THE MODERN conservative ascendancy in America grew in large part out of a rebellion against the liberal revolution in values of the 1960s.
This moral and cultural revolution was the acme of modern Western liberalism. It produced some indisputable gains, most obviously the rapid progress towards racial and sexual equality. But its moral legacy was hazier. To many Americans the permissiveness it preached looked dangerously like moral relativism. The rallying cry of the conservative counter-revolution above all was personal responsibility. Criminals should not be “understood” in terms of their background but rooted out and punished. Welfare mothers should no longer be supplied the monetary support to finance their dependency. Fathers should be made to acknowledge their responsibilities.
A couple of decades after conservatives first rode this backlash into Washington, it is all starting to sound rather quaint. The latest sorry way-station on the road down from the moral mountain has been the storm that has engulfed US politics this week — the case of Mark Foley.
Last Friday Mr Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned his seat in the House of Representatives after it emerged that he had been sending lurid e-mails and instant messages to congressional pages. These 16 and 17-year-old high school students spend a term or two in Washington performing menial tasks for congressmen while getting hands-on experience of American civics. Sadly the sort of hands-on activity Mr Foley seemed to have in mind for some of the males in the programme was neither constitutional nor wholesome. His instant messages with one, obtained by ABC News, contained some graphic exchanges about masturbatory techniques and within hours Mr Foley had quit his seat to spend, it is assumed, more time with his computer.
On Monday this staunch defender of personal responsibility took the well-worn American route of the outed scoundrel and announced he was checking into an alcoholism rehab unit. On Tuesday, as the storm deepened, his attorney announced that Mr Foley had been sexually abused as a child by a priest. By the weekend it is expected that he will be urging the FBI to hunt for the real culprit in this tragedy — his mother.
It soon emerged that a number of Republicans had had their concerns about Mr Foley for a while. There were many stories about how he had been trying to get too “close” to pages. But when the subject was raised with the House of Representatives leadership a year or more ago, no one took firm action to get him to desist. Since this story became public last weekend, Republicans have been casting around for the negligent enablers among themselves.
House members who had had misgivings about Mr Foley blamed the leadership. John Boehner (no snickering at the back please, his name is pronounced, “Bay-ner”), the majority whip manfully stepped up to the plate — and said it was all the fault of Dennis Hastert, the Republican Speaker of the House. Mr Hastert, in a brave display of personal responsibility, went cap in hand to the American people — and said the Democrats were to blame: they had deliberately held off on releasing the e-mails until they knew it would cause maximum political damage in next month’s elections.
Now the Republicans, who coached the country through the great moral crisis of the Clinton presidency by promising to restore the virtues of individual morality, are in full blame-apportioning fury.
As political sex scandals go, the Foley-Pagegate episode is fairly low voltage. The congressman is not the first to get frisky with pages. The age of homosexual consent in Washington DC is 16, lower than in many states where until recently sodomy was a crime. Indeed, one sometimes suspects it’s the main reason some Americans choose to come to Washington — the sort of congress they’re interested in isn’t the legislative one. What’s more, to subtract still further from the scandal, there’s no evidence to date that Mr Foley consummated his desires with any of the pages.
And House Republican leaders say, with some cause, what could they have done? They knew only about the mildy troubling e-mails and not about the disturbing instant messages when they passed over Mr Foley’s case a year ago. But this won’t really do. It was, by all accounts fairly common knowledge that Mr Foley was something of a page-chaser.
His sexual predilections are not really the issue. However, a member of congress is in a special position of authority towards the pages; hitting on them is a serious breach of professional ethics — and, yes, personal responsibility. To cap it all, Mr Foley was an active member of the House Committee on Missing and Exploited Children, and had sponsored legislation to protect minors from aggressive electronic pursuit by adults.
Whether this incident will so repel voters that they will turf the Republicans out is now the main topic in Washington. But in a sense the true lesson of this story is that, whatever happens at the mid-term elections, it further emphasises how detached from their political, cultural and moral moorings Republicans have become.
Republicans came to power in Congress 12 years ago to complete the conservative revolution begun by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. But a decade or more later the Republicans are, like the pigs in Animal Farm, barely distinguishable from the rulers and the governing values they displaced. They have come, not only to tolerate big government, but to enthusiastically accept and garnish it, dispensing large public programmes in health, education and domestic security with a verve that makes their Democratic forebears look miserly.
Republicans have embraced a corrupt culture of swapping dubious legislation to favour special interest groups for large campaign donations. This is often done in hidden clauses in Bills, reminding us too that, as someone once said, in Washington the truth is merely another special interest, and a not particularly well financed one at that. Worse still, a number of Republicans have enriched themselves personally through accepting bribes.
It is in this context that the moral failings of the Foley scandal need to be considered. Having buried the conservative virtues of small government, honesty and truth beneath an avalanche of self-serving, self-aggrandising big government liberalism they have finally embraced the last defence of the moral liberal — “I cannot tell a lie: someone else did it.”
So even if the Democrats do take control next month, will anyone really notice the difference?
