Very fine people

It’s almost enough to make one believe in that much-mentioned but too-often elusive “long arc of history” which, according to Martin Luther King Jr (not to mention Barack Obama), “bends towards justice.” Almost.

For almost exactly coincidentally with the latest and perhaps the ultimate implosion of the once mighty but now effectively bankrupt Washington Post and the dismissal of a third of its remaining journalistic staff, James Rosen published in the New York Times, of all places, the latest and perhaps most consequential of a number of recent articles reassessing the Watergate scandal — on which the Post has staked a wholly undeserved reputation for journalistic heroism for the past half century. The reputation of that scandal’s object, Richard Nixon, in other words, appeared to be emerging from the drain just as that of his one-time journalistic nemesis was circling it.

Contrary to the Post’s self-curated legend, the Woodward and Bernstein stories were really just conveniences offered to deep state actors, mainly Mark Felt of the FBI, who were part of what Mr Rosen’s article reveals as a multi-pronged effort to destroy the Nixon presidency. But as is so often the case, reality lags behind the legend, and the legend of Watergate has been instrumental in creating the scandal-obsessed media culture of today. Indeed, with the democratization of the media, now rubbing shoulders with a vast array of would-be media on the internet, it would be better to call it our scandal-obsessed culture, full stop.

As it happens, the new and perhaps decisive Watergate revisionism has also coincided with what I consider to be the reductio ad absurdum of that scandal culture. I refer of course to the feeding frenzy that began with the release by the FBI of three million pages of documents and thousands of videos and other images known as the Epstein files at the end of January and still going on as I write. Out of all those millions of pages and thousands of images there turned out to be practically nothing that could be construed in a court of law as evidence of criminal conduct, so the Epstein enthusiasts who had demanded their release had to be content with a shame-campaign against the famous and not-so-famous names appearing in the files, no matter how tenuous their connection with Epstein himself.

The result was a series of “cancellations” (to use the new term of art) to rival that of the #MeToo craze of a few years ago. Yet, as an exercise in sheer self-righteousness, now spread from the scandal-hunting media to, seemingly, half the population, it’s far worse than that. Here, as one small example, is The New York Times newsletter, “The Morning,” on the arrest in Norfolk, UK., of the man we are now rather absurdly meant to call Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. “I’m going to start today with the British royal family,” writes Sam Sifton for the Times. “It’s kind of unbelievable we were once ruled by these people.”

These people. There’s no other way to read these words than as casting their contempt, not only on ex-Prince Andrew, but on his much-beloved late mother, his brother the king, so pathetically eager to curry favor with the baying media mob that he has de-princified him, and all their ancestors going back, presumably, to James I who chartered the Virginia Company in 1610. No doubt this was just a poor attempt at a joke on Mr Sifton’s part and not an indication of actual malice towards the Mountbatten-Windsor clan or any of their preceding royal dynasties in the sceptered isle, but it is a good illustration of the undoubted fact that scandal culture is always and everywhere about finding, exposing and shaming (at least) these people. And we always know who is meant by these people.

It’s these other people, these bad people who are always and ever to be distinguished from the good people, like those who like to make jokes about how contemptible the bad people are. A more serious look at the defenestration of the man once known, in more innocent times, as Randy Andy, the playboy prince, comes from Yuan Yi Zhu, an “academic and writer,” at UnHerd who finds that “King Charles, whose knife-wielding against his own kin becomes more impressive by the day, released a statement that expressed just enough familial sadness to make the message — he’s on his own — appear less harsh than it was.”

Whence, do you suppose, comes this idea that “knife-wielding” against those to whom one is bound by ties of blood or affection is the sort of thing that makes a man “more impressive by the day”? Where else but from the media, whose conceit of their own moral unassailability needs constant reinforcement by such praise for virtuous ruthlessness — perhaps tinged with “just enough familial sadness” not to seem quite heartless — on the part of those, like King Charles, who may fear themselves to be in danger of relegation to the sullied ranks of these people.

