Andrew Cuomo’s Al Capone Moment

Hey,

Much like a Wolfgang Puck restaurant at the Newark airport, Mercury has no atmosphere. Its surface is very similar to our moon’s, but because it’s so close to the sun, temperatures can exceed 800 degrees during the day. As lying liars say about Phoenix, it’s a dry heat. But when it comes to Andrew Cuomo’s downfall, my eyes are drier than the surface of Mercury.

He deserves what he’s getting. 

And yet, I’d rather he was being pelted from the public stage for other reasons. It’s not that I think his behavior toward women was anything but reprehensible. If half of the stuff in the attorney general’s report is true, he has no place in public office. But I kind of feel like this is the political equivalent of getting Al Capone for tax fraud. It’s wholly legitimate—and certainly better than nothing—but somehow insufficient.

I think groping and sexual bullying are grotesque and disqualifying offenses for public service. But I think killing people is worse. And while it’s good that norms against piggishness are being strengthened, it’s dismaying that the more important norms Cuomo violated seem to be weakening.

Think of it this way: 50 years ago, Cuomo wouldn’t have fallen from grace for the sort of behavior he’s been credibly accused of. We know such behavior—and far worse—was tolerated, ignored, and even celebrated during the heydays of Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, not to mention Ted’s brother John, who literally pimped out an intern to an aide, among many other outrages. (I’ll come back to the “celebration” of sexual misbehavior in a minute.)

But I would like to think that 50 years ago, Cuomo would have been forced from office for his official behavior during the pandemic. I don’t even mean his disastrous decision to send COVID patients back to nursing homes, needlessly causing the deaths of thousands. That was a grave error, but I think you can acknowledge it wasn’t intentional. It was just outrageously stupid (a peril the liberal bogeyman Ron DeSantis recognized and avoided). I’d be okay with a culture that demanded resignation for such gross incompetence. But in the early days of the pandemic, good faith mistakes were made by all sorts of people.

What’s unforgivable is that Cuomo knew he screwed up. He knew his decision was disastrous. And he covered up the evidence while preening over his “leadership.” He allegedly used government resources to pen a book—while the pandemic was still raging—trumpeting his brilliant handling of the pandemic. He made more than $5 million from that book—and won an Emmy to boot. That’s repugnant. 

As a defender of our federalist system, I’m okay with different states tackling the pandemic in different ways. Sure, if you know beyond a doubt exactly what to do, a one-size-fits-all policy might be preferable. But that assumes we can always know what that policy would be. (And it assumes that pursuing such a course of action without local buy-in wouldn’t have horrible unintended consequences.)

But if we’ve learned anything from the last 16 months, it’s that nobody had such knowledge. Not Anthony Fauci, not Rochelle Wallensky, not Donald Trump, and most obviously not Andrew Cuomo. Using different approaches allows other states to mimic best practices. But just as important, it allows other states to avoid making mistakes. Hiding New York’s failures for his own political and financial self-interest wasn’t just wrong on Cuomo’s part, it was evil.

The character zig zag.

So let’s get back to my assertion that violations of sexual norms were once celebrated.

In the 1980s, feminists waged an uphill battle against workplace sexual harassment. They painted Clarence Thomas as a sexual predator because of some alleged jokes and little more.  They claimed some scalps, including that of liberal Republican Sen. Bob Packwood.

Then Bill Clinton ran for office. 

While it would be unfair to say that “everyone knew” Bill Clinton behaved just as badly as Andrew Cuomo, it is fair to say that it was very well-known in elite circles. In 1992, the Clinton campaign dismissed women who came forward about their experiences with Clinton as “bimbo eruptions.” The American Spectator ran a series of articles describing how Clinton used his security detail to procure women. Joe Klein’s Primary Colors was about Bill Clinton, and nobody thought his treatment of Clinton’s sexual appetites was unfair or inaccurate. The media and Democratic politicians alike rallied to his defense, preferring to denounce the prurient prudery of right-wingers. But at least there was some veneer of deniability that people could hang onto.

