Who knew Virginia could match Louisiana for crazy politics? Or match Kazakhstan, for that matter, where the politicos are in high dudgeon over a British comic’s oversexed caricature named Borat?
But our Senaterace keeps getting weirder and weirder: First we hear George Allen might be a racist, then that he is a Jew, then that he once was the kind of person who stuffed severed deer heads into black families’ mailboxes. Now Jim Webb might be racist, too. My prediction for the next revelation in this race? “I am a gay American.”
But wait. Aside from all this camp, are reports that a politician used the “N-word” in his youth really a big deal? What if he has reformed, making special efforts to right the immoral positions he held as a younger, less mature man?
George Allen’s record on race as a legislator has been good: He’s fought for money for historically black colleges, gone on civil rights pilgrimages to sites like Birmingham, and so on. The most credible reports that he used that word are from as far back as the ’80s. Shouldn’t the cleansing of his vocabulary and his reaching out to the black community make us respect him for fixing something that was wrong with himself?
After all, as a country, we value the virtue of self-improvement and overcoming obstacles more highly than many others.
Self-help books are a billion-dollar industry in America.
We have a much more extensive program of affirmative action than other developed countries; partly, that’s because slavery is a special historical case, but beyond that, college admissions officers are simply impressed by poor immigrants and childhood screw-ups who, by sheer force of will, turn their lives around.
As a kid, I remember the hero of my aspiring-doctor friends was Ben Carson, the pioneering neurosurgeon who started his young adulthood in the ghetto with the nickname “Dummy.” Carson even tried to stab someone!
We’re partly attracted to the virtue of self-improvement, I think, because it follows a distinctly Christian narrative: Past sins can be expunged through being born again into faith.
And yet, we have surprisingly little interest in this sort of self-improvement in politicians. As my colleague at The New Republic, Michelle Cottle, puts it, “politics is a field that values certainty and absolutism above all else.”
That’s why John Kerry spent his presidential campaign improbably trying to argue that eagerly signing up to serve in Vietnam was not a mistake and that protesting it afterwards was not a mistake. And why George Allen foolishly claimed he had not only refrained from uttering the N-word recently, but that he had never in his life said it.
But the popularity of George W. Bush, a recovered alcoholic, shows the appeal of a self-help journey story in politics.
Even something as odious as racism in one’s past might be overcome through reflection and atonement. It was Lincoln who reminded the hot abolitionists that even slaveholders were not inherently more evil men than they; rather, having grown up around slavery they had become numb to its injustice.
Likewise, had he grown up in the South, learning about the “war of Northern aggression” and hanging out with boys who used the “N-word” liberally, we could understand George Allen’s not rejecting it until he became an adult with independent judgment.
Except … George Allen didn’t grow up in the South, surrounded by ingrained racism. He was raised in progressive Southern California, and came to his perverted love of the Confederacy as an adult, by choice.
His journey to tolerance goes in the reverse direction. Now that’s just messed up.
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
