Tribalism, good and bad

When in the dying days of 2024, former President Jimmy Carter also expired, aged 100, the considered judgement on his presidency of many media observers agreed with mine, as expressed in these pages almost two years ago when he entered hospice care (see “Jimmy the Good” in The New Criterion of April, 2023). On that occasion, I wrote that Mr Carter was a good man but a bad president, and that the two things just might be related. Maybe Christian piety and high-minded moralism were and are more of a hindrance than a help in the often sordid business of governing a country in which, as our Founders wisely recognized, men were not angels. Maybe, too, self-righteous preaching to lesser men about respect for human rights was not the best way to win friends and influence people internationally.

Of course there were also some of the former president’s obituarists, including his biographers Kai Bird and Jonathan Alter in The Washington Monthly, who argued for the greatness of his presidential accomplishments — both plausible (the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt) and implausible (the collapse, more than a decade after he left office, of the Soviet Union). But across the political spectrum and among historians of all stripes, most of the emphasis was still, as it had been throughout his life, on Jimmy’s sterling personal character, as shown especially in the Good Works undertaken during his long post-presidency.

This was also true of the tribute delivered by then-current President Joe Biden from vacation on the Caribbean island of St Croix when he said that Mr Carter “stands as a model [of] what it means to live a life of meaning and purpose, a life of principle, faith and humility.” In response to a question about what his successor, President Trump, could learn from the Carter example, Mr Biden replied, “Decency. Decency. Decency.” That might seem a bit rich coming from the man who, only weeks earlier, had pardoned his son Hunter Biden for any crimes alleged to have been committed by him for a decade previously — after having denied repeatedly that such a pardon was under consideration. But few were in any mood to recognize the irony in his use of the very word, “decency,” that the media had chosen to represent the quality that, back in 2020, they were claiming President Biden was to have brought with him to the White House in contrast to his predecessor.

Such suppositious “decency” was obviously still proof, in the media’s eyes, against anything Mr Biden or his family could do to qualify it. As Peter Baker of The New York Times noted of Mr Biden’s encomium,

when he spoke of Mr. Carter’s “honesty and character,” he left no doubt that he meant that in contrast to his predecessor and soon-to-be successor, Donald J. Trump, the first former president ever convicted of felony crimes and found liable for sexual abuse and business fraud.

The supposed Biden “decency” has remained unquestioned in the media’s eyes in spite of what some may see as the corruption of his administration. So, too, do the torts proved against Mr Trump — partly as a result of that same corruption as manifest in the Biden Department of Justice — stand unaffected, in the media’s eyes, by the legal chicanery, rampant partisanship and bad faith required to prove them. The media’s characterization of both men dating back to the onset of antagonism between them is apparently set in stone and unalterable by anything that either of them can do or say now.

If so, the reason is not far to seek. The necessary fiction of a Manichaean conflict between the Bad Orange Man and the Good Never-Trumpers of both parties has been the cornerstone of Democratic and media politics for almost a decade. It is now, with Mr Trump’s re-election, showing so many signs of dilapidation that the long-delayed death of Mr Carter must represent to the unyielding Trump-haters a heaven-sent opportunity to refurbish and renew it against the moral and electoral impetus of the incoming administration.

The Carter example also served as a distraction from what emerged in the closing weeks of the old year as the central and all-pervading dishonesty — indecency, one might almost call it — of the Biden presidency: the cover-up, dating from the 2020 election campaign that put him in office, of the President’s mental incompetence. In an extensively reported Wall Street Journal article of December 19 headed: “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge,” reporters Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer and Siobhan Hughes detailed the elaborate hide-the-ball strategy of the White House staff during the last four years that supposedly prevented the media and the public from perceiving the sadly “diminished” state of the President’s intellects and energies.

