poor moral character is a symbol suggestive of a person unfit to hold office, so too is the advocacy and promotion of the village idiot to run the free world. If Bush is an idiot; then the neocons need to be thrown out for good. Alternatively, if Bush is savvy and smart and if he is representing neocon policy, the neocons ought to be thrown out for good. In either case, neocon policy owns the failure.
We might argue that nobody could forsee the consequences of the policies. But this just seems silly. The problems caused by these policy problems have occurred many times before in history. The principles violated by these policies are at least as old as the Great Depression; some are as old as western civilization.
- The people who regulated banks after the Great Depression forsaw the consequences of a) an over leveraged financial system and b) the integration of banks with other financial service institutions. They made a body of laws that stood from the early 1930's until 1996 when banking deregulation was passed by a Republican Congress and a conservative President. This one Dubya doesn't own; but his neocon ventriloquist does.
- Foreign occupations have gone badly when the cultures in question were not like the US culture, and where the fundamental institutions that are required for success either do not already exist or are systematically dismantled. This, Vietnam should have taught Americans. Adventures in Latin America might have done the same thing. Or perhaps we could have learned something from Napoleon's successful campaign in Russia or Hitler's successful campaign in France.
- Preemtive strikes are morally questionable; any nation that engages in them loses the moral high ground. And this makes them inherently less trustworthy. That's not a problem for a nation that neither has any trading partners nor needs any; but most of our raw materials are imported, and a large portion of our finished goods are as well. Trade is not axiomatic or automatic. Access to raw materials is not guaranteed. Preemptive strikes destabilize the world, turn nations against our own, and make commerce both more risky and more expensive.
- Arguably, $100 per bbl. oil is one of the consequences of destabilizing Iraq. And in light of the arguments above, it was forseeable. A cynic might argue that it was all so predictable that any fool would see that the purpose of the Iraq war was not just to secure oil but to drive the price up. Perhaps there is a moral problem with that?
- Then there is the Constitution. Dubya may be the only president in history to say "sure, I broke a law. I broke a lot of laws, so what?" The fact that he broke the FISA law and has not been prosecuted sets the precedent for a president who is above the law. This functionally means that the Constitution is not fully functional. The restraints that Congress properly ought to place on the Executive are not being enforced. And if it is the start of a trend, then Dubya's administration will mark the point that tyranny became permanently established in the highest levels of the land.
The list could go on for pages. In all of these cases there is simply no question that something would break as a result of the policy. The questions were "when?" and "how badly." And "who would pay? " Neocons have arranged a cozy relationship with major parts of the press; and therefore, these policies were not critically examined in most major publications. The reason Joe on the street did not know of the risks was twofold. 1) He wasn't very interested. 2) It was not in the interests of the neocons that he should know. Americans might plead ignorance.
In final analysis, the most likley reason we forgive Dubya for wrecking a nation while we cannot forgive Spitzer for wrecking his marriage is that we can clearly understand what Spitzer did but not what Dubya did. We understand what is morally wrong about Spitzer's actions; but we do not understand the moral failings of the neocons' policies.
We might reason that a person who is not of sound moral judgment and discipline is unfit to hold public office. This is fine reasoning as far as it goes; but there are a number of really big problems with applying it exclusively to Spitzer.
One is that the type of weakness Spitzer had is not so very uncommon among the people of power. As one government official put it during the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio, "If every Washington politician or bureaucrat who has slept with an aide were to be forced from office, it would be a great deal easier to find good parking spaces downtown." When it comes to this particular sort of moral problem, the consequences it has on personal life may be material; but the affair is private and the effect on the public is symbolic, at best. In similar cases, the French try to just hold their noses and ignore minor personal failings.
Another problem in applying the moral argument only to Spitzer is that the argument presupposes that it is not some moral character flaw that motivates the bad policy of the neocon. Whether this is so depends on correctly distinguishing between Adam Smith's idea that enlightened self interest, operating in a society of educated and ethically sound people - tends toward good results ... in certain kinds of trading situations, and the blanket theological proposition upon which "neoconomics" is built that "greed is good."
It may seem like a quibble; but a great deal of important stuff lies in the distinction. It is analogous to the difference between personal liberty in a well run western style democracy and personal liberty in an anarchic society such as post-invasion Iraq. In the former case laws and law enforcement sanction social behavior that is eggregiously destructive. In the latter case a total absence of governmental form and function was fundamentally anarchic - it allowed an unprecedented level of freedom. But the anarchy also caused violence that preyed on the weak or unfortunate.
Similarly, there are moral reasons not to invade nations whose natural resources one covets or for other arbitrary reasons.
And if one is hesitant to bring moral arguments to bear on political discourse, all one need do is to set about trying to understand how cooperation, trade, and trust are what makes things work in a vast, interconnected, specialized society. Moral reasoning is concerned with preserving these qualities. Societies that fail to preserve trust and cooperation experience serious impediments to economic development. Or, if they are developed, they tend to fall into decline.
If one understands the moral arguments it is not difficult to see that the moral ground upon which most of the neocon's economic and foreign policy agenda is built is not just swampland; it could barely support one of those little waterskeeters that skit across the surfaces of quiescent summer ponds. It's little wonder that we frequently find our boots full of muck, and we sometimes feel in danger of drowning. Most of political policy since 1980 is built on this kind of moral reasoning. It is built to capitalize on short term trends by mortgaging and not maintaining assets of all sorts: capital, skill, goodwill, institutional, etc. It's the perfect prescription for long-term societal failure.
The fact of Spitzer being out of office while Bush remains in office suggests that we are incapable of evaluating the moral implications of bad policy, even after it has borne bitter fruit. It is like seing adultery tear apart a million families and saying "So what? Why should people not do as they please, regardless of the consequences to the people involved?" That, after all, is the public policy purpose of laws prohibiting prostitution. In a public policy debate, that is the moral mandate for the law Spitzer broke.
If we persist in believing that the most productive way to operate a society is for Spitzer to be out of office and Bush to be in office, then there is neither much question about why our system of government is so broken nor is there much hope we might live to see it get any better. If we cannot understand arguments about huge policy issues, and we are satisfied with that state of affairs, there simply is no hope that democracy might serve the public interest.