The sad case of Vito Fossella, Republican Congressmen of New York, who "acknowledged on Thursday that he fathered a child from an extramarital affair, answering questions that arose from his arrest on drunken driving charges last week" (quite a twofer, that), inspires Poulos to take a flamethrower to Martha Nussbaum's asinine contention that in a more civilized society (i.e. Europe) it would be "laughable" for the public to give a damn about how a public figure behaves in private. It's too good to excerpt; just go read the whole thing.
« More Brideshead | Main | Who Gives? (II) »
Private Vices, Public Lives
08 May 2008 04:48 pm
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/21284
Comments (27)
Sorry. I think Poulos's outrage just looks silly--while reading it, I just kept hearing the voice of Basil Fawlty on a tear--and Nussbaum has it right.
MoeLarryAndJesus AND Martha Nussbaum: Two Tools For Our Time!!!
If the guy has a girl friend on the side, unless he is abusing his office; giving her a government job, using government personnel and money to provide her things (ahem Rudy) etc, it is entirely a private issue between him and his wife. Does it change his stance on any of the issues? Did Nelson Rockefeller's performance as governor change now that we know he had a mistress? Does it change anything about FDR to know he pretty much ceased having a marriage in 1918 or so and had a regular mistress for pretty much the rest of his life?
The drunk driving is an issue since besides being a crime it is a really dangerous and irresponsible thing to do.
Ross,
You should reconsider, and fast. The Poulos argument is shot through with dishonesty. First, it occludes the blatant distinction between drinking (worse—DWI!), which distorts cognition (and in the case of driving, kills people), and sex.
Poulos also reeks with dishonesty in complaining about Nussbaum’s use of the phrase “a lot to discuss with his wife and family,” as though engaging in “discussion” isn’t central to what intimacy is all about.
Two separate problems occur when Poulos refers to something he calls “the sort of personal discipline necessary to holding public office.” Most fundamentally, he never defines what threshold separates permissible variations from that “necessary” standard he believes we must expect politicians to meet. Furthermore, even assuming he could define and defend some particular standard, he commits the logical fallacy of assuming his conclusion: “Is that [maintaining such discipline] too much to ask? If we answer yes, we’re selling ourselves short — very short,” he blusters, without ever managing to say why failing to meet his standard would be so calamitous.
That’s too bad, since most people would actually agree that psychological problems that lead a government official to be seriously distracted from an important, time-consuming job and that interfere with the capacity to maintain courteous, professional relationships with other leaders and with the public is indeed disqualifying. To call this a “moral” problem is to trivialize the work of government, as though the presidents, judges, and lawmakers were designed to be parents to the nation, rather than to work on substantive, often life-or-death problems. You don’t need to defend President Clinton to believe that he was only speaking long-overdue common sense to say that even presidents have private lives. If you want to obsess over private virtue in your leaders, you almost invite the ascension to power of presidents like the incumbent, for whom the details of policy are irritating distractions from their own narcissism, and the public good be damned.
There’s more wrong in the Poulos piece, but I have other stuff to do at the moment.
A quick clarification ... I should not have referred to “dishonesty” in the Poulos piece, but to “falsehoods.” Perhaps rather than lying, he simply has not thought these issues through very well. He certainly seems upset; that, or something, has stripped from his argument much of the proportion or analytic precision that might allow him to build consensus even among culturally left-leaning observers like this one.
I guess it was all that rampant homosexual marriage that Vito voted to prohibit that caused him to knock up a Lieutenant Colonel (aren't there UCMJ articles about sex with someone, not your spouse?) and go out and drive with a BAC of 0.13 at the station house. Which means, considering he was in DC when he started, he was probably 0.20 when he set out down the ole' Shirley Highway.
Yup. Just another Republican hypocrite. But, can we come to expect any less from the Republicans? At least this one is banging grown women and not paying for it (that we know).
Oh Man, I don't have any special fondness for laws prohibiting prostitution, but that Martha Nussbaum piece is risible. Eliot SPitzer the noble and beknighted saint. If he broke any laws it's okay bvecause they were bad laws [which he as a prosecutor had arrested and jailed people for].
Mean-spirited is prosecuting the DC madam. All Spitzer got was the ridicule he deserved as a bluenose prig who got caught with his pants down. He was exposed as a hypocritical buffoon, but clearly Martha likes him and his politics ("he's one of us, the right-thinking elite") so he gets a pass. Think she would offer the same to Dick Cheney?
It's good that she's in Europe. Surely Nietzche would have agreed with her that supermen get to live by different rules.
Martha Nussbaum: "In Germany and the Netherlands, prostitution is legal and regulated by public health authorities. A man who did what Spitzer did would have a lot to discuss with his wife and family, but he would have broken no laws, and it would be laughable to accuse him of a betrayal of the public trust."
