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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary E. Johnson who wrote (39617)	3/20/1999 8:05:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 67261

I'm worried about a world overrun by moral reformationists, or at least I used to be. This is Andrew Sullivan, from Oct. '98. Truly American conservatives would not recoil at the greater liberty enjoyed by women, racial minorities and homosexuals, as the truly American conservative Barry Goldwater showed. In the last decade, true American conservatives would have been heartened by the declines in divorce, crime and teen-age births, and encouraged by the move among gay people for more stable, responsible relationships. They would have been elated by the collapse of collectivism and totalitarianism abroad, and encouraged by the return of fiscal prudence and social responsibility at home. They would have seen in Bill Clinton a dangerous proclivity for dishonesty and abuse of power, but they would not have seen him as the degenerate apotheosis of an entire generation -let alone an entire nation. And they would have seen the emergence of religious dogmatists on the far right as a threat to constitutional order and political civility, not as a boon for votes. Above all, they would not have fatally overplayed their hand and tried to impeach a President not for illegality but for immorality, and they wouldn't have shredded the virtues of privacy and decency and common sense for the emotional release of a cultural jihad. Today's conservatives - the intellectuals in particular - have begun to replace skepticism with certainty, faith in ordinary people with contempt for the masses, religion with theocracy. These are fools' bargains. And unworthy of conservatism itself. Moreover, this shift has also undoubtedly weakened, rather than strengthened, the ability of conservatives to address moral issues in a limited but compelling way. When conservative extremists accuse Bill Clinton of murder, when Republicans make a divisive, difficult issue like abortion a litmus test for moral purity, then most Americans will be reluctant to listen to them when they worry about illegitimacy, juvenile crime or Presidential law-breaking. Conservative moralizing, in other words, requires a certain temperance to be truly effective. Of course, conservatives have now achieved a political ascendancy regardless of these mistakes. Thanks in part to the collapse of the liberal alternative, and to the self-destruction of Bill Clinton, the flaws of religious zeal and moral authoritarianism have not prevented conservatives rise to cultural and political power. That makes the danger of hubris all the greater and the need for self-restraint all the more pressing. In the past, conservatives have rightly been praised as much for what they haven't done as for what they have. Maybe today's conservative generation, poised on the brink of unprecedented power, will heed that lesson. But maybe, God help us, they won't. Or maybe they've overplayed their hand, and we don't have to worry about it. Anyway, as to the everlasting FBI files, why in the world wouldn't anyone come forward during the long impeachment ordeal if they'd actually been used? There must be some very, very black things in those files. The blackmailees wouldn't even have to say what the threat was, just that the threat was made. Or maybe, using some non-Neocon version of Occam's razor, there's just no evidence they were ever used.