By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
It’s amazing how complicated simple principles can become
when they’re inconvenient to your team.
On Sunday, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi created a
mess for herself by insisting on NBC’s Meet
the Press that Representative John Conyers deserves “due process” in the
face of a series of accusations of improper conduct.
Politically, Pelosi’s performance was a gift to her many
critics. For liberals who think she’s passed her sell-by date as a Democratic
leader, her hapless effort will now be Exhibit A in the brief against her,
despite her subsequent efforts to clean up the mess.
For populists on the left and right who think the
political establishment is rigged to protect members of the club, Pelosi’s
effort to protect Conyers — and Senator Al Franken, who has also been accused
of several sexual transgressions — while at the same time insisting that we
know all we need to know about President Trump and Alabama Senate candidate Roy
Moore is simply a naked partisan double standard.
“We are strengthened by due process,” Pelosi insists when
the topic is Conyers. But Moore is “a child molester.”
This raises the most dismaying gift that Pelosi lobbed to
the mob. By circling the wagons around Conyers and Franken (and Bill Clinton to
some extent), Pelosi is all but guaranteeing the election of Moore.
It is difficult to exaggerate the anger among many
Republicans who believe that liberals use the rules selectively, shamelessly
invoking standards of conduct to delegitimize and destroy their enemies while
exempting their own. “Zero tolerance” for thee, “it’s complicated” for me.
It was this belief — hardly unfounded — that let millions
of Republicans dismiss allegations of sexual abuse against Trump and now Moore.
Every day, conservatives angry at my opposition to Moore tell me “we” can’t
“unilaterally disarm.” If they won’t play by the rules, why should we?
This isn’t simply a Beltway game. Pelosi is a passionate
supporter of Title IX regulations, which have been used to dismantle due
process for sexual assault allegations on college campuses. When Education
secretary Betsy DeVos introduced reforms to Title IX, Pelosi denounced them as
“outrageous, immoral attacks on Title IX protections” and a “shocking attack on
women.” Perhaps college students deserve at least as much due process as
congressmen?
But as someone who believes pretty much all the accusers
so far, I’m not interested in pecking out another column on partisan hypocrisy.
These days, that’s the easiest column in the world to write.
Instead, I’d like to point to a possible way out of this
mess.
The philosopher John Rawls famously offered a thought
experiment he called the “original position.” Imagine you are in some kind of
limbo waiting to be born into our world. Hidden behind what he called a “veil
of ignorance,” you have no idea what “kind” of person you will be — female,
male, gay, straight, sickly, healthy, smart, dumb, rich, poor, black, white,
etc. What rules would you want for society?
The point of this exercise is to make you think about
what fairness looks like. If there’s a good chance you’re going to be born
poor, you might see the point of having certain protections for the poor. If
there’s a 50 percent chance you’ll be born a woman, you’ll probably reject the
model of society found in The Handmaid’s
Tale. In short, the veil of ignorance allows us see justice through the
lens of self-interest.
I don’t like or agree with everything Rawls and his fans
have done with this thought experiment, but the original position is
nonetheless a useful way of thinking about society.
We live in a moment beset by tribalisms, from
partisanship to myriad forms of identity politics. All of them work on the
assumption that neutral rules are unfair or unjust because my tribe is somehow
especially noble or your tribe is especially evil.
The original position is not as original to Rawls as some
believe. In fact, it’s embedded in the very idea of classical liberalism,
because it presupposes that we should all be equal in the eyes of God and the
government, and that therefore the rules of the society should be fair for
everybody — and applied to everybody equally. It’s a simple principle, but
everyone wants to make it complicated these days.
No comments:
Post a Comment