Well, in this country too, prostitution is legal and regulated by public health authorities--in certain counties of Nevada. I am sure Spitzer had some opportunities to go to Nevada on business, and if he had sneaked away from Vegas or Reno or Carson City to one of the nearby counties with brothels, and engaged in legal sex there--well, if the media discovered and broke the story, he would obviously be embarrassed but his political career would not be over. Instead, he decided to use the very sort of "gentlemen's clubs" he had gone after as a prosecutor...
Elliot Spitzer. Larry Craig. Left or right, everyone enjoys a little schadenfreude.
Ben — May 8, 2008 at 10:53 pm
A good point from the comments section of the Poulos piece:
So what counts towards this needed “ounce of moral character”?
Voting against torture? Basing tax policy upon reasonably honest budget projections? Opposing wars that manifestly fail the just-war criteria? These all strike me as more important, from a moral point of view, than whether a particular politician has lived up to his marriage vows (which a whole lot of Americans–John McCain, Newt Gingrich, and Henry Hyde included–have not).
Vito Fossella sounds like an unpleasant man and I don’t feel much sympathy for his situation. But after watching what’s happened in our government over the last seven years, I have to dig pretty deep to find any outrage over it.
Good grief. Nussbaum is right to attack our "gotcha!" puritanism, but to hold up Spitzer as a model student is absurd. It is equally absurd to claim, as Poulos does, that tabloid voyerism should in any way inform our political judgments. Both extremes should be discouraged, but they never will be as long as the news is more about sales than information (which means until this country swallows itself out of pure glutony and ignorance). Vito is just another poster boy (albeit a relatively minor figure in that crowd) for American politicians past, present and future. We get exactly what most of you deserve.
The nut of Poulos's argument is:
What I’m angling for here is simple: a basic public consensus that if you sleep around on your spouse you are a bad person, and to hell with your future in politics, because we still have enough talent in America to replace you with someone who isn’t a bad person and is nonetheless capable of being a ‘gifted’ and ‘dedicated’ public servant.
And I don't think it stands up.
The first half of his argument, sure. Someone who sleeps around on their spouse without their spouse's honest consent is a bad person, agreed. His argument falls down in the second half. People with the talent and inclination to be high-quality public servants, especially at the highest levels, are not common, and history shows that some of the best have been, in their personal life, notorious rakes. If there were any meaningful correlation between quality of one's personal life and quality of one's public service, Jimmy Carter would have been a great President and it would be Thomas Jefferson who's remembered as "History's Greatest Monster."
If a company in which I was a stockholder announced that they were not going to hire the best CEO candidate because that candidate was having an affair, and that they were going to hire a lesser candidate instead, I would consider that a violation of the board's fiduciary duty. Even if the CEO they hired was still qualified, as a shareholder I want the best qualified. And that applies to my government too.
Now, for what it's worth, Nussbaum gets this wrong too, because Spitzer and Fossella deserve to be in trouble not because of their personal lives, but because they broke the law. A politician who disapproves of a law has an obligation to either speak out against it, or shrug and obey the law anyway. It is certainly not appropriate to condemn a practice in public, while enjoying it in private, which is what Spitzer did. And while I'm not aware of Fossella crusading against drunken driving, drunken driving is nonetheless something that unambiguously deserves to be a criminal act. Whether you're heading off to your mistress or to give toys to orphans is besides the point.
To be fair, what Fossella did is certainly wrong but it isn't in the same league as what Spitzer or for that matter, Larry Craig did. Fossella at least was in an actual relationship which even gave rise to a child, while Spitzer was engaged in the throroughly sordid and inexcusable commercialization of sex.
and to be fair, I think that Jimmy Carter _was_ a great president.
Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say someone in a mutually painful marriage falls for someone else during the conflict, doesn’t want to hurt their spouse, isn’t ready to end the marriage, but desperately feels a need for solace and connection with the new person, and they become involved in an affair. Are they necessarily a horrible person? I don’t think so. I’m not saying the affair is good in these circumstances, merely that such a complex, personal situation doesn’t warrant condemnation. I think the Fossella example has come to stand for the entire category of infidelity, because it seems to fit a callous stereotype of someone who is multiply, grossly irresponsible. But his example does not necessarily comprise the norm, and even if it does there are plenty of exceptions that conform more to the circumstances of my hypothetical.
Hector, I think that what Fossella did was arguably worse, since there is much less of a chance that patronizing a prostitute will directly result in hitting a small child with three tons of steel at 60 MPH.
It's not any of Poulos' business what criteria I use in voting, and it's none of my business what criteria he uses. If he wants to vote based on whether someone is sleeping around, fine.
This applies to other issues. If you care more about whether the president wears a flag pin than whether your child dies in Iraq, you'll vote for McCain. If you think your child dying in Iraq is more important, you'll vote for Obama. Each voter can pick the things important to him or her.
