Patriotic Philanderers

I should respond to some of these Vito-related comments, I think, because they sound reasonable enough at first blush and provide thereby a good means of sharpening my argument. First consider commenter Tel:

He wasn’t married at the time, but Thomas Jefferson did father several children with one of his slaves, starting in 1795. Should his political career have been over? He would have never been President. Franklin Roosevelt would have been drummed out of politics in 1918. I doubt that we could have easily replaced either of those public servants. If we throw out all of the adulterers from public office, I would guess that about a quarter of government jobs would go unfulfilled. (Though that would certainly be a creative method of cutting the budget).

The aim isn’t to relitigate the suitability of past patriotic philanderers for office, especially given the obvious fact that at least some patriotic philanderers made cardinal contributions to American power. (Note: I can’t think of any more noncontroversial way of summing up any single way in which both Jefferson and FDR could be considered Presidents we’d not want to have missed out on.) History is the story of our mistakes.

But it’s also the storybook of lessons, then. And it’s also a series of begged questions about what we could have done better had we only the will to do so. Thus, it’s also an invitation to ask what exactly it would mean to do better. My contention is that being more discriminating about the moral character of public officeholders is one such important type of doing better. There’s nothing particularly glamorous or, on the other hand, puritanically obsessive about this idea. A more accurate metaphor would be: when it comes to the moral character of our politicians, let’s be more like that cat on the Fancy Feast commercials that turns up its nose at that other cat food. Someone dares to call this cat food? It isn’t worthy of the name! Etc.

Of course we like to think that moral character carries more than a merely aesthetic weight, and, on balance, I’m convinced that it’s right to think this way. But the way in which Vito’s scandal registers as an aesthetic turn-off and the way in which it registers as a moral turn-off overlap to an important and significant extent. That’s why the phrase in poor taste carries the complex and cumulative weight that it does. What I’m inviting us to do is enrich our taste, and to recognize that doing so is a step up both aesthetically and morally. It’s a luxury we can afford, and we should claim our rights to it. Think of the line from The Doors, when Jim Morrison is losing his mojo and everyone’s starting to know it: “Elevate your taste in trolls, man.”

Commenter bs23 is inclined nonetheless to resist — based on what I think is a misunderstanding of my argument:

You’re not getting this consensus from me; I find it mildly offensive that elected officials should somehow have to serve as moral guides for citizens of a free state. I give as much attention to private lives of public officials as I expect them to give to mine. Not none, but not much. Besides, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that even if the guy had permission from his wife, you’d chide him just the same.

I hardly want our elected officials to serve as moral guides for free citizens. On that count I’m one with Tocqueville, who said that if public servants wanted to inspire religious faith among the people, the only thing they ought to do is go to church — meaning, from my perspective, that elected officials shouldn’t consider it part of their job to boost good moral conduct. That’s hardly a license for them to drive drunk and sire bastard children, but that’s not even the main point I want to make here. I want the inverse of what bs23 alleges: I want citizens of a free state to serve as moral guides for elected officials. If Vito’s wife invited him to transform their marriage into an open relationship, I’d chide him just the same but for different reasons. (That is, the public trust still involves not driving drunk and not having illegitimate children, at least in my antiquated judgment. If Vito’s wife invited him to run a responsibly prophylactic Nazi-themed S&M dungeon in the privacy of the family basement, you would still have to prepare yourself for more, albeit different, chiding on my part. The dungeon would be far less of a moral offense, insofar as no spousal betrayal would be in play. Presumably such an arrangement could avoid breaking important laws like those criminalizing prostitution and drunk driving. It’s true those are real pluses. The criticism is more modest, but the type of judgment is the same.)

In conclusion, what touched off my ire is a certain sentiment, swirling below the surface of our public conversation about naughty politicians, which inclines us to think that private abuses of power are the acceptable cost or even the appropriate reward for those among us who are most talented in exercising public power. The clear implication is that abuses of private power are far better than abuses of public power, and that the leaders we entrust not to powerfully abuse their relationship with us deserve our tacit or even blanket permission to powerfully abuse their relationships with people in their ‘private’ lives. This is about as repulsive, tawdry, cynical, corrupt, low-rent, and tasteless a vision of political virtue as I can conceive. What’s really going on here, I think, is a fear that we can’t get a critical mass of people of virtue into our political leadership class, and that we have to appease these all-too-typical degenerates by giving their tyrannically disordered souls a place that’s prophylactically sealed off from the public realm in which they can safely indulge themselves. Well there’s a breach in the latex, friends, and it’s a thin, permeable wall besides. A basic quantum of moral virtue is a necessary ingredient of political virtue. And there’s no escape from the fact that even people who hate virtue language want politically virtuous politicians representing them in government.

By way of a footnote, commenters Behelden, O’Gorman, and mattc have it basically right, and the answer to commenter q is No! Okay?