Thursday, June 29, 2006

Sullivan's Travails

Today's mail brings an advance uncorrected proof of Andrew Sullivan's forthcoming book, The Conservative Soul.

One of Andrew's great themes is that the Republican party has been infiltrated by sinister Christianist theocrats such as ... me. He even quotes me.

[T]he theorists of the new conservatism were entirely candid about their goals and philosophy. In the Monica Lewinsky saga that consumed American politics for much of Bill Clinton's second term, they saw an entire worldview in the balance. "What's at stake in the Lewinsky scandal," neoconservative writer David Frum wrote in a 1998 issue of The Weekly Standard, is not the right to privacy, but the central dogma of the baby boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it's consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all.

The quote is not footnoted, but you can find the full text here. And if you click on it, you will I think notice that I argued exactly the opposite of the point Andrew represents me as advocating. I've cautioned Andrew about this misrepresentation before. I guess I'm going to have to do it again.

The Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted between January 19 and 21, 1998. The article Andrew cites was distributed at the end of the first week of February, just after the first shock of the revelation had subsided - and as the president's defenders were rallying to excuse presidential perjury. I tried to make sense of how they could possibly do such a thing:

Time was, when Charles Reich, the author of The Greening of America and a law professor at Yale when Bill and Hillary studied there, could denounce over-whipped peanut butter as an imposture and a deceit; today, the Clintons are toying with the idea that lying under oath is a perfectly reasonable response to pesky and impertinent inquiries. How in the world did we get from all the way over there to over here? ...

It's easier to keep calm at Bill Clinton's lies in the Monica Lewinsky case if you think that the behavior covered up by the lie — a series of casual sexual encounters with a series of women not his wife — was not especially wrong. And that, it appears, is what a good many members of the president's generation do think. ...

As these libertine boomers see it, criticism of Clinton is the first step on a slippery slope. You start with an apparently sensible restriction — married presidents shouldn't have sex with government employees in the Oval Office — and the next thing you know, it's back to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Just as the ACLU sees a Frosty the Snowman in front of City Hall on December 24 as the first step toward theocracy, so the president's defenders fear that condemning the Lewinsky affair will ineluctably lead straight back to Puritan New England.

Make no mistake: The defense of Clinton's right to lie about his affair with Lewinsky is not, as some of his defenders optimistically suggest, a defense of "privacy." If it turned out that Clinton were in the habit of making racist jokes in the company of two or three old friends, the privacy defense would not avail him. If he had lied under oath to cover up an improper deduction on his theoretically private tax return, [his defenders] would lift not a finger for him. The right to privacy? This is a White House in which you're not allowed to smoke.

No, what's at stake in the Lewinsky scandal is not the right to privacy, but the central dogma of the baby boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it's consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all.

Sorry to be so long, but I hope the extended quote makes clear: Like most Clinton critics, I myself believed in 1998 that the issue at stake was presidential perjury - lying under oath for his own personal advantage. It seemed to me that we were battling to protect the integrity of the American legal system against a chief executive willing to violate fundamental rules for his own personal advantage. Maybe I was wrong, but that's what I thought.

It was Clinton's defenders, I warned in 1998, for whom the issue would be one of sexual freedom above all, and I don't know how I could have stressed the point more emphatically. And yet Andrew clips out one paragraph from its context in order to turn its meaning upside down.

I hope that's an isolated incident and that the rest of the book rises to a higher level of accuracy of fact and scrupulousness of argument.

06/29 10:10 PM