The scandal culture dating back to Watergate has now become so ubiquitous, so familiar to us, that we can no longer remember a time when loyalty to friends and family, not to mention political leaders and other authority figures, was more respected by ordinary people than those who trumpet their own virtue by denigrating that of others. Louise Perry, writing in The Wall Street Journal
professes to feel sorry for King Charles as lacking the “power,” as a constitutional monarch, to resist the tide of media-led opinion. “The British royal family” she writes, “knows its position is fragile and that difficult family members like Andrew must be expelled in order to protect the institution.”

But is the institution worth protecting if its preservation depends on its members’ yielding to the demands of mob justice and denouncing (or arresting) each other? The titular king might do better to consider the stout-hearted defense, in The Spectator, by mere commoner Ian Maxwell of his sister Ghislaine, the principal living object of the media’s hatred for her association with Epstein, who “has become a prop in the theater of viral outrage.”

My family name has become a byword for scandal. My father, Robert, went from press baron to tabloid monster within weeks of his death in 1991. My sister Ghislaine, convicted in New York three decades later for sex-trafficking offenses linked to Jeffrey Epstein, became the algorithmically optimized villain of the online age. Last week’s arrest of the former Prince Andrew shows how fully a newer system has taken hold: one in which guilt is first declared on the homepage and only later, if at all, tested in court. Old protections — the presumption of innocence, etc — become threadbare once a story enters the global content mill. Defendants are no longer chiefly subjects of legal process. They are raw material for clicks, outrage and political theater.

What’s the use of being king if your subjects can publicly say as much as that (and Mr Maxwell has much more to say) in defense of their family members but you can’t?

But those who benefit from scandal, including the media, very often do so at least in part because it is a distraction from any public consideration of their own potentially scandalous behavior. As Isabel Hardman, writing for the Spectator Daily’s “Evening Blend” wryly notes:

This afternoon’s Commons debate on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was unusual for all kinds of reasons. It wasn’t just that the Speaker had decided that MPs could condemn the former Duke of York despite parliamentary convention normally preventing them from criticising the royal family in the chamber . . . It was also that the minister responding to the debate was able to spend most of his speech criticising someone else, rather than being on the defensive the whole time. Trade Minister Chris Bryant took some obvious pleasure in describing the former Prince as “a man on a constant self-aggrandising and self-enriching hustle, a rude, arrogant and entitled man who could not distinguish between the public interest which he said he served, and his own private interest.”

In that, of course, we are meant to understand that he was utterly unlike the Rt Hon. Mr Bryant and his highly virtuous Labour front-bench colleagues — barring, of course, ex-colleague Peter Mandelson. As Ms Hardman concludes, “perhaps the strangest thing about this whole row is that Downing Street finds it much easier to deal with than pretty much anything else right now — which is an indication of just how badly everything is going for the government.” Moreover, the fact that, if there are any actual crimes to be attributed to the scandal’s fallen, they seem quite likely to involve sex with underage girls, which makes it the ideal distraction from renewed attention to the long neglect, for reasons of political correctness, by successive British governments of the victims of “grooming gangs” in several British cities.

Scandal in its essence is only tangentially related to wrong-doing, if any. It is, rather, the media’s license to hate, along with their instruction as to whom to hate. Actually, it’s worse than that. Scandal taken to the Epstein-like extreme amounts to the suggestion that you must hate the scandalous one, as the media themselves do, lest your own high moral character should be called into question. The hate must become politically instrumental, just as it is for the totalitarians of George Orwell’s 1984 who mandate a two-minute hate of a manufactured villain in order to find out and punish anyone who is insufficiently enthusiastic in his hatred of the scandalous one.

Even if poor old Andrew, and Peter Mandelson and everybody else caught up in the Epstein scandal deserves everything that’s coming to him, shouldn’t we give some weight to the fact that these people and their now-ruined lives are really just collateral damage in what began, like Watergate, as part of a long-term effort on the part of the media to overthrow by disgrace and, if possible, by prosecution of an elected president? All are paying the price not for their own sins but for what the media desperately want to believe are Donald Trump’s.

