By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, August 20, 2016
Finally the degeneration of this “news”letter from the
G-File to the T-File has been checked. Given that the GOP nominee has had a
very good four days — grading on a curve to be sure — and that we may actually
be seeing something like a pivot, I’m going to use this opportunity to (mostly)
write about something other than you-know-who. But first, some instant
punditry: I do not think the man we saw last night is a product of Steve
Bannon’s counseling, or even Kellyanne Conway’s — though I think she deserves
some credit. I think the key player here is Roger Ailes. He has a legendary
ability to get politicians to get over themselves and follow a script. Maybe
I’m wrong, but I strongly suspect Ailes is playing Oogway to Trump’s Po. We’ll
see if the master is up to the challenge.
Now, as the Iranians said before they released our
hostages, let’s talk about money.
“Money is the root of all evil,” goes the saying, and the
saying is wrong.
It’s wrong as a quote, and it’s wrong as an idea. The
expression comes from the New Testament, Timothy 6:10. There are almost as many
versions of this line as there are versions of the Bible.
The King James Bible says:
For the love of money is the root
of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith,
and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
But the International Standard Version says:
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people,
in their eagerness to get rich, have wandered away from the faith and caused
themselves a lot of pain.
If you read the passage in context, this version is
closer to the real meaning. The desire to be rich is a path to evil — I would say “can be a path” — but it is certainly
not the only path.
Now, if I had to put together a résumé, “Biblical
Literacy” would hit the cutting room floor, long before “Can Eat Inhuman
Amounts of Chicken Wings” and somewhere around “Practitioner of the Ninja
Arts.” So, as Bill Clinton will no doubt say when making his case at the Pearly
Gates, let’s leave the Bible out of this.
Instead, let’s simply invoke common sense. Money simply
cannot be the root of all evil. Let’s
check the Archives of Evil, which I have saved as a handy PDF on my laptop.
Stalin and Hitler killed a lot of people (you could look
it up) and a single-minded pursuit of filthy lucre is not the top item in the
moral indictment against either. Jack the Ripper wasn’t called Jack the Mugger,
for a reason. Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t sell body parts, he ate them. Osama bin
Laden, abandoned a very lucrative career in the family business to live in
caves and plot murder. Rape, I’m told, is not a get-rich-quick scheme, racists
do not collect a royalty every time they use the “n-word,” and stalkers aren’t
universally interested in getting their prey’s PIN number. Do I really need to
go on?
The funny thing is that the people most likely to
believe, at least in spirit, that money is the root of all evil aren’t widely
known as strict Biblical adherents. Bernie Sanders is no Bible thumper and I
don’t think such admonitions fit into the Cherokee faith, so Elizabeth Warren
is off the hook. Rousseau, who believed all evils stemmed from the moment
someone put a fence around a plot of land and declared it his, was a Christian
of a sort, but I don’t think he had Timothy 6:10 in mind. And Marx came to his
economics via his atheism, not the other way around.
If you’re inclined to see humanity through a cold,
materialist prism it should be even more obvious that money can’t be the root
of all evil. (Leave aside for the moment that cold materialist doctrines have
quite a heavy lift explaining evil in the first place —- “evil” is such a
judgey concept.) After all, money is a very recent human invention: Did evil
not exist prior to the shekel? Somehow I doubt it.
Ironically, if you do believe that, then you’re buying
into a modified version of original sin and the Fall of Man, in which the apple
of knowledge is replaced by a fat wad of Benjamins (which, come to think of it,
is pretty close to the Rousseauian line).
The Wages of
Corruption
I bring this up in part because I’m very deep in the
weeds of the book I’m writing. And even though I do not want to pick off
morsels of that feast for the mind and peddle it here piecemeal, I also can’t
get my head completely out of it either.
Another reason I bring it up is that I think Hillary
Clinton’s corruption is a good illustration of how we have corrupted our
understanding of corruption itself.
Corruption is a deeply misunderstood word. Today we
associate it almost exclusively with graft, bribe-taking, and other forms of
essentially financial malfeasance.
