As soon as someone tells me that one particular political
measure or decision is the right or moral choice and the
alternatives to it are irresponsible and immoral, I start to feel
an almost irresistible urge to do the immoral, the forbidden thing.
It’s not that I am a willful reprobate. Or not just that, anyway. I
simply don’t believe it. This assertion looks way too much like
moral blackmail to me, and hence it is itself at least as likely to
be immoral as the thing it deprecates. American politics for
reasons that I go into in detail in my book, Media Madness, is becoming more and more corrupted
in this way as the media and their foolishly compliant political
acolytes attempt to transform issue after issue — from global
warming to health care to the war in Iraq — into a moral crusade
instead of the problem in practical politics that each of these
things is in reality. Right now, they’re in the process of doing
the same thing to the Wall Street bailout.
Like most people of the chattering classes, I was unthinkingly
in favor of the bailout when it was first proposed. You’ve got to
do what you’ve got to do if the economy is not to collapse, of
course. But then the insistence of its proponents that it
would collapse became just a little too strident. The
moral note began to creep in, and I began to think that the case
for the deal must be weaker than I thought if they were having to
tighten the moral screws on the skeptics. Then Nancy Pelosi decided
to turn the deal she and her fellow congressional leaders and the
administration had hammered out over the weekend into part of her
and her party’s on-going moral assault on the Bush presidency and
single-handedly wrecked it. So then, it appears I was right to be
suspicious. Of course it was the GOP skeptics who got hammered for
it. Even the Wall Street Journal said “that Republicans chose to oppose something they
think is in the national interest merely because of a partisan
slight.”
Well, it may be so. But it seems to me rather that they came to
think of something they had been bullied into thinking in the
national interest must not be so after all, if this was how its
proponents were behaving. If the case were so morally exigent as
Mrs. Pelosi and the others claimed it was, she would not have
attempted to turn it into a partisan triumph. The fact that she did
suggested that she must have been hyping the crisis and her
preferred remedy for it from the start. Now she simply wanted the
moral credit of the thing, such as it was, for her party and its
presidential candidate. That could be taken as a pretty good
indication in itself that there was no moral credit in it. The
House GOP must have seen the same thing and, rightly, voted the
thing down. It was all just politics after all.
And it is of the first importance that we understand the
difference between morality and politics.
David Brooks joined in the attack on the Republican
refuseniks, calling them “nihilists,” and said that “If this
economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys
of the 21st century.” An interesting qualification that. Is it
really only “if this economy slides” that they will become Smoots
and Hawleys? And if it doesn’t slide, does that mean they
won’t be nihilists anymore either? If, in other words, his point is
to persuade us that the House GOP is guilty of some moral
dereliction, isn’t it undercut by this implied concession that if
it all works out all right they’re off the hook? That’s the very
reason why politics is never well served by being moralized:
because political decisions always involve such contingencies.
Politicians always have to make a judgment call as to what course
will be for the best. They may be right or they may be wrong, but
it simply cannot be that they are acting morally only if they are
right and immorally only if they are wrong.
For that would be to deny the very meaning of morality, which
implies fixed principles of right and wrong whatever may be the
results of acting on them. The only fixed principle in politics is
that you consider the good of the commonwealth in giving your
honest judgment as to what course is best in a given circumstance.
Now we know that politicians don’t always do that, but unless there
is hard evidence of actual corruption, it is essential to the
proper functioning of a democracy that they be given the benefit of
the doubt that they are acting in good faith. During the Bush
administration especially but to a greater or lesser extent under
every president since Lyndon Johnson, the media have thought it
their duty — or, not to give them the benefit of the
doubt, their profit — to deny our leaders this assumption of their
good faith, with what result we see in the utter collapse of our
political discourse into mere name-calling. Whose purposes does
that serve?
Oh, right. I forgot. It serves the media’s purposes by
increasing the level of moral drama and excitement in something
that, to be effective, has to be and in fact is rather
dull and, from their point of view, unmarketable. Not for the first
time we may reflect that it is the media’s world; we’re only living
in it.
