The President and the Prosecutor: Three Views on Politics and Personal Life
Lears, Jackson
THE REAL scandal in Washington is not Clinton's sex life, but the government's ability to pry into it. The real threat to the republic is not the lack of "character" in the Oval Office, but the...
...Clearly a number of streams have fed into this slough of despond...
...The problem was not privacy per se but unequal access to it...
...DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 5 COMMENTS & OPINIONS The problems arose when the slogan ossified into a dogma...
...The caricature of the feminist as humorless ideologue overlooks the vitality and variety of feminist thought...
...Opinion surveys, despite their ephemeral and unreliable nature, suggest at least some cause for hope: Americans are separating Clinton's actual performance in office from the allegations of his sexual misconduct...
...The good news is that many Americans aren't buying what the media are selling...
...It may mean that they understand a proposition that is crucial for sustaining our privacy rights: the personal is not always political...
...The people drawing the lines between personal and political were privileged white men, and the resulting boundaries served their interests...
...it created a fictitious realm called "the private sphere" that served existing power relations by denying their existence...
...Legalistic feminism is only a trickle...
...it sanctioned the claims of the individual against those of the social order...
...There was nothing wrong with reticence in principle...
...But the problems raised by this controversy affect the rest of us as well as Bill Clinton...
...And so have the reflexes that keep tabloid stories in circulation: the assumption that arrest, indictment, or even accusation are tantamount to conviction...
...Journalistic pseudopopulism, now as in the past, has excused sloppy, invasive, and inaccurate reporting with the all-purpose claim that "the people want to know...
...What had begun as a useful catchphrase became a reductionist formula: "The personal is [nothing but] political...
...Liberal tradition allowed a larger domain for the personal...
...after more than a century of feminist struggle, the mythologies of domesticity seemed stronger than ever— above all the belief that the personal and political realms could be neatly separated, that conjugal relations could be divorced from power relations...
...Rooted in the evangelical ethos, that tradition displayed the blend of righteousness and prurience still seen on tell-all TV shows...
...Not necessarily...
...JACKSON LEAKS is professor of history at Rutgers University...
...But it is in part an understandable response to this reductionism, which has promoted sweeping legal solutions to problems (such as sexual harassment) that sometimes require a more nuanced approach...
...Maybe the most significant source of the crisis is the most obvious: the Republican congressional majority that sent Starr on his mission in the first place...
...Privacy rights were part of a broader Victorian culture, committed to keeping certain areas of human experience hidden from public view...
...BUT IT would be misogynist fantasy to locate the contemporary threat to privacy in the more puritanical strains of feminist legal thought...
...Right-wing moralism, here as in the "war on drugs," has justified sweeping invasions of civil liberties...
...it maintained a double standard by forbidding behavior to women that was winked at in men...
...As Jeffrey Rosen has argued in the New York Times, sexual harassment litigation "often spirals out of control because civil suits lack the procedural protections necessary to guard the privacy of the accused and all others with whom he comes in contact...
...Louis Brandeis's published classic articulation of the doctrine may be seen as a high point in the new struggle of the personal against the political...
...the Fourth Amendment, prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, has become virtually a dead letter...
...They succeeded until quite recently, and may be making a comeback in the idiom of health rather than salvation...
...The personal has become political, with a vengeance...
...Starr and his supporters exhibit the evangelical blend of righteousness and prurience, combined with a faint simulation of MacKinnonite feminism that is mostly Republican fantasy— the dream of closing the gender gap by capturing the righteous females...
...the reckless disregard of the presumption of innocence...
...Feminist critics were onto something important about the diffuse omnipresence of power...
...Consider the themes arising from the Monica Lewinsky controversy...
...Starr's outrageous tactics—the surreptitious wiring of witnesses, the use of the grand jury as agency of intimidation—have become commonplace procedures for many prosecutors, not just "special" ones...
...Evangelical reformers sought government power to enforce what most contemporary Americans would consider personal preferences: sabbath observance, say, or abstinence from alcohol...
...This is especially true when the accused is a target of a special prosecutor's investigation...
...The whole is served up by the solemn sensationalists of the "mainstream" media...
...This genteel tradition (or its twentieth century remnant) kept men's peccadilloes out of the public eye...
...Reformers have always assumed that the ills they addressed were not merely personal, that sobriety and sabbath keeping served the interests of social order, and that both were therefore fit subjects for political concern...
...So at any rate it seemed to the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, who popularized the slogan "the personal is political...
...The real crisis arises not from the president's supposed misconduct— which is little more than a cloud of rumors and allegations—but from the growing tendency to confuse authority with authoritarianism...
...Lamentations about moral decline, understandable as they may be, have helped to legitimate an appalling proliferation of police-state tactics...
...The real threat to the republic is not the lack of "character" in the Oval Office, but the erosion of privacy rights for all Americans...
...For starters, we have a rhetorical tradition combining meddlesome moralism with compulsive sincerity, stretching back to the early days of the republic...
...Our privacy rights remain under siege...
...There are far more important sources of the crisis atmosphere...
...The specter of Prohibition still stalks the land, animating the antifat phobia, the antitobacco crusade, and catastrophic "war on drugs...
...Their frustration was understandable...
...But there was an alternative to these assumptions at the heart of nineteenth-century political culture...
...Late-nineteenth-century jurists refined the individual's claims by formulating a doctrine of privacy rights...
...Does this mean that Americans are jaded, cynical, and indifferent to moral issues...
...Consider the political consequences of the silence surrounding sex...
...How did we get ourselves into this mess...
...indeed, it may have been a necessary component of cultural meaning, as Rochelle Gurstein has intelligently argued in The Repeal of Reticence...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