Graft is certainly a form of corruption, but not all
forms of corruption can be described as graft. In fact, most of the corruptions
in life don’t involve money at all. My Dad always used to say that the most
corrupting thing in everyday life was friendship, not money. What he meant by
that is that we do things for friends we would (almost) never do for strangers
offering cash.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that in ten or 15
years, a longtime friend of mine, say Steve Hayes, asks me to get his kid an
internship at National Review or AEI
(assuming they haven’t fired me by then). I’m not saying I would automatically
do it; there are other considerations at play. But let’s assume that on paper
the kid is qualified. I would certainly consider it (at least to spare the
young’n the professional and moral stain of working at that hive of mopery and
insolence, The Weekly Standard). But
if some stranger offered me $1,000 dollars to get his kid an internship, I’m
certain I would reject the entreaty summarily.
This highlights the difference between morals and ethics.
It is unethical — and arguably immoral — to take a bribe of this sort. But, in
practice, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s immoral to do this kind of
favor for a friend because the simple fact is that it happens 100,000 times a
day all around the world. Teamsters help get their buddy’s kids into the union,
college trustees help their golfing partner’s kid navigate the application
process, generals give their incompetent old friends nice billets out of personal
loyalty.
That’s because favors are the original currency of
mankind. This is not a controversial point in the academic literature. No
society has ever existed anywhere on earth in which favoritism towards family
and friends wasn’t endemic. It’s in our genes — and not just our genes, but the
genes of every cooperative species. “Indeed,” writes Francis Fukuyama, “the
most basic forms of cooperation predate the emergence of human beings by
millions of years. Biologists have identified two natural sources of
cooperative behavior: kin selection and reciprocal altruism.”
Reciprocal altruism, at least for our purposes here,
boils down to “I’ll get your back, if you get mine.” Army units live — or die —
by this principle.
Every meaningful realm of life that hasn’t been taken
over by the logic of markets and contracts, operates on some version of
reciprocal altruism. We don’t think of it in those sterile terms, though. We
yoke all sorts of other concepts to it: friendship, honor, obligation, etc. And
in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, this is a good and wonderful thing.
It is what motivates us to visit sick friends in hospitals and to ruin our
Saturdays helping a coworker move.
But politics is different. For good reasons — and more
than a few bad ones — we’ve tried to wall off politics from the logic of the
market. Public servants are supposed to be above personal financial
motivations. To say that we’ve failed to uphold this principle is one of the
great understatements of our time, on par with “Sally Kohn can be annoying
sometimes.”
Still, the vast majority of corruptions in politics have
little to do with money. And even in the cases where money is part of the
indictment, it is only part of it. Most people don’t go into politics to get
rich, not even Harry Reid (who nonetheless managed it). Vladimir Putin may be
the richest man in the world, but you don’t have to be his psychiatrist to
understand that he didn’t go into politics just for the rubles.
People go into politics for a number of reasons, many of
them lofty, but at least one of them not so much: status. The desire to be a
politician is almost inseparable from the desire to want to be a Very Important
Person and, in many cases, a Very Important Person Who Can Tell Other People
What to Do. The former, at least, is not in itself evil. No doubt many people
want — or believe they want — to be Very Important in order to help people.
(I should say that to the extent the desire to be rich is
the path to evil, it’s not the money that’s the problem, it’s the desire to be
important because you are rich.)
Do Me a Favor
The primary currency of politics is the favor. Trading
favors at the macro-level is often called logrolling, but at the micro-level it
is called “politics.” Favors can involve trading power, information, offices,
access, recommendations of all sorts, status, and, of course, taxpayer dollars.
Among the experts, there are fascinating debates about
how much we should expect developing countries to shed their “corrupt”
practices. When we give money to an official in Afghanistan, we want that money
to go to the winning bidder. The official wants that money to go to his cousin
or his clan or some other allied faction. When the official gets his way, we
call it corruption. But the official says, “This is how politics has worked in
my country for thousands of years.”
And he’s right.
If you watch Game
of Thrones you’ll notice that gold plays a big part in petty corruptions,
but the desire for power is the real source of moral degeneration. Change out
“Westeros” for “Ancient Rome,” the “Soviet Union,” or virtually every other
society that has ever existed and you’ll notice the same thing.
