By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, July 16, 2020
One of the most shocking things about corruption scandals
such as the one currently convulsing Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada is
how little there is to be gained.
Trudeau is in trouble because he and some other members
of his government did not recuse themselves from the decision to reward a
no-bid contract to a politically connected charity that had paid Trudeau’s
mother and his brother some (U.S.) $200,000 over four years to give speeches.
(Justin Trudeau himself was in the full-time speech-making business for much of
his youth, and in a good year he could expect to collect a half-million dollars
or so.) Canadian finance minister Bill Morneau is in the stocks, too — he was
involved in the contract decision in spite of the fact that his daughter is
employed by the charity.
The Trudeaus are not as rich as you might expect them to
be, but they are well-off. They are not the sort of family in which the parents
and adult children are simply desperate for (on average) an extra fifty grand a
year, but neither are they the sort of people who would fail to notice an extra
fifty grand a year — or its absence.
J. J. McCollough,
who writes about Canada for the Washington Post, blames Trudeau’s
“idiosyncratic mix of elitism and obliviousness” for this and other troubles.
It would be difficult to credit obliviousness if Trudeau had not already
demonstrated that quality so often. As McCollough notes, Trudeau had early got
himself into trouble by making use of a private island belonging to the Aga
Khan, which Trudeau thought was within the bounds of propriety because the Aga
Khan is a family friend. Which of course he is. Justin Trudeau is unlikely to
be surprised by anyone’s wanting to be his friend.
But when you are walking around with a famous name, everybody
is a family friend or desires to be — ask Chelsea Clinton, who was paid
$600,000 by NBC News in exchange for very little work and has earned millions
sitting on corporate boards with almost nothing to recommend her save her name.
Hunter Biden you know about. No doubt we will have an infestation of petty
Trumps in American public and business life for a little while at least. (The
Trumps thought they were the Medici but turned out to be the Borgias.) It is
easy to be oblivious when you are Chelsea Clinton — or Hillary Rodham Clinton,
for that matter, who was every bit as much a hanger-on as her daughter is. Bill
Clinton, who had the talent and did the actual work of building Clinton Inc.,
was many things — oblivious was not one of them.
But these apple-stealing scandals are not restricted to
the genuinely oblivious. Virginia governor Bob McDonnell was undone by a $6,000
Rolex given to him by a businessman looking for a favor regarding some dietary
supplements. McDonnell is smart enough to know that it means something — and
nothing good — when a politician receives a Rolex unexpectedly. Jesse L.
Jackson Jr. was undone by a rather nicer Rolex, one valued at $43,000.
(Both men enjoyed some other indulgences, McDonnell’s
paid for by the same patron who provided the Rolex, Jackson’s paid for by the
misappropriation of campaign funds. McDonnell and his wife were convicted on
felony corruption charges, but the conviction was overturned and the government
abandoned the case. Jackson served a short prison sentence on fraud charges.)
New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, sometimes
mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick for Joe Biden, used to be in the
House, where she got into hot water over accepting some jewelry and a rug from
the government of Azerbaijan on a junket to Baku. You do not have to be
gobsmackingly bright to rise in New Mexico politics (though the Land of
Enchantment has produced some smart politicos, including Susana Martinez and
Bill Richardson), but Lujan Grisham certainly is bright enough to know that
what happens in Baku doesn’t stay in Baku.
So, why accept the gifts?
My pet theory is that this kind of petty corruption in
politics is driven by two factors: The first is that the stakes are only petty
on the politicians’ side — that Canadian charity that paid sundry Trudeaus for
speeches got a $900 million contract. Throwing a few fruit baskets at Canadian
MPs or American congressmen can be a pretty good investment, if you know how to
play it. Some of those politicians are going to take those fruit baskets.
The second factor is the same one that drives much of our
class-warfare politics: the fact that many influential people, especially
academics, politicians, and media figures, are socially adjacent to
people they are not financially adjacent to. The Trudeaus are
comfortable, but the Aga Khan has a Caribbean island of his own, a pretty nice
one. Justin Trudeau lives in a duplex, and the Aga Khan . . . does
not.
If you are the governor of Virginia, your social set will
include a number of very, very wealthy people, especially now that we have
entered the republic-teetering-on-the-edge-of-empire stage in our history, with
the political capital slowly becoming the financial capital. But even if you
are a big noise in Richmond, you still make only $175,000 a year. (Only.)
That’s fine if you are someone like former Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, who
inherited his grandfather’s billions (that splendid Target money), or a former
Goldman Sachs monkey like Steve Mnuchin, or a successful entrepreneur such as
Rick Scott. But most people in politics are lawyers with a little bit of money,
or something financially and socially similar. They have more than most, but
not nearly enough to satisfy them.
“I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity
of the wicked. . . . Surely in vain have I cleansed my heart, and washed my
hands in innocence.” The lament is familiar. But the psalmist had something to
set against the gold of those for whom “pride is their necklace.” What do we
have now?
