If there’s anybody left in America who qualifies as genteel, surely it’s New York Times columnist and PBS frontman Russell Baker. But these days Baker has been in what for him qualifies as a quaking rage. He recently wrote a column titled “A Shudder of Disgust,” about the degradation of public discourse. His peg was the Lewinsky story. His contempt was for pretty much everybody involved in it. “Sensitive people,” Baker wrote, “will be content to loathe them all quietly for what they have done to the country, for how they have debased our culture.”
It’s a sentiment we’re hearing more and more from commentators on the far side of the generation gap. There was recently a segment on a Los Angeles radio station that had sages Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Reeves scolding the media for paying so much attention to this lewd affair. And it’s not just liberal fogies who feel this way. The conservative Rutherford Institute is now fighting for survival. Its donors have stopped giving, to protest the group’s decision to support Paula Jones’s lawsuit. These people may not like Bill Clinton, but they despise tawdriness even more, and they’re willing to blame anybody who airs it.
It’s hard not to sympathize with the last defenders of the old order. Baker, Schlesinger, and those Rutherford donors are all standing up for a set of social standards now eroding — something conservatives ought to respect. During the Cold War, there was a hierarchy, rarely articulated but perfectly understood, that determined which subjects were fit for public discussion. At its head were issues involving guns and money. So arms control, foreign affairs, and monetary policy were the most prestigious topics. Then you got down to less prestigious but still important matters, like education and welfare. Below them all, however, was a range of subjects, private matters, that were unfit for parlor chatter — abortion, adultery, private perversion. People weren’t innocent about such topics (read John O’Hara), but that was no reason to acknowledge them. Folks were willing to cover up scandal and vice for the sake of reticence, which was a value they thought essential to decent public life.
That code is now gone. We live in a world in which Dan Rather and New York Times columnists go on the Don Imus show. It’s clear the old Protestant establishment can no longer exert sufficient social pressure to enforce its standards. Now there’s a general scrambling of high and low, and this, since Monica, has provoked a raft of hypocrisy on both sides. It’s a little rich to hear baby boomers who have spent their lives attacking the WASP old-boy network now lamenting the loss of the decorum established by that network. Not long ago, the boomers were attacking decorum as stuffy and repressive. They were the ones who prized frankness. So too, it’s a little odd to see some conservatives, who talk a lot about the degradation of culture, suddenly unbothered by public discussion of semen-stained dresses.
But the shift from Walter Lippmann to Geraldo Rivera is not strictly a story of cultural decay. It’s more accurate to say that public passions have migrated. During the Cold War, there was a broad consensus about private morality, but strong disagreements about public policy. It’s hard now even to recall the furious intensity that surrounded aid to the contras, let alone episodes like the Hiss-Chambers trial. Today, there are few passionate debates about fundamental public issues. Almost nobody argues the pros and cons of capitalism. Political corruption like Whitewater or Asiagate arouses passions only within the niche market of political junkies.
But Americans are confused about private morality. Many Americans don’t know how to be judgmental. They aren’t sure how they are supposed to treat people who have committed sins. So to address such confusion, public discussion has shifted to topics of private behavior, and not just on Jerry Springer, but on the network news and in the news magazines. If anything, it’s surprising that at this late date there is still such widespread resistance to frank discussion about private matters.
What’s interesting is the arena we have chosen for our discussions about private morality. If you had to predict, you would say that it would be psychologists or novelists or clergymen who would lead public discussions of personal morality. But the novelists have retreated to their alternative academic universe. And most leading psychologists and church leaders have values so non-judgmental that they are of little help to mainstream Americans. So instead, America has turned to . . . lawyers.
The legal arena has taken center stage. Whether the subject is race, sex, the way we treat our parents, or the way we treat our children, it’s one damn legal proceeding after another. It’s O.J., the Menendez brothers, Lewinsky, babies in the dumpster, kids shooting in the schoolyard. It’s these stories, not legislative battles or works of literature, that are the real markers of the age. When America needs to take its temperature, it doesn’t look to novels or to the halls of Congress — it looks to the courts.
