Reflections in the wake of Andrew Cuomo's resignation: On the Nixon Syndrome of substituting morality for politics

August 10, 2021

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's resignation is one more confirmation that politics in America is not about what politicians do in terms of politics or policy, but about their persons and personalities.

We want to elect heroes and representatives of heretofore disadvantaged identities. Is it too much to ask that our politicians also stand for something, and want to do good -- and not bad -- things not or not only to the people in their direct acquaintance but to the people they govern?

Differently put, since such malefactions as what Cuomo is accused of cannot fail to bring disdain and criminal or civil penalties to him as a person, we can also say that politicians who engage in this kind of behavior do harm to the whole political system, not least the supporters of their policies.

The trend was surely set decisively with the scandals surrounding President Nixon -- at, more or less, the outset of the neoliberal era. In global political economics, it began the same year, 1973 when the Nixon administration under the advisement of Henry Kissinger backed and arranged the coup in Chile that brought to power Pinochet's ('free' market) liberal fascism.

But in American politics in terms of how voters think, the decisive moment was when Nixon's attempt to use occulted or 'deep state' tactics -- which had long been used by the FBI against radicals and protesters (it continues; I was a victim of this in a small way during the Obama administration) -- against opponents of the Vietnam War (the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, who opposed the war, and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, telling Americans and the world how our government had conducted the Vietnam War; tellingly, Nixon had an operative bug the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, figuring he could be discredited on the most personal of grounds).

American society and politics were then perhaps irrevocably marked by the idea that acts of barbaric cruelty carried out by our military (or domestically by police agencies) and even with, as in Vietnam, as many as 2 million mostly non-combattant victims, are not what counts for us politically; what counts is personal misconduct and morals as revealed negatively in scandals. What matters is good manners, neighborly conduct, protestant niceness, and clean hands. And so 20 years later Bill Clinton would be impeached by Congress for a sexual peccadillo; he had had intimate relations with a young intern. The Democratic Party's effort to take down Nixon (any way they could, as he had tried to defeat the Democrats in the election any way that he could, with similar tactics applied to protestors and poor blacks in declaring the 'war on drugs') was, in what must have been a very careful calculation, carried out as a moral crusade against the wrongdoing of a man who would be stigmatized for the paranoia that amounted to saying that people with politics we don't like must be 'mentally ill'. That itself was not regularly said, but the implication was clear.

The liberal consensus also says this of Hitler. The causes of the war he started and the European Holocaust lie in the personal hatreds of someone who ought to have been caught in time, locked up, and sent to a soul doctor.

In other words, a totalitarian police state has the right solutions to the problem of totalitarian politics: it is caused by leaders who ought to have been better policed. They are surely madmen, so lock them up.

Where talk of what is to be pursued and avoided are a matter of heroism or villainy, so that we vote for the least of all sinners, there is no politics. Politics then is replaced by morals, which is to say by religion. That the priests of the new religion are doctors and social workers changes nothing in this except to make it far more pervasive and harder to criticize. After all, religions sustain themselves because enough people choose to attend the church and take its prescriptions for their conduct; they want happiness and freedom from excess guilt or, in our protestant and secular society, anxiety and depression, and the state's church promises everyone that, and if that also means that heretics are hunted and persecuted, well, maybe the only question, to the injustice justifiers who are found everywhere and often, whether or not they really were great sinners.

Different forms of governance identify differently those persons targeted for exclusion or correctional treatments, but they always elaborate a discourse which normally enables them to show that the identified referents of the discourse really are correctly identified in its terms. As long as the prevailing discourse has general credit with most people, the victims will have scant means of self-defense.

There was surely no alternative to Cuomo's either being driven out of office because of the sex scandal or resigning as he did. It only seems to me troubling that in this kind of situation, there are no winners. Good morals cannot be a (sufficient) reason for anyone to be elected to office (as arguably they were posited as being by Jimmy Carter's successful campaign 2 years later), but the lack thereof may be a sufficient reason for them not to hold office. Historians who examine the relationship between the lives of politicians and their careers considered politically will always be able to ponder the extent to which a serious moral fault affecting the persons in her or his acquaintance is significantly related to forms of bad governance. Good sense urges caution in drawing such conclusions. There is little evidence suggesting the likelihood that such caution will be much observed.

It is disastrous when we do this with artworks and scientific theories, though when their authors are teachers who must exhibit good conduct towards their students, worrying about their morals may be inevitable. It happens that government is not just an affair of some representatives deciding what is to be done, but of persons whom we must prefer virtuous to vicious. If we judged everything that way, politics itself would disappear and in its place we would just be voting for the recipients of awards for being a hero or a good or great person. American society has been moralistic since the Puritans; that there is no way to want to change this completely does not alter the fact that this is a problem.