The Death of Outrage: Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Roy Moore, and the Partisanship of Scandals As the partisan wheel turns. By Noemie Emery (weeklystandard.com) / Nov 24 2017
Of course the supporters of Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, are standing by their candidate, despite credible charges of sexual misconduct involving underage girls. That is what partisans do. They avow principles that they say they will never surrender, then anoint leaders who violate those same principles, then go on to defend their champions until their very last breath, denying the bad behavior and even the fact that a problem exists.
These dilemmas were rare with the statesmen of generations past, who busied themselves with issues like taxing and spending or war and peace, but in our era of culture-war combat, in which the “moral high ground” is fervently fought for and hotly disputed, they have blossomed apace. Donald Trump and Roy Moore and the social conservatives, Edward M. Kennedy and the women’s rights movement, Robert Packwood and the abortion activists, President Bill Clinton and the Anita Hill-era school of anti-sexual harassment crusaders—the gap between what partisans say they believe and the way they conduct themselves boggles and staggers the mind. How did we come to this strange moment? Let us look backwards and see.
Politics make strange bedfellows, but none have been stranger than the romance of the dowdy and earnest and buttoned-up feminists of the 1980s-90s with the un-put-together Ted Kennedy, a user of women if ever there was one, whose drunken exploits were legion, and who, as some people remember, once left a woman to drown in the car he had driven into a pond. His level of respect for women who did not engage with him in transactional politics was described by the late Michael Kelly in GQ in an article that caused a sensation in 1990 when it was published, and that contained little gems such as these: “A former mid-level Kennedy staffer . . . recalls with disgust one (now ex-) high-ranking aide as a ‘pimp . . . whose real position was to procure women for Kennedy,’ ” and “In December 1985 . . . Kennedy allegedly manhandled a pretty young woman employed as a Brasserie waitress,” picking her up and throwing her on top of a table, and then into the lap of Senator Christopher Dodd, his dinner companion, and “rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair.”
Acts such as these would have brought calls to resign if he had been conservative, but the feminists’ love for their senator never abated, and he went to his grave as their guardian angel, a man who had the interests of their sex at heart. Second to him in the hearts of the movement was Sen. Robert Packwood of Oregon, the rare Republican who was also an abortion-rights absolutist, a friend and ally of Gloria Steinem, who raised campaign funds for him in the 1980s, even when his aggressions were privately known. His double life as the feminists’ friend and as a chronic molester of female associates was blown apart by a piece in the Washington Post on November 22, 1992, just a few weeks after he had been safely elected to his fifth term in the Senate. But with the election of Bill Clinton as president, Packwood’s vote was less important and his usefulness to the cause was less clear. The article stressed the puzzling difference between his ardent support of the feminist movement and his predation towards females one-on-one. “Our reporting identified more than 40 women whose lives had been negatively affected by the Senator’s actions,” the lead reporter, Florence George Graves, recalled later in Nieman Reports. “Seventeen chose to testify during the subsequent Senate Select Committee on Ethics investigation, and several said they’d been terrified by his advances. Some allegations were tantamount to sexual assault.” The timing seemed perfect for feminists, who could strike against Packwood without losing power, leaving him bewildered as to why his charmed life had vanished. But another feminist hero would soon come to be outed, the stakes would be far higher, and the outcome would not be the same.
Since at least 1991, the year of the Clarence Thomas hearings, feminist women and their male allies in power had professed fervent belief in several unshakable convictions: Workplace harassment was always abhorrent, the word of the woman must always be taken, and women, of course, never lied. Then President Bill Clinton himself was accused of harassment, and all the rules, at least for the sisters, turned on a dime: Sympathy went to the man with the power, and women, it turned out, could and did lie all the time. In Vanity Fair, the late and much missed Marjorie Williams chronicled the reactions of feminists to the news that Clinton had been accused of groping by Kathleen Willey, a volunteer in his White House; with rape by Juanita Broaddrick, who had been an Arkansas state employee in the late 1970s; and of carrying on an affair with a pretty young intern who delivered a pizza to the Oval Office during a government shutdown and thus caught his eye. “She put the moves on HIM,” Susan Faludi would say of the intern. “We do not know what happened,” said an officer of the National Organization for Women. “I simply don’t care,” pioneering feminist Betty Friedan would offer. Writer Anne Roiphe gave the most honest answer: “It will be a great pity if the Democratic Party is damaged by this,” she opined. This was their view through the course of the scandals, even when Clinton confessed he had lied to the country and that the stories about him and the intern were true. Feminists gulped but rallied round Hillary, who as the put-upon woman was still standing behind him. And when the impeachment trial was over, they all returned to their place at Bill’s side, too.
