[I’m a bit snowed under just now, so have a reprint of a piece from the old Palace of Reason. It appeared there on June 7, 2002 – FWP]
How is it that this continuing circus of incompetence and corruption that we call Washington, DC hasn't turned the great majority of the American people off to politics completely?
The ethical standard for political behavior has sunk to depths unimaginable by private persons even half a century ago. Go back a full century, and you wouldn't even find politicians able to imagine 2000's levels of depravity. I know a lot has changed, but have people really become so inured to evil that they can endorse, or at least tolerate, the behavior of our political class?
There are a lot of stock answers, and many of them have some grain of truth in them. My favorite is the displacement of absolute right and wrong by the notion of situational ethics. But all the stock answers are vulnerable to the following challenge: We know this kind of behavior to be a detriment, not a support, to both personal survival and social stability. How is it, then, that its practitioners flourish, and our society stands?
I have a good friend who works for the local headquarters of Head Start. He hates it and everything connected to it. He brings me stories of corruption and intrigue that would turn the stomach of a goat. Yet he's worked there for more than twenty years. It's his livelihood. He doesn't know how to do anything else.
We might be witnesses to the emergence of a new (for America) kind of stability: the stability of the shepherds and the sheep.
Once the sheep have gotten used to being herded and shorn in return for their daily groats, they forget what it was like to be free. They lose the use of their "freedom muscles:" the ability to reason, the willingness to accept personal responsibility for their well-being, and the courage to assume risk. This is all very well for the shepherds, of course.
Our "daily groats" are the largesse that Washington and the states distribute to us in a myriad guises. In 1980, some 34 million people drew their whole incomes from government; the figure must be higher today. A great many more receive some sort of payment, tax break, or commercial benefit from government. It's likely that the number of us who are the "beneficiaries" of some government program or policy exceeds half the population of the country.
People will seldom rise in rebellion against, or draw back in disgust from, that which they believe puts bread on their tables. One cannot even contemplate such a thing without suffering severe cramps in the wallet. And should the possibility of detail changes arise, everyone will strive most mightily to protect his own ox from being gored; that's the Public Choice effect in its most venomous form.
If I'm correct about this dynamic, we've entered an era of impotent disgust: a disgust which contents itself with itself, rather than seeking to alter the conditions that produced it. It suggests that the modern American Leviathan could last a long time, despite all our earnest wishes to the contrary.
Could you remember several specific people who exemplified the worst behavior in public officials at that time so that we might consider what consequences, if any, they suffered or brought on suffering of others? Bill Clinton for instance was likely large still in our thoughts. But who else might have triggered that screed?
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