On January 12 the Wall Street Journal reported that Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s attorney, paid a pornographic actress with the nom de scène of Stormy Daniels the sum of $130,000 in exchange for her signature on a nondisclosure agreement. The thing she was not to disclose was an “alleged sexual encounter,” as the Journal put it, with Trump. I have no idea if the encounter or the payoff ever took place—nor do I want to know—but most people in the media I’ve spoken to or read seem to accept the story at face value.
Some of those same reporters and media personalities also seem frustrated that the story hasn’t put much of a dent in Trump’s popularity with his supporters. Nobody’s dying to find out the truth, and this absence of outrage is said to be a sad sign of the times. Well, these observers conclude with anguish, I guess this is the new normal. I guess a sitting U.S. president can now be the sort of person who cavorts with a porn actress and has his attorney pay her off.
Well, maybe. Maybe if Trump weren’t already known as a libertine, and maybe if he hadn’t already said and done so many shocking things, he might be obliged to pay some small political price for the alleged transaction. But politicians caught in sex scandals frequently pay a surprisingly low political price, or no discernible price at all, at least when those scandals don’t involve either (a) assault or some other serious illegality or (b) behavior so stomach-churningly loathsome that they immediately resign in disgrace.
Louisiana senator David Vitter confessed to seeing a prostitute and went on, three years later, to win reelection. He ran for governor in 2015 and lost by 12 points, but the fact that he ran at all seemed remarkable at the time. My own former boss, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, was discovered to be secretly seeing a mistress in Argentina, but he served out the rest of his term and later ran for his old seat in Congress. He is now safely ensconced in the House of Representatives.
Then there is the greatest of all modern political sex scandals: the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The president was pretty clearly guilty of the charges brought against him by the House, charges that included lying to a grand jury, tampering with evidence, and encouraging others to lie to federal investigators—all of which stemmed from the sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Clinton by Paula Jones. In the end, Clinton was acquitted by the Senate and served out his term. Now he is so beloved of Democrats that they nominated his wife to be president and fully expected Bill to be First Gentleman.
The chief consequence of these and similar cases isn’t that we have hounded lots of creeps out of public life and so cleaned things up. No indeed; the chief consequence is that millions of Americans feel they must read about and discuss the anomalous sexual behavior of a lot of arrogant men. We grow more accustomed to the lewdness each time; the jokes become crasser, the discussions more graphic, and the young more used to laughing at the appetites of grown-ups and more adept at spotting double entendres. The offending politician often enough either stays in office or takes up a lucrative lobbying career.
The political commentariat exacerbate the whole sordid mess with brazen, unprincipled hackery. Many on the right would thunder against any liberal or Democratic officeholder thought to be guilty of the sort of behavior they openly excuse in Trump. And the converse is true on the left—a tradition going back to the 1960s when the news media kept quiet about John Kennedy’s many dalliances but worked overtime to find any hint of misbehavior by Richard Nixon. A few smart liberals will defend the double standard, pretending it’s not about sex but “hypocrisy.” Since only Republicans claim to care about “family values,” these liberals argue, so only Republicans are targets. This is cant. Bill Clinton never proclaimed a belief in free love. He toted his gigantic Bible to church services and in public spoke lovingly of his wife.
The point is not that right and left should be more consistent in going after sexual misbehavior in public officials. The point is that, making exceptions for illegal and abusive behavior, they shouldn’t go after it at all. Politicians are mostly vain and self-willed men, and they misbehave in the way of vain and self-willed men. If we insist on a public spectacle every time we discover an act of—let’s use the word indiscretion—we won’t change our politics for the better and will mainly succeed in further debasing our common life.
I’m not advocating a surrender to the libertinism so relentlessly promoted by our cultural insurrectionists for a half-century. I’m suggesting that we no longer accept the worldview of the 1960s counterculture—a worldview that refused to distinguish between public and private morality. The older outlook is eloquently described by James Bowman in his book Honor: A History (2006). “The appeal of the old system of honor,” Bowman writes, “was precisely that it was not the same thing as morality.”
Conservative culture warriors (are there any left these days?) may interpret this as a capitulation, but it’s only by valuing the distinction between public honor and private morality that we can keep our shared culture from slipping further into prurient disorder.
We may at last have arrived at the first moment in our lifetimes when a return to the older distinction is just possible. Many liberals suddenly realize to their horror that the libertinism they’ve endorsed has made it impossible for them to destroy a hated adversary with a salacious revelation. And many conservatives suddenly wonder why they’re disinclined to revile Donald Trump for behavior that would have caused them to mount the barricades were he a political foe. The puzzlement arises from the obliteration of a valuable distinction.
In the 1950s—and in the 1850s—people didn’t seriously believe their political leaders were models of private rectitude. Midcentury Americans weren’t stupid or naïve and neither were the Victorians. But they knew how to keep silent about things that deserved silence—and they were happier for it.