Then the Lewinsky scandal broke and the deniability was no longer sustainable. So, feminists and their allies in the elite media decided to make Clinton’s behavior something to celebrate. The New York Observer ran a little symposium titled “New York Supergals Love That Naughty Prez.” The subhead was even better: “What Do Women (Erica Jong, Nancy Friday) Really Want? A Boyish Chief Executive Who’s Alive Below the Waist.” The only note of condemnation came from “retired dominatrix and writer” Susan Shellogg, who said, “I think the President is reckless for not practicing safe sex if she has stains on her dress. She was not using a condom. That’s a big story.”

Yes, that was the big story.

Movie stars came out of the woodwork not just to stand by Clinton, but to cheer his libido. “What would be the alternative leadership? Should it be somebody who doesn’t want to f**k?” Jack Nicholson asked. “Bill, you’re great. Keep on!”

Rolling Stone ran its own symposium during impeachment. Publisher Jann Wenner set the stage:

What we have is a Republican majority in the House, held hostage by hate-drunk zealots and McCarthy-esque character assassins arguing the proposition that the president’s personal life must be absolutely flawless, [and] that should he have less than such moral purity, he has no right as a sworn officer of the Constitution to personal privacy.

In the same issue, Nicholson called the investigation a “coup d’état” and compared Bill Clinton to abolitionist zealot John Brown. The 1990s were weird, man.

Rapper DMX told Rolling Stone, “All [Clinton] did was get some p***y, you know what I’m saying? … He’s a dog, man. Men are dogs. The fronting ones are the ones who don’t act like dogs. Those are the ones you watch. He’s doing his job. Whether he gets impeached should be determined by that, not where his (manhood) is at.”

The New Yorker ran any number of pieces trying to rationalize Clinton’s behavior. My favorite contribution was from the feminist author Jane Smiley. She argued that Clinton was infinitely preferable to that stick-in-the-mud George H.W. Bush because Bush was a war monger who liked launching missiles more than having sex:

Maybe what Clinton did in the Oval Office was love, or infatuation, or just sex. At the very least, it was a desire to make a connection with another person, a habitual desire for which Clinton is well known, and sometimes ridiculed. But this desire to connect is something I trust, because it seems to be the one thing that he can’t get rid of. If we as a nation choose to put ourselves through the national pain of impeachment rather than the national healing of forgiveness, we will have only ourselves to blame when the next fellow comes along who would rather launch an air strike than a pass.

Of course, many of these people would say that they were talking about purely consensual sex with an intern (despite the fact feminists spent years arguing that such “relationships” were inherently abusive because of the “disparity of power” etc.). In order to rationalize this inconsistency, Gloria Steinem, dean of American feminism, concocted the “one free grope” rule. Katie Roiphe adopted the novel strategy of arguing that Lewinsky was in fact a “savvy” career woman for trading her sexual services for advancement.

Still, it’s not like they were defending actual rape. Of course, this leaves out the fact that credible rape claims were on offer. Juanita Broaddrick said Clinton raped her. But this wasn’t widely known, in part because NBC News kept the allegation secret throughout the impeachment hearings because they believed it was true.

During this period, conservatives—including yours truly—argued that this wasn’t just hypocritical—which it obviously was—but perverse. Bill Bennett wrote a whole book, The Death of Outrage, chronicling and channeling conservative outrage.

Fast forward to 2016. Many of those conservatives, sadly including Bennett, lost the plot. Imagine what Bennett would have said if the Access Hollywood tape had emerged back then with Bill Clinton on it?

