“Mr. Hackworth,” Finkle-McGraw said after the pleasantries had petered out, speaking in a new tone of voice, a the-meeting-will-come-to-order sort of voice, “please favour me with your opinion of hypocrisy.”
“Excuse me. Hypocrisy, Your Grace?”
“Yes. You know.”
“It’s a vice, I suppose.”
“A little one or a big one? Think carefully—much hinges upon the answer.”
“I suppose that depends on the particular circumstances.”
“That will never fail to be a safe answer, Mr. Hackworth,” the Equity Lord said reproachfully. Major Napier laughed, somewhat artificially, not knowing what to make of this line of inquiry.
“Recent events in my life have renewed my appreciation for the virtues of doing things safely,” Hackworth said. Both of the others chuckled knowingly.
“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of climate, you are not allowed to criticise others—after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism? . . .
“Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour—you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy. . . .
“Because they were hypocrites,” Finkle-McGraw said, after igniting his calabash and shooting a few tremendous fountains of smoke into the air, “the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefandous conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves—they took no moral stances and lived by none.”
“So they were morally superior to the Victorians—” Major Napier said, a bit snowed under.
“—even though—in fact, because—they had no morals at all.”
There was a moment of silent, bewildered head-shaking around the copper table.
“We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Finkle-McGraw continued. “In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception—he never held those beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it’s a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”
“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”
“Of course not,” Finkle-McGraw said.
—Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
Hillary Clinton’s greatest asset in this campaign is her front-runner status. It’s understandable that a foe eager to reinforce her image as an unscrupulous competitor might seize on the belief that she set a trap for Bernie Sanders, which he walked into. But it defies reason that she would think there was any need to do that. She’s confident—some might say overconfident—in her ability to win on her own strengths. Even those who despise her have to admit, if they’re honest with themselves, that she’s intelligent, informed, a quick thinker, exceptionally tenacious, appealing and even inspiring to some, more than adequately funded, and still much more widely recognized by the voting public than her opponents are. Such a candidate has no need for dirty tricks; all she has to do is play it safe and press her existing advantage.
Bernie Sanders’ greatest asset in this campaign is his integrity. It’s understandable that a foe eager to attack his strength might seize on an opportunity to show that it was less than it seemed. But it also defies reason that Sanders—or, for that matter, anyone on his team—would deliberately resort to cheating as a tactic with which to gain an edge over Clinton. The Sanders staffers’ intrusion into data that were supposed to be restricted to the Clinton campaign was foolish and arguably unethical, but the idea that it was motivated by Sanders’ desire to obtain an unfair advantage strains plausibility. Not only does no one with any sense undermine his own strategy like that, it’s hard to believe that the staffers who accessed the data could have known exactly what information to retrieve in order to improve the campaign’s position by any meaningful degree, found that information and stashed it someplace secure within the unknown window of time they had to do so—or that, their motives being so crooked, they made no effort to cover their tracks.
To say that this episode has destroyed Sanders’ campaign, or that it’s destroyed Clinton’s campaign, is absurd. Neither campaign is dramatically worse off than it was a week ago. Clinton is still the front-runner, and Sanders still has his integrity.
Those who argue that Sanders doesn’t have his integrity any longer, who insist that his staffers “stole valuable confidential files” and that he’s tainted by association, need to attempt the exercise of putting themselves in Sanders’ shoes and asking whether it would make any sense at all for him to condone such a thing, let alone order it. They need to think about what they would do in such a situation, upon finding out that their own people had taken part in a potentially embarrassing security breach, and reflect honestly on whether Sanders, by firing the national data director primarily responsible for the act and continuing to investigate whether any of the other participants were culpable, hasn’t already done exactly what they would do. They need to forthrightly declare what more they want from him—because it seems like some individuals wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less from Sanders than his apologizing personally to Hillary Clinton on CNN during prime time for ever having doubted her entitlement to the presidency, endorsing her nomination, withdrawing from the race, retiring from politics to raise llamas, and willing his entire estate upon his death to the DNC.
The repeated insistence that Sanders “cheated” sounds very much like the 20th-century voices in Stephenson’s novel, condemning him for having had the gall to take a moral stance and then failed to live up to it perfectly, implying—if not outright proclaiming—that it was all part of a planned campaign of deception . . . even though holding the moral high ground, any moral high ground, has never seemed particularly important to these accusers before.
I believe in Sanders’ sincerity in this matter, because doubting it, based on decades of evidence, doesn’t make sense. I also believe in Clinton’s blamelessness in this matter, because the possibility of her personal involvement, also based on decades of evidence, doesn’t make sense. Even if one candidate or the other (or both—is such a thing even possible?) handled himself or herself with less than perfect propriety throughout this episode, the kinds of accusations and condemnations we’re seeing from die-hard pie fighters supporters of both candidates are absurd and deplorable, not only on the basis of their content but also because neither candidate has given us a single sound reason to believe that he or she would stoop to deliberate, flagrant sabotage of the other’s campaign.
What does make sense—total sense—is Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s violent overreaction to the situation, mainly because she has shown herself not only to be biased and poor at hiding it but also to have an authoritarian streak a mile wide. We’ve seen it in the way she dug in her heels over the debate schedule, which she determined singlehandedly, gaveling down vice chairs who asked her to explain it; we've seen it in her threat to bar from future debates any candidate who took part in any debate not sanctioned by the DNC; we've seen it in the petty way she disinvited Rep. Tulsi Gabbard from the Oct. 13 primary debate for disagreeing with her publicly. And authoritarians invariably react to criticism by attempting to punish their critics, which is exactly what she did to the Sanders campaign upon finding out about the data breach, backing down (as authoritarians also do) only when she realized she didn’t have the power to enforce her will which she thought she had. The damage she’s done to the party, by publicizing the breach and by driving a wedge between supporters of the two campaigns, will be hard to measure, but it’s surely greater than zero.
Wasserman Schultz is the only figure in this episode so far who has committed errors in judgment and ethics and hasn’t suffered any consequences for them—perhaps because there’s no hypocrisy she can be accused of. She’s taken no moral stances and claims none.