Brooks did a column yesterday on Deborah Pryce (R) Ohio. The whole premise that someone who admires Dennis Hastert is a paradigm of someone who has maintained her humanity and integrity is hard to take seriously. Maybe in Brooks’s world. I don’t know anything about Deborah Pryce, but from Brooks’s description of her she appears to be one of these decent but clueless people who thought politics is the way it was portrayed in her High School civics book, and was truly shocked, as were her friends and family, that people in politics don’t play nice.
Brooks in this formulaic puff piece does not tell a story of courage and strength; he’s telling a story of an ordinary lady from the heartland who found out that politics didn’t live up to her fantasy and is quitting so that she can be a nice person again. She admires Denny Hastert?!
The real point of the column is to provide a gloss on a quote from Meg Greenfield’s memoir, Washington, in which she describes the typical politician:
They allow the markings of region, family, class, individual character and, generally, personhood that they once possessed to be leached away. At the same time, they construct a new public self that often does terrible damage to what remains of the genuine person.
So his point is well taken about the dehumanizing process one must go through in becoming a politician, and it’s no wonder that anybody who is willing to go through it is more likely to be a creature of the system than to maintain his or her integrity. And for that reason the process promotes a certain kind of empty-suit personality with a big-time need for approval. These men and women do what they’re told.
The system as it affects pols on both sides of the aisle is self-perpetuating no matter what individuals come and go, and so it’s no wonder we’re in the fix we’re in. The system has a life of its own, and the people who thrive in it are people who are prodigious in their ability to serve its needs. And so it follows that the system spits out people who do not serve it, and anyone who exhibits a spirit of independence and personal integrity are spit out or spit upon. Their are exceptions, but they are tolerated because they are for the most part ineffectual and their presence helps to support the illusion that the system embraces that kind of integrity.
The system changes only if pressures outside the system challenge it the way, for instance, the civil rights movement challenged the cultural-political segregation system in the fifties and sixties. The problem for us now in developing such a movement that could apply such pressure on the system lies in that there is no clear focus point. It was relatively easy to organize around segregation and voting rights. The rank-and-file of the civil right movement were people who felt the sting of segregation every day of their lives. It was easy to organize around the Vietnam War because so many Americans felt the sting because of the draft.
It’s very hard to organize around issues like warrantless wiretaps, the politicization of the DOJ, or the restoration of habeas corpus because these issues, extraordinarily important as they are, are too abstract, and most Americans don’t feel their sting. The same is true for the Iraq War–only a few feel its sting. That’s why Bush will never reinstate the draft no matter how strained his military. He wants to keep the war abstract, and the draft will expand the scope of Americans who feel its sting. So we are forced to depend on our elected officials to deal with the abstract issues and to prevent systemic abuses. But these officials fail us because they are either naively nice people like Pryce who either do what they’re told or get out. Or they are bad guys obsessed by greed and ambition. In either case, the needs of the system get served.
Maybe a guy like Al Gore could do more outside of the system than if he were to be elected president. Whatever his flaws and whatever his past complicity in the system, his not wanting to be a part of the system is a sign of his deep sanity. I’m not saying Al Gore is Gandhi, but I think he’s basically a good guy who has lived in the belly of the beast without having been completely digested by it. I think that his losing the election was a liberation for him when he realized, like Arthur Edens in "Michael Clayton", that the system has excreted him, that he’s covered still in its filth, but now he can to expose it for what it is without having to play by its rules. That’s why the system has done everything it can to promote the-Gore-is-crazy narrative. He understands that the system is broken and not much can be done within it. And I agree; initiatives from outside of it or pressures brought to bear from outside it are the only things that will make a difference.
P.S. I’d like to use as an epigraph for this post Arthur Edens’s speech in the opening voice over for "Michael Clayton." I looked but couldn’t find it anywhere. Anybody know where to get it?
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