J. J. McCollough of the Washington Post faults
Trudeau’s “elitism,” but one of the problems with our elite is that it
has no –ism — no creed, no shared sense of class responsibility, few if
any shared norms, and no working definition of civic duty. We Americans do not
really have an old-fashioned class system in which young people are educated
for leadership in a semi-hereditary fashion, a European-style civil-service
culture, or the meritocracy that we imagine we do. (It is really something
special to be treated to disquisitions on “merit-based” policies by Jared
Kushner.) It is easy to understand and appreciate how that fails the American
people, who are denied diligent and honest government and administration, but
it also fails the politicians, too. You do not have to shed a tear for them,
but the situation is worth understanding, if only for purposes of civic
self-defense.
Most people don’t go into politics looking to get rich —
they go into politics looking for status and meaning. That is especially true
for people who already are well-off. Kelly Loeffler doesn’t need your money —
$500 million still goes a long way in Georgia. The more honest and self-aware
of the businessman-politicians can be pretty frank about that. They have money,
but money isn’t enough. They end up, as one very wealthy politician told me not
long ago, “addicted to feeling important.”
I used to be represented by a Pennsylvania state senator
who was a textbook squishy progressive tribune of the New Suburbia; I disagreed
with her about most things but never suspected that she got into public life
seeking a fortune, because she didn’t need one — her father was Leon Hess. She
may have been wrong about a lot of things, but she was sincere in her desire to
contribute something of value. Unfortunately, political office (and government
work generally) no longer provides many people the status and meaning it once
did, precisely because our elites have no –ism, no creed, no shared
conception of duty and political honor. Like the guy who exchanges his Corvette
for a Lamborghini, politicians can trade up and up and up but never go
anywhere: The House is full of people who detest it and wish they were in the
Senate, the Senate is full of people who despise it and desire to be president,
and the White House is — I’ll leave that off, for now. This is not to suggest
we should be sentimental about some golden age of American democracy: We always
have had corruption and careerism, but it is more difficult today to make a
mark and achieve something meaningful with dutiful service than it was a
generation or two ago. We have a lot of cheap demagogues because cheap
demagoguery is where it’s at. And if you’re not a gifted demagogue, you can
still hustle.
You will not hear me delivering homilies against “consumerism”
or “materialism.” I believe that the enjoyment of good things is good in its
place, and that the spur provided by the desire of such enjoyment is one of the
things that raised us up out of the muck and into civilization. But there is
only so much satisfaction in consumption, even of the most rarefied kinds. It
is difficult to get Americans to keep a straight face when talking about avarice
in its Seven Deadly Sins sense, but we see its wreckage all around us.
The Trudeaus and the McDonnells and the Jacksons of the
world get themselves into trouble not because they are merely and simply
greedy but because they are trying to use consumption to meet a powerful human
need that cannot be satisfied with a Rolex. (Or even an A.
Lange & Söhne Richard Lange Pour Le Mérite!) They go into
politics hoping to satisfy their craving for meaning, to enjoy a larger and
more significant kind of life than that which can be had from getting and
spending alone, but they end up disappointed. At the same time, they enter into
a new world in which public and private transactions both are quantified with
the once-exotic word billions, develop connections to individuals and
institutions with millions and billions to throw around at whatever interests
them, and occasionally enjoy a tantalizing little taste of the private-jet
life, which is very tasty indeed.
There is a bit of temptation, and maybe that temptation
doesn’t seem like very much in the balance — unless you understand that on the
other side of the scale is: almost nothing. Without a real creed of
public life, there is no counterweight to the temptations, whether it is the
temptation of great wealth or the ordinary pursuit of comfort.
People have admired Cincinnatus for 25 centuries now
because he went home to his plow. To the Romans, that was the stuff.
Cincinnatus was a patrician, but he wasn’t rich — he was a poor farmer, with
only four acres to his name. When his country needed him, it invested the
powers of dictatorship in him, which he used to repel an invasion, and then he
resigned and went back to his farm — all of that in fifteen days. (This is a
legend, of course.) He could have clung to power or sought some means of
enriching himself, but he held these things to be of little value in comparison
to the dignity conferred by a life lived in accordance with the highest ideals
of his people. He had something better than wealth or power. But we
21st-century Americans are not going to develop a cult of admiration for men
who go home to their plows and treat them as timeless paragons of virtue —
because we do not actually admire them at all, and we don’t see the virtue in
such actions or agree about the virtue in much of anything else. We don’t
really like anything better than wealth and power.
The choice between doing the honorable thing or pushing a
little money in the general direction of your family is easy enough if there is
an honorable thing and you can say with confidence what it is. But there’s a
lot less power in the honorable-ish thing, the provisionally honorable thing,
the honorable-enough thing, the thing we only pretend to honor.
Why would Justin Trudeau risk his reputation and his
position over a paltry sum of money? Wrong question.
Ask instead: Why wouldn’t he?
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