We’re seeing the emergence of a new social phenomenon: the legal spectacle. Monicagate, which has unfolded in Washington and involves its top politician, is more a legal spectacle than a political scandal. Unlike Watergate, it didn’t start as an effort to gain political advantage. Unlike Iran-contra or Hiss-Chambers, it is not related to any great policy matter. Monicagate is about politics like the O.J. trial was about football. Politics is the route Bill Clinton used to achieve celebrity, and a celebrity surrounded by lawyers is what you need to get one of these new-style spectacles going.
The legal arena is perfect for controversies about private behavior because it allows us to probe for ever more lurid details while at the same time giving us a dispassionate and technical way to talk about them. Unlike journalists or writers, lawyers, with subpoena power can unearth personal details with a thoroughness that was previously available only to novelists. Moreover, the pace and rhythm of legal proceedings stretches each drama over months, even years. So the public can follow the stories with the same steady fascination that 19th-century readers followed serialized novels.
But these legal spectacles are not traditional stories, or non-fiction novels in courtroom form. Several pundits have likened the Monica story to a tragedy, with Clinton being brought low by his tragic flaw. But what separates these spectacles from normal story-telling is that, in spectacles, unlike literature, the central figure is beside the point. An O.J. or (in radically different circumstances) a Clinton may get the action going. But once the spectacle begins, this figure is passive. It is the lawyers and commentators who are the main players. They impose a silence and idleness on the genesis figure and they take over the action. Imagine a Shakespearean tragedy that has Othello’s legal team battling Iago’s legal team while the two principals sit in the dressing room, awaiting the outcome.
As the months go by, the lawyers and pundits construct a legal superstructure and a dense thicket of commentary around the original kernel of crime. Using the magic word “allegedly,” pundits can fashion arcane discussions about events that may never have occurred in the first place. Pretty soon, the legal super-structure and the sociological commentary begin to overshadow the original event. In true postmodern fashion, the meanings ascribed to the events are more important than the events themselves. O.J. matters because of the lessons different groups have drawn about race relations. Johnnie Cochran has had more influence on American life than O.J. Simpson. Monicagate’s importance will lie in the way it influences our tolerance of adultery and lying. The fact that the public has so far accepted Clinton despite his behavior is more significant than anything that has happened or is likely to happen to Clinton personally. America is always in the midst of redefining itself. These spectacles serve as the pretext for that kind of discussion.
Today, you can’t turn on the TV without seeing Jonathan Turley, Greta Van Susteren, Richard BenVeniste, Alan Dershowitz, Johnnie Cochran, or some other lawyer expanding on the events of the moment. Legal spectacles are like war in that they make fast promotion possible. And the sort of people who rise to prominence in times of spectacle are those who are good behavior coaches. In last week’s Newsweek, lavish attention was paid to Clinton lawyers David Kendall and Nicole Seligman. In Time, there was a worshipful profile of Lewinsky lawyer Billy Martin. These lawyers are portrayed as the strategic masterminds behind the conflict. They are the only truly glamorous figures in the entire event. And what these people are praised for is their ability to give advice on etiquette and conduct.
In college, the deal was you could be either a lawyer or a writer. The lawyers would go off and get nicely tailored suits. They’d play tennis wearing whites and enjoy winter vacations at resorts. The writers, meanwhile, would wear rumpled jackets, play tennis wearing any old T-shirt, and enjoy cheap vacations in national parks. But as compensation, the writers (journalists, intellectuals) got to play a unique public role. They got to take part in the national conversation, tackle the really big issues, and hash out moral disputes. The lawyers, of course, had to squirrel away over boring briefs. But now lawyers get the money and the public role.
So the current fascination with lewd details and suspect dresses is not simply some lapse of taste. It is not some temporary blip that the country can put behind it once Monica leaves the scene. These legal spectacles are going to dominate the media and American life for quite a while. We’re going to be spending our time with all those yucky private details we sort of don’t want to know. And we’re going to have to listen to a lot more lawyers. And maybe start thinking like them.
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
