National Review: Rank Hypocrisy : The liberals' posture over Bill Bennett is absurd

It was arguably a two-day story, or one that never should have been written in the first place: Virtue czar Bill Bennett played a lot of high-stakes slots and video poker in Las Vegas and Atlantic City over the last ten years. The authors of two simultaneously published articles -- one in Newsweek, the other in The Washington Monthly -- were at pains to explain why they wrote the pieces in the first place, invading the privacy of a public figure who'd broken no laws, told the truth, and committed no obvious hypocrisy (since he'd never railed against gambling).

One argument was that Bennett had sinned, and that since Bennett speaks out against sin, he must be a hypocrite. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, libertarian columnist Norah Vincent articulated her ignorance of both religion and conservatism by insisting that "there can be no doubt where the Christian Right stands on the issue" and that "Hellfire conservatives" -- her label for Bill Bennett and me -- know that gambling is a sin. Of course, because he is not an idiot, Bennett never claimed he was without sin. More important, his own faith does not forbid gambling. "Gambling is not a sin; it's not illegal. He didn't condemn it and then contradict himself," declared an unexpected defender, fellow Catholic Mario Cuomo. "He didn't hurt anyone. He didn't lie about it; he didn't try to hide it." Gambling is "not among the seven great sins or even among the 70 small ones." Considering Cuomo's convoluted defense of abortion, Bennett may have hoped for support elsewhere; regardless, Cuomo is correct. Bennett was no more hypocritical for gambling than he is for not keeping kosher. Critics like Vincent seemed to translate their shock that any conservative "moralist" could have any kind of "normal" fun at all into prima facie evidence of hypocrisy.

Another charge was that of hypocrisy-by-omission: Bennett, after all, left the one vice he was guilty of out of his litany of moral exhortation. "There's a compelling case to be made just on the hypocrisy alone," Joshua Green, the author of the Washington Monthly article, told the Washington Post. "A lot of people believe you can't pick on everyone else's morality and then exempt the one area that you yourself want to indulge in. He's cutting himself a break that he won't give to other people and other vices." But this argument puts the cart before the horse, asserting that Bennett left gambling off the list because it is his own vice -- as opposed to the equally probable explanation that Bennett kept it off because it's not a vice. Indeed, Bennett's defenders make the point that there are many vices not in Bennett's litany, including the cardinal sins of gluttony and envy.

But a lesser charge finally struck home: Bennett has preached moderation and self-control, and it's hard to argue that "cycling through" $8 million in a decade is a good example of self-discipline. And, while gambling may not be a sin, Catholics are supposed to try to be Christ-like in everything they do, and even Bennett's most ardent defenders must concede that it's hard to picture Jesus, at 3 A.M., rendering unto Caesar's $500 at a time.

So Bennett has fallen short of Jesus' example. Still, it's hard to see how this qualifies as a thunderclap revelation. It's even more difficult to see how this justifies Michael Kinsley's conclusion that Bennett is "a humbug artist who ought to be pelted off the public stage if he lacks the decency to slink quietly away" -- unless, of course, you realize that liberals use the charge of hypocrisy as a cudgel and a gag. When Green says, "There's a compelling case to be made just on the hypocrisy alone," it sounds like there's a case to be made other than hypocrisy. But there's not. That's it. Countless Bennett detractors insist, in the words of influential liberal blogger Joshua Marshall, "I don't really have a feeling one way or another about gambling." Even the Bennett detractors who contend that gambling is a sin, such as the libertarian Miss Vincent, don't care that it is a sin beyond the fact that its sinfulness proves Bennett's hypocrisy. After all, Miss Vincent wants to deregulate sin altogether.

And once you have this in mind, it becomes clear that the knights charging out to slay the virtue dragon are in fact defending a Potemkin village. The liberals aren't defending a standard, they are defending the lack of standards. The virtue czar's crime is not that he gambled and lost, or even that he gambled at all. His crime is that he talked about virtue in the first place. Hypocrisy is the perfect weapon for liberals -- first, because is it uniquely effective against conservatives. "When Hugh Hefner moved out of the Playboy mansion the better to bring up his two young sons," NR's Ramesh Ponnuru observed, "nobody accused him of not living down to his principles." More significant, the hypocrisy charge implicitly advances the idea that any moral message can be silenced if the messenger falls short of it.

For example, Michael Kinsley's career as a writer is dedicated almost entirely to a single intellectual trope: give conservatives their principles but denounce conservatives for not fully living up to them. Time and again, Kinsley has written some variation of "If they were really serious . . ." about abortion, tax cuts, the Bible, free speech, whatever, then "conservatives would" favor one outlandish position or another. He has argued, for example, that if conservatives were really serious, we would get rid of Social Security. Ridiculing President Bush's claims to "moral seriousness" on the issue of stem cells, Kinsley objected to Bush's statement, "We should not as a society grow life to destroy it. It's morally wrong in my opinion." To which Kinsley responded, "Taken literally, this would cover raising cattle or even growing wheat." Okay, and tee-hee; but what is Kinsley's "morally serious" policy on stem cells? He never says. He declares Republicans "self-righteous" idiots and hypocrites on the issue of parents' rights because they didn't support Eli?n Gonz?lez's return to Cuba . . . but, he concedes, they may be right on the issue anyway.

In Kinsley's world, conservatives can never be pragmatists and idealists at the same time without being rank hypocrites; by this rationale, Abraham Lincoln was a fool and a hypocrite for not being a rabid abolitionist. Kinsley's schtick is a good one and he is good at it. But it's a fairly sad commentary that the man New Republic editor Peter Beinart calls the "dean of smart liberalism" has no higher aspiration than to quibble about the way the opposition sells its products, while at the same time largely conceding that ours is the superior product line.