“Organized women’s groups overlooked a lot to stand by the senator from Massachusetts,” Eleanor Clift admitted in Newsweek when Edward Kennedy died in 2009. “Feminists who proclaimed ‘The personal is the political’ made an exception for Kennedy. They argued that the political outweighs the personal. . . . Women who agreed with his politics . . . valued the way he advanced their interests” though he had “done things they found reprehensible.” There were flickers of doubt during his nephew’s 1991 trial for rape. The events in question were set in motion by the 60ish senator, when he roused his nephew and son out of bed to go bar-hopping with him in Palm Beach, and then back at home wandered around in his nightshirt with an addled expression, chatting distractedly with his son and a girlfriend while his nephew indulged in the disputed activities outside with his female companion (he was acquitted).
But that moment had passed quickly—and they forgave even more for Bill Clinton, in part because of his support of their issues and perhaps even more for the sake of his first lady, whom they hoped to elect as the first woman president and whose fate was entwined with his own. But when Hillary did run, she would find herself faced with that rare man whose reputation was perhaps even worse than that of her husband. And the Republican party would find itself facing a Clintonesque bind of its own.
* * *
During the Clinton years, and in part as a reaction to them, an outrage machine had grown on the right, feeding on all of the Clintons’ varied transgressions, which it saw in a sinister light. This virtuecrat caucus emerged as a critical wing of the party, with a religious arm in the evangelical churches and a secular one in the talkers and writers who kept a close eye on the culture for wardrobe malfunctions and other signs of general rot, of which there is never a shortage. During these years, books appeared by the ton, blasting the Clintons less for policy stands than for moral corruption, and this was even before the sex scandals erupted. Comparisons to the Macbeths were too flattering. William J. Bennett, who had made his deserved good name as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of Education and then as President George H. W. Bush’s first drug czar, reinvented himself as a moralist, tossing off a series of books prominently featuring in their titles words like moral compass, moral poverty, moral collapse, and virtue—this last one a trait he found lacking in the first couple. “If you don’t disassociate yourself from Clinton, you will make a pact with the devil” was how, in a 2001 Larry King appearance, he described the advice he had given to Democrats during the impeachment commotion. “They are corrupting themselves, they are corrupting others, they are a disgrace to this country,” he said.
The verdict was clear: Clinton was a lout and a lecher of a sort the party of Lincoln would never tolerate. Then came 2016, and the Republican party found itself tied to its very own lout and lecher. And all of a sudden, a very large bloc of conservative purists had some very strong second thoughts. All of a sudden they found that an ex-Democrat, an ex-friend of abortion who had funded Chuck Schumer and both of the Clintons, mocked almost all the conservative tenets, and led a Page Six-style private life was really the man of their dreams. All of a sudden, many evangelicals found that greed, lust, and blasphemy were not a problem and the lack of biblical, and even the commonplace, virtues was not that important. What of the coarseness, the lies, the mocking of heroes? They were refreshing. The many adulteries? He was in good company: Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and even King David had committed adultery, too.
In The Death of Outrage (1998), Bennett had written,
On Bill Clinton’s behalf, in his defense, many bad ideas are being put into widespread circulation. It is said that private character has virtually no impact on governing character . . . that America needs to become more European (read: more “sophisticated”) in its attitude toward sex . . . that we shouldn’t be “judgmental,” that it is inappropriate to make preliminary judgments about the president’s conduct because he hasn’t been found guilty in a court of law. . . . If these arguments take root in American soil—if they become the coin of the public realm—we will have validated them, and we will come to rue the day we did.
In 2016, Bennett would say in defense of Trump that “too many people are on their high horse” and of Roy Moore that “it’s not up to me . . . to decide this.”
One could say outrage has died in Bennett and large swaths of conservative America just as it clearly died on the left many years earlier, only to be resurrected when it can be used to beat up on others, with whom they have never agreed. This is called “selective outrage,” which is the worst kind on offer, or “situational ethics,” which means that whatever helps your situation is assumed to be ethical. It’s not a nice picture, but perhaps not the worst that can happen. Without situational ethics, we might have no ethics at all.
PB/TK – Party over Morals, from the smallest of politician to the highest of leadership. Too many would rather see the Devil represent them as long as he wears the Party label