“Journos who joined gaslighting on Biden’s decline should never live it down,” headlined the New York Post on New Year’s day, and, as a charter member of the You-Can’t-Hate-the Media-Enough society, I know, as they say, where they’re coming from. Yet I’m inclined to think that, in politics anyway, there are few deceits that are not primarily self-deceits. Certainly it strains credulity to suppose that the media were really hoodwinked by the Biden-surrogates’ little game, any more than they were by his repeated assertions that “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

In both cases they could only have been deceived if they had wanted to be deceived — which is why, in both cases, so many former free-speech absolutists made no protest against the suppression of information on social media and elsewhere which might have caused people to question the truth of the administration’s official position on both Hunter Biden and the President’s competency.

So obvious, indeed, was Mr Biden’s mental decline and his deep involvement in his son’s influence-peddling operation, at least to those not numbered among his partisan supporters, that it could not have been only the media who were self-deceived. Millions of Democratic voters who had been persuaded by the media (or who had persuaded themselves) that Joe Biden was the only alternative to the dreaded Trumpist tyranny must also have preferred to believe in his Carter-like integrity and his “sharp” cognitive alertness, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Even after the Journal’s supposed exposé, many in the media still could not bring themselves to acknowledge the obvious. As Matthew Rice wrote for The New York Sun:

As President Biden prepares to leave the White House and end his five-decade-long public career, members of the White House press corps who’ve covered his administration from day one have been publishing their first drafts of the history of the 46th president. And even as a reckoning is beginning about how the press covered Mr. Biden’s mental acuity over the course of his presidency, some of the most elite members of the White House press corps appear to be doubling down on their unwillingness to acknowledge what’s long been obvious to even a casual observer of the president — that he was challenged by cognition issues.

How could it be otherwise? The potential scandal was not just that the elected president was out to lunch for four years while persons unknown were running the country but that the very basis of his appeal to voters in 2020 and just about all that he, now like Jimmy Carter, has left in the way of a “legacy,” namely his personal decency, could not survive the acknowledgement. Yet there was clearly more to the Carter eulogies than their practical political utility in upholding the otherwise threadbare Democratic claim to moral superiority. The view of one Jamie Paul, writing for Quillette, is typical:

A single-term president, Carter was narrowly elected before being defeated in a landslide. His presidency was marred by an economic crisis that he did not create but could not satisfactorily reverse. As a result, he is likely to be remembered primarily as a mediocre leader. But while his failures in office are not in dispute, they don’t tell the full story. When we examine not merely his four years in the White House, but the entirety of his long life, we see that Jimmy Carter was far from mediocre — he was, in fact, among the very best of us.

I’m not sure I would go so far as my friend Professor Frank Buckley of George Mason University who thinks that “the obsequies for Carter, who as a president was a mediocrity, remind one of the desire for royalty.” But there is an undeniable attempt, at least on the part of the media if not the wider American public, to create (or re-create?) a presidential mystique around the peanut-farmer from Plains, Georgia, as a quasi-royal figure. That mystery, that aura of sanctity is meant to be seen as transferable not, like a king’s, to his biological descendants but to his ideological confreres. They are the anointed ones of History, in their own conceit, and their perfect goodness and beneficence, like Jimmy’s, can therefore never be questioned.

American politics today, as has often been observed, is largely performative, especially on the left. The practical accomplishments of good government as traditionally conceived, such as a strong economy with low taxes and low inflation, low crime rates, infrastructure improvements or military victory — are of little or no importance compared to the virtue-signaling of those who commend themselves to the voters on its basis every election-tide. Those kingly qualities of magnificence and munificence, along with the “common touch” implied by the perennial pollster’s question about the candidate you’d most like to have a beer with, are now meant to be prized by voters above all others.

Way back in 2000, the presidential campaign of George W. Bush advertised itself as being characterized by “compassionate conservatism.” Nobody really knew how compassionate conservatism was supposed to differ from the previous, presumptively non-compassionate kind, but it turned out to be little more than a Republican-friendly version of Bill Clinton’s claim to “feel your pain” plus, in practical terms, more stuff — such as Medicare Part D — for those who had already learned to look to the government for their stuff.