But Kinsley's biggest crime -- and he has many accomplices -- is that he makes a dumb and dangerous point seem smart and reasonable. As Meg Greenfield lamented a long time ago, "If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide."

The hypocrisy game is particularly appealing to liberals because it is of a piece with the cult of personal authenticity. In Hollywood, in academia, and in the popular culture, being "true to yourself" has become the highest value. If you sin, you must own your sin to the point where it is a virtue. Take Bill Clinton. For some absolutely unfathomable reason liberals believe the former president has been absolved of his crimes because Bill Bennett somehow purchased indulgences for him at a video-poker machine. But the Left has long been determined to turn Clinton's sin into a virtue. During impeachment, award-winning feminist author Jane Smiley wrote in The New Yorker that while the first President Bush was essentially repressed -- "there he was, a guy for whom launching a missile seemed better than sex" -- Bill Clinton was authentic (i.e., heroic) because of his sexual appetites. "Maybe what Clinton did in the Oval Office was love, or infatuation, or just sex. At the very least, it was a desire to make a connection with another person, a habitual desire for which Clinton is well known . . . But this desire is something I trust." This sort of thing is a total inversion of traditional understandings of morality. Whereas once the permanence of sin was cause for a permanent struggle against it, now its permanence is precisely why it should be embraced.

On the "artistic" Left the human body, sex, and nature form the new Trinity; they've even turned their genitalia into Delphic Oracles (or Delphic Orifices, as in The Vagina Monologues). One artist auctions his own excrement in a tin can and we are supposed to marvel at the statement he is making about consumer culture. Another shoves a bullwhip in his rectum and we are told to admire the clever use of lighting. When Madonna is a glorious slut and self-proclaimed "boy toy," she's a feminist hero for being authentic. (When Madonna becomes a "dedicated mom," she's a hero for that, too.)

When he was still heir apparent to the Democratic nomination, Al Gore released a book saying that any arrangement where people love each other should be recognized by the state as a "family," and few considered this worthy of comment. Hillary Clinton won her Senate seat on the "issue" of which candidate was more "concerned" about the issues affecting New Yorkers -- not which candidate was right, or had better ideas, merely which candidate was the most "concerned." Hollywood liberals assert the rightness of policies based on their gut feelings. Hence Castro's Cuba is still a worker's paradise, because they feel that it should be one.

It's all reminiscent of Auden's poem "For the Time Being," in which King Herod predicted a "New Age" where Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions . . . Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpieces. . . . Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish . . . The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

It should be no surprise that in this New Age, in which authenticity outranks reason, conservative hypocrisy would be the greatest of crimes. Leo Strauss observed -- correctly -- that "if our principles have no other support than our blind preferences, everything a man is willing to dare will be permissible." This has been borne out by today's Left, whose phobia about hypocrisy has forced it to embrace consistent evil over inconsistent good. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the most reliable argument by antiwar leftists was that America's foreign policy was hypocritical and therefore wrong. America "created" Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, etc. The Left thus stipulated that the Ba'athists and the Taliban were cruel, oppressive, and ruthless -- but only to the extent that this laid culpability at the feet of the U.S. But they further argued that it would be hypocritical for America to actually topple these regimes; by their logic, Dr. Frankenstein should have accepted blame for his monster's rampage, but taken absolutely no action to stop the creature from killing again.

In retrospect, it's difficult to think of a single passionate objection offered by the Left that didn't ultimately depend on the charge of hypocrisy. The tired "chicken hawk" epithet was nothing more than a stalking horse for hypocrisy. Surely, the case for or against toppling Saddam didn't depend on whether I served in the military; but yelling "chicken hawk!" was a way to bully those who favored war into staying silent.

Liberals claim they are not denouncing ideals, merely the false prophets of those ideals. But if we take as a given that we all fall short of the ideal, the two things are identical. If we say that anyone who "moralizes" must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize. When charged with hypocrisy, philosopher Max Scheler responded that the sign pointing to Boston doesn't have to go there. And to date none of Bennett's enemies have successfully argued that he wasn't pointing in the right direction, just that he has no right to point that way.

This bizarre standard will have terrible consequences for society. In a 2001 essay in the New York Times, Alan Ehrenhalt worried that America might be losing its "best hypocrites." "A good hypocrite," he explained, "believes in the values he professes but is simply too weak to live up to them. He transgresses. He is sorry. He may transgress over and over again, but he will be sorry every time. A bad hypocrite pays lip service to a set of principles but doesn't believe a word of what he's saying. The more often he can get away with breaking his self-proclaimed rules, the more fun he has." Ehrenhalt cited the example of Gladstone, the 19th-century British prime minister and moral crusader who took nighttime walks in London's West End in an effort to convince the prostitutes there to seek redemption. It wasn't until a century later, when Gladstone's diaries were published, that it became known that his interest in the prostitutes was not entirely charitable. Whether Gladstone actually partook of their services is still debated, but, Ehrenhalt argues, "Gladstone meets the definition of a hypocrite. He also meets the definition of a decent and troubled man." According to Gladstone's diaries, his sexual hypocrisy was "the chief burden of my soul"; but by the logic of today's liberals, Gladstone would have improved his moral standing if he had supported prostitution from the get-go instead of condemning something he guiltily participated in.

Bill Bennett is being devoured because he's America's leading promoter of universal moral ideals. In a sense, this is a compliment. La Rochefoucauld was right when he said "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue"; and the screaming of the Left is the tribute a party without universal ideals pays to one that has them.