In 2018, Ben Shapiro made a very good case for why older conservatives rallied to Trump and disregarded his characterological shortcomings while younger conservatives didn’t:

There are a few reasons for this gap. First, older conservatives already fought the character battle over Bill Clinton, and they carry the scars from that ordeal. They remember arguing that Bill Clinton was unfit for office based on his treatment of women and his perjury, and they remember losing that argument. They remember arguing that character counts, even as Democrats held aloft the banner of “Lion of the Senate” Teddy Kennedy, who left a woman to drown in his car and made waitress sandwiches with fellow Democratic senator Chris Dodd. Older conservatives remember Mitt Romney, the cleanest candidate for high office in modern American history, being destroyed by the media over pure nonsense. Older conservatives weren’t looking for character in 2016. They were looking for a hammer. 

The perils of ressentiment.

In Suicide of the West (and a bunch of G-Files), I wrote a good deal about ressentiment. We don’t need to get too deep in the weeds, but for our purposes it’s basically the way the “outs” wage war against the “ins.” For Nietzsche, the triumph of Christianity was the result of the outs successfully redefining the concept of the good for their benefit. It was a contest between “knights” and “priests,” and the priests won. 

Whereas strength, honor, pride, victory, etc. were once knightly virtues, the priests successfully turned them into vices. The meek, the humble, the downtrodden became the virtuous while the strong and courageous who created their own morality became villainous. Now, that’s a very glib summary and an even glibber version of reality. But you get the point. The knights ruled with swords, the priests with words, and the wordsmiths won.

I think this is a very useful way of understanding the “character wars.” Here’s a very oversimplified scorecard. In the 1950s, conservatives had very old-fashioned notions of sexual propriety. No doubt many of them were profound hypocrites in their personal lives, but as a matter of public norms they championed “square” values. In the 1960s and well into the 1970s, there was a wave of “moral deregulation,” as Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in “Defining Deviancy Down.” 

This was followed by a Reaganite reaction that lasted well into the 1990s and was marked by a lot of talk about the importance of character. Feminists foolishly rejected any effort to fuse their wholly legitimate case against sexual harassment with conservative notions of sexual propriety—and vice versa. This was in part because liberal boomers—like the Clintons—still saw themselves as transgressive rebels against Reaganite conformity (the horrible movie Pleasantville typifies this outlook; sexual awakening is coded as political rebellion).

This was part of Nietzsche’s point about how history works: “Human history would be nothing but a record of stupidity, save for the cunning contributions of the weak.” The ins grow complacent, while the outs grow passionate. The aristocrats become decadent and crapulent, while resentment grows among the bourgeoisie, the peasants, the proletariat, or whoever gets organized. This, in very broad strokes, is the story of most revolutions.

But today’s situation is different. Today we have competing elites—and their associated shock troops—who are each, respectively, convinced they are the outs. This is the politics of ressentiment. “If they are for it, we are against it.” They are for masks, so we are against them. They are for free trade, so we are against it. This isn’t a conflict over class or theology, it’s eternal warfare between competing elites desperate to convert any concept of the right and the good—democracy, patriotism, character, racial tolerance etc.—into weapons. (As I discussed here.)

And that’s the problem. Notions of good character—which should include everything from basic decency and honesty to sexual restraint and male respect for women—should be non- or pre-partisan commitments. But because we live in an age of ressentiment, the mere act of embracing certain values or virtues invites a rejection of them by the other “side.”

It’s worth recalling that the MeToo stuff got off to a late start because the first allegations of sexual misbehavior in the media emerged at Fox, and the mainstream media was perfectly happy to cover it as a Fox News story. “See! This proves what they’re like.” It was only when the evidence about Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, et al, mounted so high that it became impossible to ignore.

The truth is that male piggery, like Cuomo’s and Bill O’Reilly’s, really has no meaningful ideological content. Male piggery is a product of human nature (with an emphasis on the “man” in human). And pretending otherwise for partisan purposes only makes it harder to teach good character—or good citizenship, patriotism, etc.

That’s what’s so depressing about the politics of ressentiment: Civilization—in every sense of the word—depends on a rudimentary, dogmatic commitment to certain notions of the good. But the moment political combatants make an issue of the good, their opposite numbers get to work crafting arguments for why their version of the good is bad.