Slate Family Values
Attentive online readers
will notice a slight change in our design, if not by the time you read this
then in the next few days. The purpose is to reflect the launch of Microsoft's
new "portal site," msn.com.
As followers of Internet fashion are aware, portal sites are the flavor of the
moment, as various online giants--America Online, Yahoo, Netscape, and
Microsoft--compete to be your guide through the maze of the Internet. A portal
site is a Web page with useful features such as a Web search engine, your local
weather, sundry links, perhaps a stock ticker, news headlines, a small button
that says "Click here or we e-mail your boss that you've been playing Solitaire
again," and so on. The idea is that you make it your home page, or at least
come to it often, and that way the sponsoring company will get lots of traffic
and make lots of money by ... by ... well, we're all still working on that.
It's the Internet after all.
Anyway,
Slate
conducted a scrupulously objective study of the major portal sites and
concluded that msn.com was
the one we preferred to be associated with. By special arrangement with America
Online, however, readers who access
Slate
through AOL will get a
special set of pages that shield them from any special temptation to visit
msn.com and other Microsoft properties. Instead, they will continue to enjoy
AOL's own self-promotions as usual. Of course AOL customers are free to check
out msn.com, just as other
Slate
readers are free to visit
aol.com. Nobody has a monopoly here, as we keep telling Janet Reno.
We can't
resist noting, finally, that if your primary interests are news, politics, and
cultural commentary, our "Slate Links" page doesn't make a bad "portal site." There you'll
find links to all the major columnists and commentators, movie and other arts
reviewers, U.S. and foreign newspapers, and other tasty treats. Make it your
home page--Microsoft won't mind.
Partisanship: Slate Wobbles
There is nothing especially
Democratic or liberal about the behavior that has got President Clinton in hot
water. Nor is there anything especially Republican or conservative about
Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr's alleged excesses. Some conservatives have
attempted to associate Flytrap with the political and cultural values of the
1960s--let it all hang out and so on--though they also have insisted that
feminists are betraying feminism's roots in the same period by failing to
condemn the male perpetrator. Surely the latter critique is closer to the mark.
If the Clinton-Lewinsky affair smells of any past decade it is the 1950s and
the pre-feminist workplace culture reflected in movies like The Seven Year
Itch and The Apartment .
But
basically this scandal is nonideological and so are the arguments around it. So
the strong tendency of Democrats and Republicans to see Flytrap differently is
especially impressive. There is nothing wrong with partisanship--when it's
about principled ideological disagreement. "The Beast stands for strong,
mutually antagonistic governments everywhere," says the press magnate, Lord
Copper, in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop . That is a pretty good attitude to have
about domestic politics. If there's anything worse than partisanship, it's
bipartisanship. This is not merely the journalist's professional preference for
disagreement over agreement. It is a suspicion that rising above partisanship
usually means rising above democracy. (See David Plotz's "Flytrap
Today" dispatch on Washington's "Wise Men.") Nevertheless, it is remarkable
that on a series of essentially apolitical issues on which reasonable people
can differ, Democratic politicians are almost all on one side and Republicans
are almost all on the other.
How does it happen? Empty, principle-free
partisanship--the bad kind--is the obvious answer. It is tempting to apply this
analysis only to whichever side you happen to disagree with. But unthinking
partisanship can strike anyone at any time. Consider the sad case of an online
magazine editor. Call him "K." K was working on an article--and working himself
up into a fine froth--on the subject of legal "hairsplitting." What is wrong
with it? K does not go as far as those Clinton defenders who say that you have
the right to lie under oath if the questions are ones you should never have had
to answer. But he was strongly tempted by the notion that if you shouldn't have
been asked the question, responding with fatuous evasions is perfectly OK.
Starr had spent four years and $40 million not so much investigating a crime as
arranging for one. If a bizarre definition of sex could allow Clinton to
mislead without falling into a perjury trap, he was not merely within his
rights but perfectly justified.
As K was thinking this
through, though, the line of reasoning started to seem familiar. Wasn't this
exactly Elliott Abrams' argument? Abrams, assistant secretary of state under
President Reagan, pleaded guilty to misleading Congress about the Iran-Contra
affair, but was pardoned by President Bush. His defense (for which K had
contempt at the time) was that he intended to mislead but was technically
telling the truth. For example, he stagily denied that any foreign money was
being used to finance the contras--although he himself had been involved in
soliciting such money--because the check hadn't yet arrived. When the deception
came out, Abrams sermonized that sneakiness in the defense of liberty is no
vice, and many Republicans supported him in that.
There are
differences, of course. Congress' right to question an assistant secretary of
state about U.S. foreign policy will seem clearer to many than Starr's right to
ask the president about a sexual affair, but a few will think the opposite.
Abrams felt he was defending liberty in Nicaragua, while others might
characterize his deception as an effort to subvert democracy in the United
States. So what Abrams did to prevent Congress from enforcing a policy he
disagreed with is either much worse or much better than
lying-through-technicalities to protect your right to privacy from an
overzealous prosecutor. K has no trouble deciding which it is now that he needs
a few second-order considerations to refine his argument. But K's indignant
objection to hairsplitting a decade ago and his indignant sympathy for it now
took no account of such nice distinctions.
The clips from the Abrams episode are a hilarious reminder
of how partisan indignation can survive a total reversal of position on an
issue. The thundering Republican condemnations of the special prosecutor back
then are just like the thundering Democratic condemnations today, down to the
very phrase, "four years and $40 million." Republicans used to defend any
conceivable expression of "executive privilege" over Congress and the
courts--now Democrats do that, while Republicans take up the old cry of
"imperial presidency." When Republican officials were in the dock, the Wall
Street Journal editorial page used to opine about "prosecutorial
discretion"--the apparently noble principle that you don't necessarily
prosecute a guy just because he did something illegal--and K used to mock it
for that. Now the conservative mantras are "perjury is perjury" and "no man is
above the law"--and K finds himself tempted by the idea that it isn't the end
of the world if a perjurer gets away with it.
The strangest role reversal
is going on right now and concerns democracy itself. In the 1980s, and as late
as 1994, a major Republican theme was a sort of taunting, nyah-nyah populism.
They thought the force was with them and always would be. Remember term limits?
The notion of representative democracy took multiple hits. Politicians were
considered inherently inferior to "the people." There was no patience for the
good old Burkean conceit that legislators should sometimes rise above the
wishes of their constituents. Those voters' wishes expressed in polls even
trumped the voters' own wishes as expressed at the ballot box (since the
essence of term limits was to limit the voters' right to vote for whom they
wanted).
These days, though, the polls
show that people pretty clearly don't want President Clinton impeached. And so
we hear a lot of talk about rising above politics and ignoring the polls and
doing the right thing not the popular thing. There have even been some
frustrated musings among conservative writers and pundits that the people are
not necessarily all-wise. They can be duped. They make mistakes. This was a
note K used to strike a lot in the 1980s, and he's glad he doesn't have to
strike it anymore. But he's trying to avoid the opposite note--"the people
agree with me, so I must be right." Just in case.
--Michael Kinsley
