Remember the days of the Clinton impeachment, when we all had such fun with our good friends the liberals, as they tied themselves into knots and/or pretzels while facing the fact that their leader, Bill Clinton, had manhandled women, and lied?
“All gentlemen lie about sex, ” said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., ignoring that fact that lies under oath were a whole other matter. Sillier still was the feminist movement, forced to walk back all things said and done since the Thomas-Hill hearings. And even sillier still was Gloria Steinem, who proposed an idea that (liberal) presidents should be given a pass on some kinds of harassment, but only if they were pro-choice.
Everyone laughed, and while they survived, they never recovered their moral authority. My fellow conservatives, the shoes have changed feet, and we are behaving like Steinem and Schlesinger. We too have been losing our moral authority. And trust me, it’s not coming back.
In a recent effort to become more like the feminists, a number of people who ought to know better came up with a new sort of relativity theory that would have done Arthur and Gloria proud. Donald Trump, they concede, has committed adultery. King David and John Kennedy also committed adultery. People think well of King David, and of John Kennedy. Therefore, they say, in a strange sort of logic, people should think well of Trump.
But the flaw in the theory, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out, is that this is a strangely reductive conception of character, and that committing adultery was not the main thing that these people had done with their lives. Like Alexander Hamilton, Martin Luther King Jr., and Franklin Roosevelt, whose private lives also were not without blemish, the American president and the Biblical King had courage, resolution, knowledge and fortitude. They had built or saved nations, waged wars or fought in them, seriously thought about aspects of government, and fought some of history’s more inhuman and brutal regimes.
Trump, by contrast, has been and done none of these. He is a coward, a creep and a vulgarian who attracts a large number of bigoted followers and spent much of his life running scams. Thus, the acceptance of Trump is a new departure and low for a movement that had claimed at one time to be grounded in character. As Ponnuru concludes, those who “dismiss what we know about Trump because nobody’s perfect are effectively saying that character does not matter at all.”
Let us recall that the matter of character has been key to conservatism since its inception, and that the worst thing Clinton and Trump have done to their parties has been to force their most loyal followers to compromise, deny, or walk back completely their most deeply cherished ideals. Feminists, incensed at conservatives who were reported to have said something offensive, had to accept the fact that their defender and president had exposed himself to one state employee, groped another, and toyed with an intern less than half his own age.
Conservatives who defined themselves in opposition to Clinton now have to face the fact that their putative head is a worse sort of person than Clinton ever thought about being, and more of a menace and thug. The true moral case made in 1998 against liberals — that they failed to hold their own side to the standards by which they judged others — is the test that conservatives right now are failing. If you don’t apply your standards to your own people, then you haven’t got standards at all.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
