Rod Dreher: May 2008 Archives

David Frum has a good column up about how the virtue of loyalty became a devastating vice in the Bush White House. Excerpt:

That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team.

Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (Robert Draper, whose book Dead Certain offers a vivid picture of the pre-presidential Bush, tells the story of a 1999 campaign-strategy meeting at which Bush shut Karl Rove up by ordering him to “hang up my jacket.” The room fell silent in shock — but Rove did it.)

These little abuses would often be followed by unexpected acts of thoughtfulness and generosity. Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and the ensuing compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept absolute subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.

Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he then delegated them enormous power. He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility — Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.

There has been lots of huffing and puffing on the right about McClellan's disloyalty in publishing his new memoir. Funny how the right didn't find blind loyalty all that attractive when Bill Clinton's lackeys were practicing it. It all puts me in mind of this famous line from E.M. Forster:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

I've always found that to be a wicked sentiment, though reading it in context of the essay in which it appeared slightly softens the impact. (If you don't care to read the whole essay, read into the extended entry for the particular passage in which this line appears; it'll give you enough). But only slightly. It doesn't seem to occur to Forster that this is the morality of the mafioso. Nor does it occur to him that a friend who is betraying his country is betraying their friendship as well.

Now, I certainly don't mean to draw an equivalence between Forster's immoral view and what G.W. Bush demanded of his inner circle. But the two aren't unrelated. I expect that my friends are as devoted to me as I am to them, but that devotion must never be unconditional. If they knew that I was committing a crime, or doing a great wrong, and would not repent or make restitution, I hope they would betray me for my own good. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the men and women I consider my closest friends are my friends because they love truth and goodness (as well as the Source of all truth and goodness) above all things. That is to say, I am most attracted to people who love righteousness.

But not righteousness alone, which can be hard and forbidding and inhuman. I'm talking about a kind of righteousness I associate with Christianity: a kind that tempers justice with mercy. Overall, though, I would not want a friend who loved me so much that he would go along with me, never peeping in protest, even when he thought I was seriously mistaken. Is that really loyalty? Is that really friendship? Can you really trust the judgment of a friend who is loyal to you personally over principle? I couldn't.

Scott McClellan has obviously been disloyal in writing this memoir, and those who say that his disloyalty is cheap because it cost him nothing have a point. I don't want to exonerate him for his deed. Nevertheless, the kind of loyalty the president demands and rewards is not virtue, it's the vice of servility. It has done neither the president nor the nation any good, and I'm not sure McClellan keeping quiet about it would have been a commendable path either. Basically, he's screwed either way. I agree with Peggy Noonan:

Leave him alone. He wrote a book. It is true or untrue, accurately reported or not. If not, this will no doubt be revealed. It is honestly meant and presented, or not. Look to the assertions, argue them, weigh and ponder.

...[T]hose damning him today would have damned him even more if he'd resigned on principle three years ago. They—and the administration—would have beaten him to a pulp, the former from rage, the latter as a lesson: This is what happens when you leave and talk.

Which is why Frum's ironic conclusion is correct: Bush's disordered exaltation of blind loyalty created Scott McClellan.

Barack Obama has resigned from Trinity Church. Guess Father Pfleger's ridiculous minstrel show was the final straw. I have no doubt that Obama sat there in the pews for 20 years listening to that kind of garbage, and said nothing. But at least this will put some of that nutty place's baggage behind him.

On a human level, though, this has got to hurt Obama. If you had told him this time last year that within 12 months, he would be estranged from his spiritual father, and would have resigned from the only church he and his family have ever known, he probably wouldn't have believed it. I bet now he rues the day he ever threw in with Jeremiah Wright & Co. If he loses this election, Rev. Wright and Fr. Pfleger will have a lot to do with it. Hope they're proud of themselves.

A reader writes:

My husband may be transferred to the Washington, DC, area. Do you know of any crunchy-con friendly neighborhoods around the District? Ideally we'd like to be able to garden in our backyard, but I'm excited about the idea that we might live in a place where I could go walking with our kids as part of daily life. But everything is so expensive there! I hear that Northern Virginia is more family-friendly, partly because of homeschool laws, and partly because of taxes. I guess we'd rent first.

Me, I don't know. I haven't lived there in 13 years. Readers?

You really have to watch the video of that loon Fr. Michael Pfleger carrying on in the pulpit of Trinity Church to grasp the full racialist wonder of it all. Love Pfleger's phony, ingratiating black accent.

I have had it with crazypants political preachers this year. Is there anything that people in the pulpit at Obama's church won't say?

My morning paper brings news that fishermen in Europe are protesting the high cost of fuel. What on earth do they expect their governments to do? Lower fuel taxes? Well, maybe so: Europe does levy heavy taxes on fuel, and it could give its fishermen (and truck drivers) a break. But that would hurt the fisc, and would be only a short-term solution (ergo, no solution at all). It seems that folks want their gummints to make something out of nothing.

Consider, as Patrick Deneen points out, the Wall Street Journal report that oil exports are falling even as prices go through the roof. The Journal observes that this defies "traditional market logic." But does it? Here's Deneen:

Even if "traditional market logic" does not seem to be working, Mr. Market is indeed telling us something: the price of oil is rising because it appears that there is less of it. That the "logic" is not working may puzzle some, but only if one believes that the market can actually create something. If the product in question is constrained or even becoming depleted, then the rise in price along with a corresponding continuing decline in supply is perfectly in keeping with "market logic." It is simply not "traditional" because it's something we haven't seen before.