Whither ethics? Whither an appropriate sense of shame?
I wish to associate myself with my colleague Becket Adams’ unease about the propriety of disgraced former FBI official Andrew McCabe serving as the featured guest for a Democratic fundraiser and serving as a paid analyst for CNN. Allow me, though, to broaden that contemplation.
It is obviously outrageous that McCabe should so quickly be feted as a political hero (by the Pennsylvania Democratic Party) and treated as a legitimate analyst (by CNN). The problems, in both situations, are multiple. First, it is inappropriate for the former acting director of the FBI to so quickly become a partisan figure. McCabe is calling into question the impartiality of his former agency. Second, it is inappropriate for either organization to not just effectively rehabilitate, but celebrate, someone fired by the FBI after a neutral inspector general’s report showed him to be have committed ethics infractions and lied under oath at least three times.
Mistakes and sins can be forgiven. Yet, when there is no penance and no intervening act meriting public rehabilitation, there should be no such rapid resurrection of respectability, much less honor – especially when the misconduct harmed the public weal and corrupted an agency whose entire mission is to fight corruption.
Here’s where those aforementioned “broader” considerations come into play. The rush to treat McCabe as eminently respectable, or even as a political hero (by the Democrats, presumably because, ethics-schmethics, he stood against the evil Trump), seems not to be an isolated occurrence. Instead, it seems a symptom of a more pervasive malady.
In public life today and in the establishment media’s cynical, manipulative news coverage/hype machine, all sides feign being appalled at ethics breaches by their adversaries, yet refuse to hold their own side to similar standards. Worse, with winks and nods, the public-forum gatekeepers treat wrongdoers as if violations of public trust were just “part of the process” and their scars “merely” political rather than evidence of appropriately meted punishment.
This is particularly true for scofflaws from the political Left, such as McCabe. We would never see CNN hire a disgraced former FBI director whose biases worked against the interests of a Democratic president.
So we see Al Sharpton, the repeat tax violator and unrepentant inciter of deadly riots, treated for years as an admirable sage by Democrats and the media alike. We saw CNN give former New York governor Eliot Spitzer his own show in 2011 despite Spitzer’s resignation from office in a prostitution scandal. James Clapper, director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama, lied under oath to Congress, yet now serves as a security analyst on CNN. And so on.
Many conservatives are similarly dismissive of scandal, lies, and abjectly indecent public behavior when their own causes are advanced. Witness the pretzel-like (il)logic of so many apologists for President Trump, refusing to hold him to standards to which for decades they held liberal politicians.
What’s missing here is the proper role of shame, and ashamed-ness, which once was, and should remain, an essential aspect of civil society. And no, this isn’t a call for a modern equivalent of Scarlet Letters for private transgressions. Instead, it is an insistence that public character, shown in actions related to public duties, is tremendously important. Customs and mores are just as crucial for the commonweal as formal law is.
If ethics no longer really matters, if character is just a “construct,” then we have defined deviancy down so far as to make societal recovery very difficult if not impossible.
If that is the case, then, shame on all of us.
