Yes, there’s a lot to untangle here. But start with this: William Bennett, formerly education secretary under President Ronald Reagan and self-appointed moral thermometer, could stand to learn from his earlier self.
Last weekend, Bennett unleashed a furious attack at columnist George Will in response to Will’s furious attack on Vice President Mike Pence. An observer can regret the vehemence of Will’s take on the usually admirable Pence and yet be appalled at the overkill, and sheer hypocrisy, in Bennett’s eruption against Will and unnamed “NeverTrumpers.”
At least Will was demonstrating the virtue of consistency — an admirable trait that Bennett, the onetime virtue-monger, has recklessly abandoned. Will always has disliked toadyism by vice presidents, as when he once wrote that the elder former President George H. W. Bush was emitting the “thin, tinny ‘arf’… of a lapdog.” And Will has argued since at least 1983 that in some respects (citing the title of his book on the subject), Statecraft [is] Soulcraft. As the New York Times review described its thesis, “where government fails to nurture a sense of public spirit and self-restraint … the dignity of politics fades and social cohesion dissolves.”
(If he mentions his 1983 book in speeches, Will shows another virtue, that of humorous humility, saying it was “read by dozens.”)
Bennett, on the other hand, now completely contradicts his former themes. Unwilling to stick to a limited, focused critique of Will, he suddenly erupts against NeverTrumpers in general, but without providing a specific example: “What is evident from Will’s splenetic attack on Pence is just how far the ‘Never Trump’ movement is willing to go…” Employing a term historically used to denigrate Communist sympathizers, Bennett excoriates “Will and his fellow travelers on the anti-Trump road,” and uses that slur to assert that the entire “never-Trump wing of the Republican Party has turned its sights on Pence.”
Balderdash. Few NeverTrump conservatives have turned against Pence. Bennett is demonstrating the vice of assigning to the many the (alleged) sins of a single member — which is, it should be noted, the very sin at the root of racism and other “us-vs.-them” evils.
Worst, though, is Bennett’s rank employment of consequentialism, a moral outlook he once rejected. Bennett once argued, fiercely and censoriously, in favor of normative ethics — an approach that (to quote from Wikipedia) “derives the rightness or wrongness of one’s conduct from the character of the behavior itself.”
Against that, Bennett now argues, “what matters” isn’t the character of the president, but that Trump is pursuing an agenda to “make this country better” and save it from “a return to power of the liberal establishment.”
That worthy goal, Bennett (in effect) asserts, obviates any legitimacy in worrying about Trump’s extravagant violation of norms, his crassness, his incontinent and unrepentant lies, his praise for authoritarians, and his deliberate divisiveness. Now, Bennett is saying, Trump’s ends justify his means — so we should stifle our outrage.
Strange. Bennett once wrote a book lamenting The Death of Outrage. In it, he lambasted the “ends-justify-the-means” situational ethics then gaining prominence, specifically because they “assume a lower common denominator of behavior and leadership than we Americans ought to accept.” He argued that the private character of a president absolutely does matter and that extravagant sexual infidelity by a president is indeed a public concern — and he stated quite definitively that “a president whose character manifests itself in patterns of reckless personal conduct, deceit, abuse of power, and contempt for the rule of law cannot be a good president.”
Twenty years later, Bennett says those awful character traits are immaterial. Whereas back then Bennett criticized “compartmentalization” of judging a president so that public character can be excused if the political cause or consequences are right, now he says all that matters is that the Left is out of power.
Back then, Bennett was concerned about a president bullying his critics. Back then, he was appalled when a president’s team systematically attacked a special (independent) counsel “whose professional career … has been characterized by sobriety, probity, judiciousness, and personal and professional integrity.”
Back then, he wrote that “in a self-governing and law-abiding nation, we must never allow ourselves to be lulled into passive disgust or indifference, the civic equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders. We must never lose our sense, when appropriate, of outrage.”
Now, though, Bennett says moral outrage is illegitimate if it is aimed at people fighting against the Left.
Some of us think our outrage is justified both morally and consequentially — that standards always matter, and that public disgust at Trumpian politics will lead to a long-term, deeply destructive political shift in favor of the Left.
This isn’t an effort, despite Bennett’s vicious assertion, to “validate [our] own [individual] sense of superiority.” It is to insist that the American civic culture as a whole should remain a superior one, rather than the tawdry milieu that both Trumpworld and Clintonworld have made it.
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of Mad Jones, Heretic, a satirical literary novel published in the fall of 2017.
