By Richard Fernandez in PJ Media and
the Belmont Club Blog
In “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde“, Robert
Louis Stevenson describes how the eminent Henry Jekyll’s wanted to be relieved
of his conscience. From time to time Jekyll had indulged in shameful vice.
However his enjoyment was ruined in two ways: first by the fear of
discovery and second, by the guilt which he felt afterward. Thus torn,
Jekyll wanted to let it all hang out yet somehow retain his respectability.
I saw that, of the two natures that
contended in the field of my consciousness … I was radically both … If each, I
told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved
of all that was unbearable; the unjust delivered from the aspirations might go
his way, and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk
steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he
found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the
hands of this extraneous evil.
There seem days when politicians,
like Dr. Jekyll, seem weary of maintaining the pretense and tempted to
simply drop the mask. James Taranto writing in the Wall Street Journal notes that Hillary Clinton is responding to a request for
her official emails in a calculatingly insulting way. She’s turning over the
emails as printed pages, almost as if to show her displeasure, the way a man
might protest at a bank by paying for his car in cash with barrels full of
pennies.
If you were following the
revelations about Hillary Clinton’s private State Department IT operation last
week, you probably heard that, as the initial New York Times story put it,
“55,000 pages of emails were given to the department” in December after being
selected by a private aide to the former secretary. You might have wondered:
What does that mean, 55,000 “pages”? Or maybe you just read it, as the crack
fact-check team over at PolitiFact did just last night, as 55,000 emails.
It turns out the reference is to
literal physical pages. From Friday’s Times: “Finally, in December, dozens of
boxes filled with 50,000 pages of printed emails from Mrs. Clinton’s personal
account were delivered to the State Department.”
Why did Mrs. Clinton have her staff
go through the trouble of printing out, boxing and shipping 50,000 or 55,000
pages instead of just sending a copy of the electronic record? One can only
speculate, but there is an obvious advantage: Printed files are less
informative and far harder to search than the electronic originals.
Because State has only printouts of
emails, department personnel responding to a Freedom of Information Act request
have to go through the whole haystack rather than type “needle” into a search
engine. At best, that would mean long delays in FOIA compliance.
Likewise, printouts are not subject
to electronic discovery in the event of investigation or lawsuit. The Times
reports that department lawyers responding to a request from the House Select
Committee on Benghazi took two months to find “roughly 900 pages pertaining to
the Benghazi attacks.” And printouts do not include electronic “metadata,”
which can provide crucial forensic evidence.
It’s not just Hillary either.
President Obama told the public with a straight face that he only learned that
his Secretary of State used a private email account from the news media. Bill Clinton has responded to reports that his foundation has received
large sums of money from Middle Eastern potentates with a breezy ‘why not?’ “We
do get money from other countries, and some of them are in the Middle East,”
Clinton said. “I think it’s a good thing.”
When the great realize that nothing
can actually stop them then the temptation to dispense with the inconvenience
of pretense grows too great to resist.
Matthew Yglesias, writing in Vox,
indirectly expresses this desire to give free rein to ambition when he argues
that America is doomed because the Constitution is flawed and its standing in the
way of progress.
America’s constitutional democracy
is going to collapse. … In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A
prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by
a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held
and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period
of weeks, but there’s simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the
legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.
But within a presidential system,
gridlock leads to a constitutional trainwreck with no resolution. The United
States’s recent government shutdowns and executive action on immigration are
small examples of the kind of dynamic that’s led to coups and putsches abroad.
Things worked well when politics
consisted of backroom deals. But somewhere along the line politics got
polluted with principle and the machine ground to a stop on a whole range of
issues.
While Gilded Age members of Congress
voted in a highly partisan way, their voting didn’t reflect any polarization of
ideas evident in broader American society. As Charles Calhoun, a leading
scholar of Gilded Age politics has written, the main concern of actual members
of Congress was not policy, but “patronage power, the privilege of placing
one’s political friends and supporters in in subordinate offices. …
Today’s partisan polarization, in
other words, is not the same as its Gilded Age predecessor. The old
polarization was about control over jobs and money — the kind of thing where
split-the-difference compromises are easiest. That polarization was eventually
undermined by a new politics built around principles. For decades, politicians
found themselves cross-pressured between their commitments to a national party
network and to various ideological causes. Today, however, politicians are no
longer cross-pressured. We have strong Gilded Age-style parties, but organized
around questions of principle rather than questions of patronage.
It’s possible that back when culture
and religion were widely shared the dominant ideology was simply implicit.
There was an ideology but not many competing ideologies. As
the gangster Eddie Valentine in the Rocketeer said
to the man unmasked as a Nazi paymaster who offers him money “I may not make an
honest buck, but I’m 100% American. I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi. Let the
girl go!” The Golden Age of wheeling and dealing which Yglesias is
nostalgic for had many degrees of freedom precisely because it had only one
constraint: an American identity. By contrast today’s gridlocked society
has multiple constraints — identity politics, single issues, etc — and no
global objective function.
