A scandal remembered

On Dec. 19, 1998, the U.S. House of Representatives considered four articles of impeachment against President William Jefferson Clinton. Two articles would pass, one on a charge of perjury and the other concerning obstruction of justice. These accusations all arose in relation to Clinton’s affair with a young intern, Monica Lewinsky. These votes made Clinton the first president impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868. As with Johnson, the Senate would fail to convict President Clinton.

How should we think of the Clinton impeachment now, 25 years later? We must understand that the America and the world in which those events took place has disappeared. In many ways, it has disappeared for the worse. Then, the world still basked in the afterglow of Communism’s fall, with free markets and political liberalism enjoying unopposed ascendancy. That reality came crashing down with the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, further chastened by foreign policy failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Domestically, America saw a long-lasting economic boom in the 1990s, one tempered in the early 2000s and then shattered in the Great Recession of 2007-2009. A Republican Congress led by Speaker Newt Gingrich fought with the Clinton White House over how to balance the national budget, which the government actually accomplished from 1999-2001. Now, we regularly run trillion-dollar deficits with no serious remaining political will to do otherwise.

However, we should not whitewash the time surrounding Clinton’s impeachment as the halcyon days on all counts. That episode both exposed and accelerated underlying trends in our politics that only have amplified since.

First, the Lewinsky scandal exposed the broadening and deepening effects of the sexual revolution on American discourse and expectations. Clinton was a known serial adulterer who used his political power and personal charm to entice willing women and to paper over the consequences with everyone else.

A majority of Americans reacted to this scandal, along with his other similar sins, with indifference, at best. Most Americans simply did not seem to care if the president committed adultery and did so with a young woman over whom he could exert significant power. Even feminist leaders actively defended Clinton, thinking his support for abortion rights more important and not worth the risk of undermining. Many others simply thought such matters unimportant compared to the economic prosperity they reaped during the Clinton presidency. The further sexualization and moral confusion of our culture since is both a result of this episode and a manifestation of the trends that bore it.

Second, the Clinton impeachment signaled a politics more personal and vitriolic in its partisanship. People despised Clinton, not just his policies or rhetoric. People despised his enemies on a similar plane as well. These feelings formed precursors to our own tribal politics, where affiliation of the person forms the basis for assessment of his or her merit, misdeeds, and overall worth. We speak less of principle and more of personality now, a politics that mimics tabloid celebrity culture.

Third, our politics became more cynical as a result of the impeachment proceedings. In some ways, this related to the tribalism that would come to full flower later. The feminist defense of Clinton made the #MeToo movement and outrage at Donald Trump seem grounded in partisan opportunism. We really weren’t to “believe all women” but just the stories most convenient to our narrative.

At the same time, some on the religious right rent their clothing in outrage over Clinton’s sexual immorality, calling it worse than the accusations of lying under oath and obstructing the investigation for which he actually was impeached. Yet this moral condemnation lost credibility amid many of them overlooking, obscuring, or downplaying the multiple marriages, flings with adult film stars, and general sexual boorishness of Donald Trump. It lost credibility, too, amid the sexual bravado seeping out of parts of the New Right’s intellectual movement in the name of recovering real “manhood.”

In a thanksgiving sermon in 1795, Episcopal Bishop William White sought to, “expose the folly and the mischiefs of the assertion, that a bad man in private life is not, on that account, the worse citizen or ruler of the state.” Even then, there was an attempt to sever morality from politics, to say the character of the officeholder did not matter so long as preferred policy outcomes (or saucy Tweets) resulted. Twenty-five years ago, our political culture was made worse by the Clinton impeachment. Politics was made more nasty and personal, yes. But fundamentally, we came to expect less of our leaders and, ultimately, of ourselves. That bode ill for what eventually came, wherein we have become more detached from proper notions of the common good, of the moral law, and of the purposes of human life and of human government as a result.

In Bishop White’s audience sat our first president, George Washington. We would do well to remember White and Washington for how we should look at politics. The anniversary of the Clinton impeachment serves as a warning of what is at risk when the political culture goes off the rails.