I agree that he's a bad person, but being a bad person shouldn't result in your being fired. What if one's definition of a "bad person" included "eating pork" or "neglecting to go to church" or "supporting interracial marriage?" These are all moral judgments, and are not held by all people. Their keeping, or breaking, might have a lot to do with being elected or re-elected. But they should never have anything to do with being removed from office.
The only thing that should have anything to do with being removed, is the breaking of an actual law. Regardless of how stupid or silly that law might be, it is still a law and public servants must uphold the law. Spitzer broke a law. So did Fossella. They should both be gone. If we catch Senator Smith cheating on his wife with a consenting adult (who is not being paid for it), then there is nothing we ought to be able to do to force him out of office. If the voters don't like it, they can vote him out next election. If the voters don't care, it's their right to keep him.
cminus,
Your right of all the examples that have been brought up in this thread (Craig, Spitzer, Hyde, McCain, Gingrich, etc) the Drunk driving is bar far the most serious issue.
That si why I seperated it out in my post, having an affair is a private matter, the drunk driving is a very public issue.
So by Poulous's logic McCain, Gingrich, Hyde, St Ronnie just to name a few shouldn't have been elected, I'm sure he has consistently applied this moral test to Republicans over the years right?
What Ben and Shawn said. When a politician is clean on torture, denial of civil liberties, making unnecessary war, etc., then we can discuss his sex life. The priorities of the right wing--Ross included--are beyond nuts.
Adultery is obviously a sin, but it's also a very common one, and if we insisted that all our politicians be perfect individuals in every regard we would have a small pool of potential politicians indeed. I am sympathetic to the idea of society being ruled by Platonic-type Guardians and obviously in such circumstances it would be very critical that the guardians be morally unimpeachable. But that's not the society we have today.
Vito's type of adultery too is probably a sin of lesser gravity than many others (I agree with Dante here)-- certainly less than the invasion of Iraq, and less than Spitzer's patronizing of prostitutes, or Craig's searching for restroom hookups, or Clinton's serial promiscuity. At least there seems to have been some genuine affection involved and a procreative aspect to the relationship (I'd say the same about the Rev. Jesse Jackson). I think that whether Mr. Fossella is forced to resign should be up to the voters.
Hector,
He should resign becasue of the drunk driving
Resign? In a Repiglican's ass. He should run for re-election and take his whipping like a man. Then he should change his name to Fredo.
I am looking forward to Election Day.
Oh, Jim Keane, we can always count on you to raise the level of discourse...
But seriously, are you on crack?
What surprises me in all this discussion is the fact that nobody notices the central problem here. It's not the sex. It's the inability of a politician to keep a formal oath.
Marriage is a legal arrangement. You promise to love one woman and forsake all others. There's a legal document in a courthouse somewhere testifying to that. People have to sign as witnesses what you promised.
A politician has to make other vows. He has to vow to uphold the Constitution of these United States.
If a man is unwilling or unable to adhere to a profoundly personal and important vow like marriage, how is anyone supposed to trust him to keep a vow that's basically just his job? It would be like saying "Oh, I know he drives his own personal car like a maniac, but surely he'll treat this company-paid rental car better."
Once you've cheated on your spouse, you've proven that your ideals are only as high as the neckline on a female lobbyist's blouse. Your judgement is suspect, and your integriy is gone.
I'm not so young that I don't remember a time when promises meant something important. Too bad so many other people are.
I'm not sure what I think about the question about private lives and public trusts, but I'm surprised that no one has questioned Nussbaum's (and others') easy use of word "puritan" to describe certain people or ideologies. Or maybe I'm just surprised, and not a little disappointed, that someone like Nussbaum would use it.
I'm not sure that it really requires great amounts of puritanism (which I take to mean sexual prudery and judgmentalism - though both of those things are actually probably more applicable to the Victorian era than to the Puritans per se) to think that what Eliot Spitzer did was bad. And while I share Nussbaum's concern with the byproducts of prostitution (loss of agency, exploitation, etc), I also wonder why it's obvious that the sex itself isn't a big deal. In fact, I sort of think that sex *is* a big deal - by virtue of the potential consequences and implications, it's serious business, and I would hardly classify myself as a "puritan" for saying so. Maybe Nussbaum's pejorative had more to do with the question of legality than morality - but even so, I wonder why it seems obvious to her that objection to the legality of prostitution indicates a Puritan mindset.
| 
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class
Another scumbag from the "family values party" is revealed to be a prize hypocrite.
What a shock - and sort of a yawner.
I'm still waiting for the story to break about Dick Cheney's world-class collection of lesbian snuff films. That will be HUGE.
Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | May 8, 2008 5:36 PM