Motus Mentis

I’m back from Southern California (always a relief) and will be getting back to normal operation around here shortly.

For tonight, here’s a longish excerpt from Jonah Goldbergs’ most recent ‘G-File’ newsletter, in which he looks at the differences between conservative and liberal sex scandals in light of what he considers to be essential differences between the liberal and conservative political phenotype.

Brother Jim Geraghty has some worthwhile thoughts on why Democratic wives seem to put up with this stuff more than Republican ones do. In fairness, I think the data are more mixed. After all, last I checked, Mrs. Larry Craig was standing by her husband.

But there do seem to be enough instances to generalize a little, and it does seem to be the case that liberal lechers tend to be more bullying or predatory in their sexual appetites — interns, random teens on the web, groupies, etc. And that their wives are more forgiving of it. Bill Clinton took advantage of a worshipful and immature intern. John F. Kennedy literally pimped out a young girl. His brother Ted would make waitress sandwiches with Chris Dodd. As for Al Gore, I dunno. Maybe he had two guinea pigs named Chakra. One was already running free but the other was trapped under his towel. So when he demanded that the masseuse “Release my second chakra!” he didn’t mean anything untoward by it, he was just concerned about the animal’s welfare.

…As for the reason liberals’ wives stick with it, again, making a sweeping generalization will get you into trouble, but the conservative adulterers do seem to have more traditional affairs. The most discussed example is Mark Sanford who simply fell in love with someone else and his wife, rightly, refused to stand by him like a Hillary or a Huma.

I don’t think there’s any single explanation for this disparity. But I think the most important or at least interesting one is the different sociologies of the Right and the Left. Most Republican politicians tend to be normal business or professional guys who decide to get into politics later in life. I think Ron Johnson is a perfect example: a decent, hardworking, successful businessman who saw how terribly Washington was running things and decided to leave the plastics business and go do his part. (Note: I in no way am suggesting that Johnson has been anything other than faithful to his wife. My only point is that his is a fairly typical Republican story.)

In other words, Republican politicians tend to come from a normal background for a fairly successful person. Ironically, I don’t necessarily mean that in a normative sense. I just mean that if you make a life for yourself outside the realm of politics, you probably don’t consider politics all that important. Even if you catch the bug for it later in life, the moral, cultural, and philosophical stanchions holding your life together — family, church, community, business, sports, the military, hunting, Comic-Con whatever — are either outside of politics or don’t feel politicized to you.

But as I’ve written in about every third G-File for a couple years now, liberalism acts more like a religion. There are no natural boundaries between the political and the personal. Politics is not only where you do meaningful things, it’s where you find meaning itself (hence Hillary Clinton’s “Politics of Meaning”). It’s the cause and the limelight all at once. According to liberals like the Clintons and Obama, civil society is just another word for government, because “government is us.”

For some liberals to leave politics means to move into the darkness, into a void bereft of meaning. Anthony Weiner strikes me as exactly that kind of person. Politics is everything to him. Well, that and junk-tweeting. A normal person would be perfectly content to go back to the non-political world and find meaning — perhaps far greater meaning — outside of politics. But when everything is political where can you go? People like Weiner and Huma Abedin are like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman yelling “I’ve got nowhere else to go!”

That was always the key to understanding the Clintons. Politics was and is their everything. Asking them to leave politics is like asking a fish to leave the ocean or a samurai to take up needlepoint. Whatever else was going on in their marriage, it was subordinate to politics because for their whole lives, everything was subordinate to politics. So, of course, the Clinton’s marriage was a “political marriage” at least insofar as everything is political. When you have a traditional religious marriage the rules of the bond are, well, traditional and religious. When you have a political marriage, when it’s a political partnership and part of your brand, the traditional and religious commitments have to at least share space with the political considerations. And for some people — the Clintons — the politics is more important. To the extent we can speak about someone else’s marriage, I think it’s reasonable to assume the same is true for the Weiners.

This seems reasonable to me. On the conservative view, government is a necessary evil, to be tightly laced up and watched with a wary eye. Because of this politics is far less likely to be seen as a higher calling, and so the basis of one’s self-definition, for the Right than the Left (although of course both conservatives and liberals alike are human, and so tempted by power).

The exception to this is when conservative politics becomes a matter of righteous resistance — which for many it is now doing. But a Resistance, once formed, is ad hoc: once it has succeeded, its agents resume their normal lives. Liberalism, by contrast, is infinite.