By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
There’s a consensus aborning: There should be zero
tolerance for sexual harassment, exploitation, and violence of any kind.
Enthusiasm for the new dawn varies widely. Some think it’s a great feminist or
moral awakening. Others see an era of witch hunts, prudery, and weaponized
politics in our future.
Put me down for all of the above.
As a conservative, this seems natural to me. Almost every
good thing comes with a downside, and virtually every bad thing comes with an
upside.
We’ve seen cultural, political, and religious awakenings
before. The abolition movement also brought with it John Brown. Prohibition had
some positive (though hotly debated) effects on public health, and the
temperance movement helped pave the way for women’s suffrage. Anti-communism
was a good thing in my book, but no one can honestly dispute that it had its
unfortunate excesses.
Whenever popular passion swamps politics, true-believing
zealots and opportunistic demagogues will exploit that passion. The zealots
will overreach. The demagogues will demagogue — using a good cause to destroy
political enemies and defend unworthy allies.
Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore is credibly accused
by nine women of preying on teenagers, one as young as 14. Harvey Weinstein is
credibly accused by at least 50 women of a long list of offenses, including
rape. Democratic senator Al Franken has been accused by two women of
inappropriate advances or groping.
These are just the recent lowlights. A host of prominent
journalists as well as Hollywood actors, writers, and producers have been
accused of varying degrees of misconduct.
We shouldn’t stand for any of it. And yet, the severity
of our intolerance should run on a spectrum. Rape should put you in jail.
Making a pass at a subordinate in the workplace should have consequences.
Making one at a bar? It depends. Taking harassment seriously also requires
making serious distinctions.
The problem is that the logic of zero tolerance often
renders every bad act as equally unacceptable.
As much as I dislike Franken, making a gross pass at an
adult woman is different than molesting a 14-year-old girl. Groping a woman’s
backside is not the same thing as raping a woman. And yet Franken’s name is
routinely listed alongside Moore’s and Weinstein’s. Some of this leveling is
simply journalistic laziness. But a lot of it is partisan demagoguery and
opportunism.
Partisanship also leads to what you might call
anti-leveling: people who ignore wrongdoing on “their side” even as they attack
their enemies.
Some Republicans insist that Franken must resign but say
that the people of Alabama should decide what to do about Moore. (Meanwhile,
Senator Bernie Sanders says the people of Minnesota should determine Franken’s
fate.)
When asked why people should judge the accusations
against Moore and President Trump differently than accusations against Franken and
others, the White House says Moore and Trump’s denials inoculate them from
condemnation or any practical consequences.
Denials should matter, and accusations absent additional
evidence should invite skepticism. But the upshot here is that alleged miscreants
should simply deny rather than admit wrongdoing and apologize. According to
this logic, Bill Clinton deserved the benefit of every doubt until he was
finally forced by the evidence to admit (some of) his misdeeds.
Worse, implicit to the White House argument is that
on-the-record testimony from victims doesn’t count as evidence, even when
corroborated by testimony from confidantes.
But the most dangerous and corrupting force in all of
this is not the weaponization of bad behavior, but the weaponization of
hypocrisy. The pastor Franklin Graham even argues that the real villains are
Moore’s critics, who “are guilty of doing much worse than” what Moore has
supposedly done.
This obsession with hypocrisy leads to a repugnant
immorality. In an effort to defend members of their team, partisans end up
defending the underlying behavior itself. After all, you can be a hypocrite
only if you violate some principle you preach. If you ditch the principle, you
can dodge the hypocrisy charge. We’re seeing this happen in real time with some
of Moore’s defenders, just as we saw it with Clinton’s in the 1990s.
We’ll sort it all out eventually, but not before it gets
even uglier.
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