Beyond hypocrisy

Glenn Greenwald discusses Tucker Carlson's passionate belief - at least when it concerns Republican politicians who have been having sex with prostitutes - that a politician's private life shouldn't be a matter for public debate (Tucker Carlson, stalwart defender of sexual privacy Salon 07/12/07).

For anyone with the most superficial knowledge of the Clinton years, that may sound like stark, raving hypocrisy coming from a Republican. And it is.

But the framework of "hypocrisy" can be very misleading. For authoritarian Republicans, the Party is the main authority to be defended. And pretty much anything they can get away with in attacking the opposition goes. They aren't worried about any other consistency than supporting the Republican Party and attacking the Democrats.

Gene Lyons described the attitude well in his Fools for Scandal (1996). Although at the time, he was shaking his head in amazement that wild accusations of sexual misconduct against politicians, which he knew mainly in the context of Arkansas politics, could become such a big part of national politics to the extent it had.

For most Arkansas voters, evaluating this avalanche of smut has always been simple: your candidate is innocent, his or her opponents are probably guilty. The fact that political fault lines here tend to coincide with religious differences - hard-shell denominations to the right, "mainstream" churches to the left - makes it easy to caricature one's enemies as pious hypocrites. Otherwise, it would be tempting to suspect that many Arkansans harbor the secret belief that any politician—or TV evangelist, for that matter - who didn't have some rooster in him couldn't be much of a man.

And this was before "Monica"!

That's pretty much the level on which today's authoritarian Republican Party operates nationwide: "your candidate is innocent, his or her opponents are probably guilty".

"It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis", in the famous describption of John DiIulio, Jr., the one-time head of Bush's office of faith-based patronage to journalist Ron Suskind.

Tags: authoritarianism, republican party