This was carried even further by the hopey-changey Obama administration whose Affordable Care Act did nothing to improve the quality and almost as little to improve the affordability of our health-care system but did involve a real redistribution of wealth from future America, which will have to pay the bills, to present-day America — which still, if the polls are to be believed, credits Mr Obama for the benefaction. His vice-president and apparent understudy has since gone on to outdo even his presidential mentor in fiscal profligacy with the laughably misnamed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and all the goodies therein contained.

So much ostentatious virtue could only expose the lack of same in President Trump’s abrasive and combative style of government, even though he was believed by his supporters to be the real compassionate conservative for his attempts to revitalize American industry and end what he provocatively called our “forever wars” abroad. Perhaps the secret of his success was that he was the only Republican to offer a plausible alternative to the Democratic version of what a 21st century American celebrity-king would look like.

However that may be, the principle of sovereign immunity, sometimes known as “the King can do no wrong,” was said to be scandalous when Mr Trump appealed to it for relief from his many accusers of the last two years. Now, with respect to the Democratic royalty of Mr Biden, as to that of Mr Carter before him, it seems to be not just a legal fiction but an assumption of self-evident fact. It’s just as well, then, for the former, that the Supreme Court has left it at least partially in effect for him to appeal to, should he need to for any reason, now that he is out of office.

I am reminded of the much-ridiculed statement of another president who became — in my view quite unjustly, a by-word for evil: Richard Nixon. “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” As Professor Buckley, for one, recognizes, this view is an artifact of centuries of tribal politics that have only ever been temporarily suspended by such Enlightenment principles as the Kantian categorical imperative, which invalidated the double standard, seemingly forever. It should not surprise us then that, now tribal politics is back again, so is the double standard.

In politics, however, tribalism has at least one thing to be said for it. It reminds us, as both Hobbes and Locke pointed out centuries ago, that sovereign rulers are always and inevitably in a state of nature with respect to each other. The double standard, as we may say, goes with the territory when it comes to international relations, which would be unimaginable without it. Not only was this something that Jimmy Carter, with his appeal to the supranational standard of “human rights,” never understood, but that same failure of understanding is the basis for all the praise now being heaped upon his character and his decency — as if being a good man and a good president were essentially the same thing.

In other words, a “good” president, in my view, must be one who puts the national interest ahead of the Kantian universal principles that define goodness for the rest of us. I believe this was the the opinion, mutatis mutandis, both of Machiavelli and of Reinhold Niebuhr. That’s not, to say the least, a popular idea today. Since World War II, the political and diplomatic cultures of the West have been based on a public obeisance to the principles of international law and human rights and a hypocritical rear-guard action to claw back as much in the way of national advantage as possible without running into some international body or treaty charged with the enforcement of universal laws against such advantage.

In this world, the most successful leaders are those who manage to persuade people that, somehow, universal principles happen to coincide, more or less exactly, with national advantage, which is why every enemy or potential enemy from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin to Benjamin Netanyahu to Donald Trump is routinely compared to Hitler. Badness, like goodness, must now be seen as a universal quality, like that once supposed to belong to the devil, and so cannot admit of any mitigation or even charitable forbearance on the part of the good — for example, by not seizing the opportunity afforded by the death of one of the putative good guys, like Jimmy Carter, to denigrate one of the putative bad guys, like Donald Trump.

This kind of “polarization” — as we euphemistically call it — is not owing to tribal politics but to the failure to distinguish between tribal politics where it is appropriate and even necessary, as in the relations between nations and peoples, and where it is not. Attempts, like those of Jimmy Carter, to subordinate nations and peoples, as such, to a universal ideal are what have led us to the disaster of the Biden presidency, and to all the parallel political disasters unfolding throughout the Western world today. Our final judgment on President Carter, therefore, really ought to be not that, being a good man, he had to be a good president, but that he should have been a good president in order to be considered a good man.