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COMMENTARY
June 15, 2011
Progressive legalism
Salacious gossip, especially if true, has a wasting effect on any audience. The allegations made against U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner have been sufficiently reported elsewhere. My point will begin where this reporting ends, for I still count this as a family newspaper.In the 9th congressional district of New York (bits of Brooklyn and Queens in New York City), you can apparently run a giant hamster and get him elected, provided he is a Democrat. It is, in my reactionary view, one of those dark, dirty, densely sprawling urban places where people never see the light of day. Technically, the sun shines down from above, but nature is held at several removes by various foreground conditions, running interference on the human condition. People are born, live, and die in such environments, and I don't mean to disparage them for what is not a happy fate. I am simply trying to explain why liberal Democrats in the U.S.A., or the equivalent party machines in Canada, are able to harvest large and unthinking majorities in constituencies like that. For it is an environment that is abstracted; in which words count for more than things; in which religious and all other cultural traditions, which confer meaning upon life, break down in a mulching homogenization; in which moral values are reduced to the lowest common denominator of "niceness," without which no one would survive. That individuals may rise above any conditions of environment, I take as proved by history. Saints arise from the most unlikely places. Moreover, no one is obliged to be a typical product of urban squalor. But there is cause and effect, and the ugliness and emptiness of the post-modern urban environment is a powerful cause. Now back to Mr. Weiner and his behaviour on Twitter, both before and after his marriage to one of Hillary Clinton's most exotic aides. According to a recent poll, some 56 per cent of those responding in Weiner's congressional district thought he should ignore requests for his resignation from most of his political colleagues. Instead, he should brazen it out, as he has been doing, with the most extraordinary, unbelievable, self-contradictory statements, followed by disappearance into unspecified "treatment" as if there were some pill for his soul. Firty-six per cent: This is only slightly less than the proportion of voters who have persistently elected the guy. (To my mind, one look at his face, and they should have known not to do that.) There is something mildly heroic in brazening of this sort. I have to concede it is at least the flip side of a definable virtue. But an alternative explanation is that a very high proportion of Weiner's constituents actually believe that one's personal behaviour has nothing to do with one's political judgment. This, after all, is how that old rogue, Bill Clinton, survived impeachment and would probably still be president today if there weren't term limits on that office. The argument goes: "Sure, the guy is a hypocrite, but we like his ..." general adherence to "progressive" causes and constant repetition of egalitarian clichés. And so what, since the argument supposes that everyone is a hypocrite when he is not being watched. I think this argument concedes too much. For, I'm not sure politicians like Anthony Weiner can achieve hypocrisy. His track record on subjects ranging across the field of "life issues" suggests a categorical denial of any relation between morality and sex. From health care to foreign policy, his positions are likewise devoid of any principle beyond antipathy for bogeymen such as private insurance executives and terrorists. While I happen to share the latter antipathy, and therefore listened sympathetically when he demanded the removal of Islamist recruiters from the Internet and terror-listed Palestinian delegations from New York, I could detect no reasoning process. I doubt he could explain why terrorism is wrong. As a man with feminist credentials, he is probably against using social media to prey on women. Yet there is no law against it, so what is the problem? Here, to my view, is the crux of the issue. To the "progressive" mindset, there is nothing wrong with anything until there is a law passed against it, for the law creates morality and ethics, and not vice versa. There is no "natural law," no antecedent right and wrong, of which human law provides an imperfect expression. "Justice" is, like Brooklyn and Queens, something entirely man-made. Compare, the incredible media trawl through the e-mail correspondence of Sarah Palin, when governor of Alaska - the purpose of which was to find any instance, in more than 100 kilos of paper printout, in which she had, even unknowingly, contravened some state or federal regulation, however minor. (Instead, to the frustration of Palinophobic investigators, this "text" has revealed a woman as honest as the day is long, who acts privately exactly as she presents herself publicly.) "Legalism" is the word for this very political phenomenon. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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