It seems clear to me, for instance, that pollsters’ majorities who say they are dissatisfied with Mr Trump’s handling of the Epstein files are swollen by those who are merely disappointed by not finding in them anything sufficiently salacious to justify their own bad opinion of Mr Trump. As pollsters for Reuters-Ipsos put it,

There’s a reason Americans have been so interested in the Epstein files. For Americans, the files — and the dramatics surrounding their release — have been a reminder of the exclusive privileges Americans feel elites have. They also serve as a clear reminder that among Americans, the distrust of elites is a powerful force that will continue to shape U.S. politics.

Though far more Democrat than Republican names appear in the Epstein files, Democrats like Representative Ro Khanna of California, think they can use them to ride the populist, anti-elitist wave. Rep Khanna, who was instrumental in prising them loose from the Department of Justice’s confidentiality, says he hopes they will “fundamentally change the economic and political structure that has shafted the working class” and so effect “a clearing, frankly, of the elite governing class . . . whether they were Democrats or Republicans.”

Many of the new Watergate revisionists, including Nathan Pinkoski in The Claremont Review of Books and Christopher Caldwell and Conrad Black in The Spectator, mention the parallels between the anti-Nixon and the anti-Trump media crusades — in the case of Mr Caldwell, this is to make Nixon look better by the comparison. But making the nice calculation as to which president is more justly hated and reviled by the half of the country that just happens to have preferred his opponent in the election that brought him to power kind of misses the point about scandal culture. Or so it seems to me. I think we would do better to answer the question, not of who is more corrupt and therefore more deserves our hatred, but what do we gain as a people, or a country, let alone as a political culture, from so much hatred that it consumes the greater part of our political energies?

It is undeniable that this hatred has poisoned our public and political life, perhaps forever, and that this poisoning is deliberate on the part of the media, whose own interests and those of their revolutionary Democrat clients, depend absolutely on intensifying that hatred with the help of any scandal that can be made to serve their purpose, no matter how unconnected with the people we’re supposed to hate.

Political hatred is a revolutionary instrument. Nixon, like Ronald Reagan, got his political start and his rise to national prominence by exploiting the anti-communist fervor of the post-World War II era, and both men were hated for it by America’s revolutionary sympathizers in the Democratic party, no matter what good they might have done, or wanted to do. Memories of that time have grown dim, but the hatreds it inspired burn brightly still and must seek new objects to feed upon among those who celebrate American history and culture and so promise effective resistance to the revolutionary change sought by the haters.

Inevitably, one supposes, those who are so hated will learn to hate in return. Nixon was a great hater and, as he later acknowledged, his own hatred did more to destroy his presidency than that of his enemies. Reagan was so easy-going that he never got the knack of hating, and that may have preserved his. President Trump, as in so many ways, is harder to read than either of these predecessors in office. Sometimes his hatreds seem merely performative, as if he believes that his many detractors are also just putting on a show, as if it’s all part of a game that both political sides are playing—or a professional wrestling match.

I thought of this during the State of the Union address when he tricked the Democratic congress-folk into making a public demonstration of the undoubted fact that their entire political existence amounts to what Matthew Hennessy of the Wall Street Journal rather awkwardly calls “reflexive political oppositionality.” Or, to use his own illustration, “If that stupid guy with bad politics says Sydney Sweeney is a beauty queen, then I’m going to say she doesn’t do it for me — even if I don’t really mean it.” The upshot came when the president turned to the folks in TV-land and said, “These people are crazy.”

These people again! But saying that “these people are crazy” is not only less hateful, less malicious and less soul-destroying than saying that they are evil, it is also — in the case of people who refuse to applaud putting the interests of American citizens ahead of illegal immigrants or a mother who rescued her daughter from the clutches of the “gender” fanatics — much more obviously true. Which, I suppose, was the real point of his demonstration and what made it a political masterstroke. The things a man can do, it seems, when he’s learned not to make himself, like the Democrats, the prisoner of his hatreds.