By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, June 15, 2018
It’s not an iron law that power corrupts. But it’s often
a good way to bet.
The interesting question is: Why does power corrupt so
many people? The way I see it, power — money, fame, celebrity, authority, or
some mix of them all — lowers the cost of indulging human nature.
This is one of the central reasons elites wreak such
havoc by preaching “If it feels good, do it” libertinism. Rich people can
afford their vices and indulgences in ways poor people cannot. An
out-of-wedlock baby is just another cost center for a libidinous billionaire.
Recreational drug use can certainly lead to ruinous addiction for a movie star,
but the path to ruin for a supermarket cashier is much shorter.
But human nature is about more than carnal desires and
other personal indulgences. Humans also desire status. And the more status some
people have, the more status they crave, along with the trappings that go with
it.
The televangelist Jesse Duplantis recently asked his
congregation to donate some $54 million so he could get a Dassault Falcon 7X
private jet. The three private jets currently owned by his ministry don’t have
the range he desires.
Status isn’t just about luxurious toys. It’s also about
the sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle art of bending people to your
will and making them acknowledge your authority. That’s why some celebrities
order the staff not to look them in the eye. It’s why Sean Penn thought nothing
of making an assistant swim through the filthy and dangerous chop of the East
River to fetch him a cigarette.
A friend of mine worked for a famous TV personality years
ago. Let’s call him JM. This personality liked to bark demands for hot
chocolate into the office intercom (“JM need cocoa!”), but he deliberately
refused to name the person he wanted to bring it to him because he enjoyed how
his employees panicked about who would be the first to volunteer to fulfill the
menial task. Just because he could.
This sort of thing is grotesque and unseemly in all walks
of life, but it is particularly egregious from government officials. A rich
person in the private sector can be an officious, overbearing ass, and all he
or she risks is his or her own money and own reputation. But a government
official who abuses his or her authority in order to indulge his or her vanity
and desire for status is a very different thing.
The Trump White House has a lot of very rich people in
it. For instance, Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, flies on her own
private jet — and that’s fine. She’s actually saving taxpayers money. Moreover,
DeVos is secure in her status and doesn’t need a government job to bolster it.
But DeVos and other wealthy members of the administration
seem to be arousing envy in their colleagues, most infamously Scott Pruitt,
head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt has done some good work on
reducing regulations and fulfilling other conservative goals. He’s also taken
credit for some good work done by others and for work that hasn’t been done at
all, as Matt Lewis of the Daily Beast
has noted.
But Pruitt has also behaved like a jackass, abusing his
authority in petty and silly ways, as if to prove that he’s a really big deal.
He’s sent his grandiosely praetorian security detail to fetch him some special
hand lotion and allegedly used his aides to get him a discount on a used (!)
mattress. He tried to finagle a job or two for his wife. And that’s just the
news of the last couple of weeks.
Like Pruitt, Ben Carson, the housing and urban
development secretary, has long talked a great game about the perils of big
government, but that hasn’t stopped him from treating his cabinet appointment
as a kind of ducal fiefdom, rewarding his family with business opportunities
but also blaming his wife when he got caught exceeding the budget for interior
decorating.
There are perks to working in government. But, as with
the pardon power, those perks are inherent to the job, not to the person
holding it. Under President Obama, it was a staple of conservative rhetoric to
note that America isn’t a monarchy. They still say it, they just don’t act like
it.
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