Clintonism in America -- Page Three
The Cause of Bill Clinton Is The Cause of Us All
WARNING: this page contains explicit political material of a left-wing type that some may find offensive or pornographic. If you have not yet attained the mental and ideological age of eighteen, please go home and ask your nurse or your chaplain what to think and how to vote.
If you read on after this notice, you do so at your own risk. Casual surfers will need to know that this diatribe relates to discussions of the news group alt.impeach.clinton in November and December of 1998 and that VRWC signifies "vast right-wing conspiracy."
Background
The above title is polemical, designed to annoy all the right people. Nevertheless, this will not be a minute-to-minute partisan contribution to the Impeachment Mania. On reflection, I have decided that this title is my preferred formulation of the infamous McCloskey Doctrine, which will here be set forth and defended.
Though I happen to be the McCloskey in question, I didn't invent my own Doctrine. That service was very kindly performed for me by Mr. Christian DeFeo. Flattering though it might seem to find oneself classed with eponyms like James Monroe and Leonid Brezhnev, I must decline the honour implied, and not only on grounds of non-origination.
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The fact of the matter is that Mr. DeFeo did not invent the MD to my face, so to speak; he introduced the expression in addressing others, persons he thought more open to political redemption, and the general tone of his remarks was "If you don't watch out, you'll end up as bad as that." My surname seems to have become attached to a paradigm of political depravity. (Hey Bill, move over!)
That's OK, but unfortunately Mr. DeFeo's statement of the MD was not all I could wish. His formulation wasn't a bit like the one at the top of this page, although I'm sure he'll find the latter full of the characteristic McCloskeyite vileness. According to him, the MD holds that "whatever the majority says is right." That's an interesting position, although it is not exactly mine. Also, it is not exactly new. But naturally Mr. DeFeo understands these things well enough. The point of his rhetoric is that Clintonistas are guided by no stable and ancient principles, only by some nonsense a crank invented just yesterday. I suppose it helps when the crank has a Celtic name: Celtic --> Celtic fringe --> lunatic fringe. (Mr. DeFeo, it should be explained, is a South Brit.)
How typically Clintonite that last slur! Here I am whimpering xenophobically that I'm a persecuted minority! Doesn't it just make you sick? Next thing you know, I'll be hollering for affirmative action! (Mr. DeFeo, it should be explained, had the vivacity to call the MD "nauseating.")
But seriously. In context, he seems to take the MD to mean that whatever the majority says to pollsters is right, that St. Bill Clinton is to be let off if 51% of 1,003 well-selected sample Americans say so, or crucified if that is what 51% happen to prefer -- no stable and ancient principles anywhere in sight. For of course that plan might mean acquitted today and crucified tomorrow. Mr. DeFeo seems to think that holding this view (which I don't hold) makes me a hypocrite, that I think popular opinion of immense importance when it agrees with me, but will weasel around it somehow when it doesn't. By contrast, you see, Judge Starr and Chairman Hyde are veritable Burkean Profiles in Courage: "Damn the constituents! Full speed ahead!" There is a serious charge here and it touches on a serious, but very well known, problem in democratic theory.
I don't have anything radically new to say, let alone a whole Doctrine, but perhaps I can sneak up on the issue from a slightly innovative direction. One trouble I've recently diagnosed with most people's ideas of "democracy" is that they are much too passive. The explicit or implicit reference to pollsters is typical: for most of us, politics becomes a kind of consumerism, a mere expression of preferences. I side with etymology: "democracy" means the people rule, actively and aggressively RULE. I have no doubt bored, as well as sickened, Mr. DeFeo with my continual assaults on "the rule of law," but there is a very simple and very necessary reason for them. When two men ride on horseback, one must ride behind: if the people rule, the law doesn't, and if the law rules, the people don't. To quote a very pertinent Clintonian soundbite, PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST means putting the law no higher than second. No cheapjack McCloskey Doctrine here. This is the oldest of songs in Western Civistan, is it not? "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
I assume it is not alone my longish sentences and ability to concoct verbal contraptions that look, to the unwary or uninformed, as if they might actually be arguments that have drawn Mr. DeFeo's fire. I undoubtedly am an extremist sort of Clintonista, since I insist on working out Pop. Sov. to the end and noting its implications for nomarchy and monarchy and every other archy. Speaking of monarchy, when she was dying, Queen Elizabeth said to a courtier who told her she must go to bed, "Little man, MUST is not a word to use to princes." That's a thoroughly Clintonista sentiment, provided we keep in mind that with Americans "We, the People" is The Prince. One passable formulation of the MD might be that it appropriates to "We, the People" what Machiavelli granted to the individual monarch.
Another proto-Clintonista formulation, even older than the Tudors, alludes at once to monarchy and to nomarchy. The jurisprudents of Justinian laid it down that Voluntas Principis legis habet valorem. (Quoted from memory...) "The will of The Prince has the force of law." The way the jurists originally meant that, it was an abomination, it set up a mere Justinianocracy, but now that the identity of the True and Democratic Prince has been established in the subsequent course of the moral education of the human race, we may take it as good prophecy rather than bad policy.
The Ackerman Doctrine?
Further to defend the nonoriginality of "my" Doctrine, I would point out that one of the less ancient writers I am aware of having been influenced by will be appearing before Hyde & Co. this week. Prof. Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School is working on a trilogy called, by no accident, We, The People. I doubt he'll be testifying about his general political theory, more likely he's an expert on the GOP Impeachment Circus of 1868 or some other specific point, but the upshot of his principles, as set out in the first published volume, is quite similar to my own real views, vocabulary apart. The vocabulary issue is of some importance, though. Ackerman speaks of a "Higher Lawmaking" that trumps the parchment Constitution. My big difference with him is simply that I'd not call it "lawmaking" at all, but frankly "politics," which is to say, "people." His chosen language, I suppose, is an attempt to accomodate the traditional reverence for "the rule of law." Being an extremist, I'm willing to say frankly that it becomes misleading to talk about "law" when we're talking about what is Highest. Ackerman comes pretty close to saying so, though: his elegant account of American political history emphasizes the "revolutionary" (which means: contrary to existing law) character of what happened in 1787, in Reconstruction, and at the New Deal.
Even bad guys ought to get a fair trial before we lynch them, Always let them give it their best shot. I therefore suggest that the VRWC activists might wish to bring the preceding paragraph to the attention of some impeachment zombie on the Hyde panel who can then devote his five minutes to checking whether Professor Ackerman holds the outrageous and damning views here attributed to him. Maybe they're smart enough to dig up this ammunition themselves, but that's an iffy proposition. Fas est et ab hoste doceri.
(To be continued. 1315 GMT 08 Dec 98)
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