Saved from Hypocrisy
Rorty, Richard
THE BEST thing about the impeachment fiasco is the failure of the Republicans to tempt the public into hypocrisy. The electorate refused to treat lying about one's sex life as a big deal. This...
...The greedhead Republicans may, the next time they manage to elect both a president and a congressional majority, finish repealing the New Deal...
...Armies could not function unless soldiers did this—unless they took pride in their uniforms and their units, despite knowing that sometimes they will be used for base purposes and will take orders from corrupt leaders...
...IN THE CLINCH, the broad masses acted just as Tocqueville hoped they would and feared they would not...
...We imagined that they had been so corrupted by trash journalism, sex-and-violence television, and fundamentalist wowsers that they had forgotten all about their birthright as citizens of a republic...
...They reacted as do soldiers who, having no illusions about the moral character of some of their officers, nevertheless "salute the uniform, not the man...
...2) The decision of the Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee to get as much sexual detail before the public as quickly as possible was disgusting...
...They are making straightforward, nonhypocritical appeals to the suburbanites to harden their hearts against the poor...
...This time around, the electorate as a whole demonstrated a better sense of the requirements of American citizenship than did the political and chattering classes...
...With any luck, the leaders of that Party will now decide that they will get little mileage out of stepping up their gay-bashing, anti-abortion, and "family values" campaigns...
...RICHARD RORTY is the author of Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America...
...But at least the greedheads are waging a relatively clean version of class warfare...
...This is a great boon for the faction within the Republican Party that appeals to selfishness rather than prurient self-righteousness...
...The hypocrites of the Christian Right (sometimes known as "cultural conservatives") may be forced back into the shadows...
...They may get enough tax cuts through Congress to make social programs impossible, and then proceed to "privatize" Social Security...
...The poll results, which demonstrate what William Bennett describes as an inexplicable lack of outrage, suggest that at least two-thirds of the electorate hold two beliefs: (1) A poor boy from Arkansas who can make it to the White House, and there do his impotent best to keep the greedheads at bay, deserves a break...
...They are quite capable of arranging things so that still more of the nation's wealth is diverted to the suburbs, and of duping the taxpayers into sending their Social Security money to stockbrokers rather than to the Treasury Department...
...They are not trying to reduce politics to a battle between the pure and the impure, the saved and the damned, the people who feel the proper sort of outrage about illicit sex and those so depraved as to disregard sexual behavior when deciding on the merits of political candidates...
...Snobbish New Yorker-reading academics like myself did not expect the broad masses to care more about the numinous chief magistracy of a constitutional democracy than about sex in high places...
...We do not want to know everything there is to know about those who hold it, any more than Catholics want to know everything that the media can discover about the idiosyncrasies of prelates...
...So the greedheads may dictate future Republican strategy...
...It was disgusting because the office of the presidency is, and ought to be, sacred...
...We were, thank God, at least two-thirds wrong...
...This is, of course, not an unmitigated blessing...
...We thought that they would pretend to feel the outrage that Bennett expected of them, in the hope of getting still more dirty details to make locker-room jokes about...
...The United States cannot function as the founders intended unless the citizens can take pride in 16 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 THOUGHTS AFTER IMPEACHMENT investing a poor boy from Arkansas with the august dignity that befits the successor of Jefferson and Lincoln, and then refusing to let the foolishness of the man diminish the office...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