The Medicis of the
Ozarks
Which brings me to the Clintons. The coverage of the
Clinton Foundation is a textbook example of how our pinched and narrow
conception of corruption distorts our understanding of politics. Those few
mainstream reporters interested in the story at all think the hook is the “pay
for play” angle.
A whole generation of reporters have misconstrued the
phrase “follow the money” to mean “it’s all about the money.” But if you go
back and actually look at Watergate, the reason why “Deepthroat” said “follow
the money” (a phrase invented by William Goldman for the movie All the Presidents Men, by the way;
there’s no evidence Deepthroat actually said it) was that the money trail would
lead to the actual corruption. The money itself had little to do with the real
crimes. The real crime revolved around Nixon’s desire to stay in power, not to
get rich. And Mark Felt, the real Deepthroat, wasn’t motivated by any lofty
principle or even by a desire for profit, he was a petty man who felt passed
over when he wasn’t named as J. Edgar Hoover’s replacement.
The Wall Street
Journal reported Friday morning that Bill and Chelsea Clinton will stop
raising money for their foundation if Hillary is elected president. They will
also stop convening the Clinton Global Initiative, which was a brilliant scam
for Bill to schmooze and logroll with billionaires, corporations, NGO heads,
“thinkfluencers,” and the heads of countless foreign governments. The Journal adds this bit of analysis:
The planned changes are an attempt
to insulate Mrs. Clinton from perceptions that Clinton Foundation donors could
benefit from her administration’s official actions, these people and a Clinton
campaign official said. Even a scaled-down foundation would mark an
unprecedented turn in politics, given what would be the organization’s close identification
with the White House.
The story doesn’t make reference to it, but this is all
in response to leaked e-mails showing that some Nigerian billionaire took time
off from sending me e-mails asking for my bank routing number to buy access to
the State Department. This “pay for play” angle is simply a manifestation of
the bastardization of “follow the money.”
The money isn’t the primary issue with the Clintons and
it never was. Sure, sure, they like being rich. They like flying around in
private planes. They like having lots of houses. But the Clinton Foundation was
never about getting rich, it was about keeping the Imperial Court in Exile
well-tended to for their return to power. Huma’s amazingly corrupt moonlighting
wasn’t about money grubbing per se, it was about keeping Hillary’s Richelieu on
the payroll.
The Clintons are a tribe, a House like House Lannister or
House Harkonnen. They trade power, fame, influence and, sure, on occasion,
money to advance the interests of their House.
Here’s how I put it last year (in a much better G-File):
Hillary Clinton recognized that her
ambitions could only be realized by hitching herself to her sociopath husband.
No doubt that decision had its downsides, but look where she is now. Let’s not pretend
she didn’t make peace with her husband’s ways a long, long time ago. She was
happy to make $100,000 on cattle futures, after all. When the Clintons left
office they created a “foundation” whose chief purpose was to give form and
function to House Clinton, a modern day version of a medieval aristocracy. The
House of Medici did many good things. They fed the poor. They built cathedrals.
But their good works were the price of power, not the purpose of the power. The
Clinton Foundation does some good things, I’m sure. But the charitable work
should be seen for what it is: the cost of business. Mob bosses buy ice cream
cones for poor kids. When Marlo Stanfield becomes the big man in The Wire, he’s quick to have his goons
hand out money to the school kids for new clothes.
No doubt the Clinton Foundation is
full of well-intentioned people who are committed to making the world a better
place. But the idea that the core mission of the Clinton Foundation is to do
good works is absurd. The core mission of the Clinton Foundation is to expand
the empire of House Clinton (and improve the lifestyle of the Lords of the
Keep). This is obvious not only from their own accounting, but from everything
we know about how Bill and Hillary Clinton have conducted themselves. The mere
fact that Sidney Blumenthal was on the foundation’s payroll tells you all you
need to know. The Gates Foundation or Oxfam would never hire Sidney Blumenthal
because they have no use for a malevolent and lugubrious political mercenary.
Hillary Clinton is corrupt in countless ways, but her
desire for personal profit is among the least of her transgressions. She didn’t
stay in her thoroughly corrupted marriage for money, she didn’t set up her
server for money, she didn’t fire the White House travel office for money, she
committed these sins — and myriad others — in order to seek the power and
status that she covets and feels she is due.
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