But as the Clinton Foundation
incident shows, times have moved on. The days of Eddie Valentine are
dead. Today we work for anyone who pays. One can no longer take
identity for granted leaving only the division of the loot to be discussed.
Today, as Yglesias notes, ideology has reared its ugly head
and produced a polarization which has led the Republicans to
obstructionism and the president toward “constitutional hardball”, which
appears to be a term of art for ignoring its provisions.
But Obama has to play ‘hardball’,
Yglesias explains, because the system forces him to. The Vox article continues,
“America’s escalating game of constitutional hardball isn’t caused by personal
idiosyncratic failings of individual people. Obama has made his share of
mistakes, but the fundamental causes of hardball politics are structural, not
personal.”
He has to bend the rules.
Otherwise nothing gets done. The article’s punchline is a prophecy.
”The best we can hope for is that when the crisis does come, Americans
will have the wisdom to do for ourselves what we did in the past for Germany
and Japan and put a better system in place.”
“A better system”. And he is
doubtless right, though perhaps not for the reasons he imagines, nor might he
get the “better system” he anticipates. The United States was founded by
men well acquainted with greatest power of the age: Britain. The Founders
were not ignorant of efficiencies of parliamentary government. On the
contrary they knew its full power for it was directed at them. Rather
they both respected and feared it.
The instrument of government they
created was calculated to both exercise power and protect its citizens from
that power. What they did not provide for was an adequate mechanism for
resolving fundamental differences of principle within the mechanism of
government. As the Lincoln-Douglas debates suggested, once “a house is divided” gridlock ensued; and
there is no remedy until the house is united again. The Constitution
seems designed to force the body politic to reach a consensus before it will
allow the wheels to turn again. The Amendments are peace treaties marking the
resolution of various crises.
The crises themselves cannot be
finessed. They will fester until they are fundamentally resolved. Only today
the White House and
Democratic lawmakers expressed indignation
at a letter sent by 47 GOP lawmakers to Iran reminding the Ayatollahs that the government
of the United States consisted of more than one man.
The GOP letter, spearheaded by Sen.
Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), warns Iranian leaders that any agreement between
Washington and Tehran could be voided by Congress and simply not upheld once
Obama leaves the White House in 2017.
“Anything not approved by Congress
is a mere executive agreement,” they wrote. “The next president could revoke
such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses
could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”
The president’s supporters called it
‘bizarre’ and ‘inappropriate’. Yet in fairness agreements can only be made
between nations, not individuals, with enough political support on both sides
to sustain the deal. Iran cannot make a deal with a “house divided”; it cannot
sign articles with Barack Obama alone leaving the Congress and the rest of the
American electorate out of the loop. That simply will not last.
One is either Dr. Jekyll or Mr.
Hyde. The character in Stevenson’s story learned to his cost not even a
powerful potion can enable you to remain both for long. The increasingly naked
exhibitions of pure power demonstrated by the Clintons for example, suggest
that the conflicts are becoming so pronounced that they have to be faced
squarely. Like Jekyll/Hyde in his last moments, the composite character
was becoming unstable. Law must either be law or pretense. It
cannot exist in between.
Perhaps the most powerful thing
about the Constitution is that didn’t provide an easy way out. At various
points in history, as scholars well know, the United States has had to fight
for its soul. There was of course no guarantee that it would keep it.
All the process of compulsory resolution ensured was that the phrase “we
the people” would always mean “we the people” and not “we, the divided,
multicultural mob”.
Richard
Fernandez
was an early joiner of PJ Media, and he is a longstanding PJ Columnist.
Richard
has been a software developer for nearly 15 years. Before that, he worked in
forestry, assisted in the negotiations between Muslim rebels in the southern
Philippines and the Cabinet, organized tribespeople in the Philippines and
played a role in the anti-Marcos movement.
On
his PJM blog, titled Belmont Club, Richard
provides a discussion of history and history in the making:
I
write about current events and look back at their antecedents. This usually
focuses on politics, security affairs, science and technology, and some social
commentary. Ideologies of all kinds, including religion, are very often the
subject of commentary.
In
every post he publishes, Richard aims to start a discussion around a defined
set of issues that never have clear answers: “The ideal piece will create a
ground of agreement but also substantial room for debate, so that about 80
percent of the commenters agree on the premises and a significant percentage
can differ on the conclusions.”
When
he’s not engaging people in discussion about important issues, Richard likes to
take long walks, find shortcuts and explore little-used byways: “One day I hope
to do an extended tour focusing on the history of a landscape. That is a dream
that is very unlikely to come true. But come to think of it, most everything
that actually did come true in my life was even more improbable.”
Richard’s
blog is available at http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/.Take a few minutes now to read his
latest entry, and share it with your friends.
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