Roger’s Rules

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March 15th, 2008 8:23 am

Spitzer and the army of born-again Leninists

Glenn Reynolds points to a brief but important comment by Arnold Kling about the phenomenon of Eliot Spitzer. “The term ‘Spitzer’ belongs in the dictionary,” Mr. Kling observes, “and its definition should be ‘any politician.’ We ought to think of all politicians as Spitzers. No, they don’t all have lurid involvements with prostitutes. But they all have an inflated view of their superiority over the rest of us.”

Mr. Kling rightly identifies all the major candidates for the Presidency of the United States as real or aspiring Spitzers, and he usefully points out that the press has performed yeoman’s service in the role of Spitzer’s wife: “someone who tolerates and enables abuse by a Spitzer.”

Mr. Kling makes the further point that while the talk shows are entertaining us with ribald mockery of Eliot Spitzer’s sexual proclivities, we should really be mocking –and constraining–the Spitzers of the world for their abuse of political power and statist intrusion into our daily lives. “Whether it is ‘cleaning up Wall Street’ or ‘giving everyone health care,’” Mr. Kling observes, “the Spitzers are making extravagant promises that only result in expanded government power.”

Mr. Kling has some sound practical advice:

Whenever the subject of politics comes up in conversation, try to bring up the name Spitzer. Yes, he’s a real Spitzer all right.

The Spitzers in the legislature say they need to spend more of our money this year? What happened, did the Empereror’s Club raise their rates again?

That Spitzer wants to tell me what light bulb I have to buy? You tell Spitzer what socket he can stick it in.

Quite right. In fact, Mr. Kling’s amusing admonitions have pertinence far beyond the realm of electoral politics. The virus of Spitzerism has infected not only politicians on the national stage. It has also infected the broader fraternity of policy actors in our society: the petty bureaucrats who determine whether you get a fishing license or a permit to renovate your garage; the school administrator who makes selling a packet of candy a crime; the taxpayer-funded clerks whom you pay to spend their days thinking up new ways to spend your money (they don’t think of it as yours, but it really is) and new ways to make buying or driving a car, sailing a boat, smoking a cigar, ordering a glass of wine, enjoying a dinner of foie gras, writing an article, hiring someone to work for you, or making an investment more onerous if not, indeed, illegal.

At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that, at bottom, freedom belongs only to the state, that the individual should not be treated as a free actor but rather, as Lenin put it, “‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” Of course, few canny bureaucrats quote Lenin today. The stock of that totalitarian genius is too deeply depressed by his association with Communist tyranny. But really, the Spitzers of the world are, as someone said about Philip Rahv, born-again Leninists. “What socialism implies above all,” said Lenin, “is keeping account of everything.” Could Eliot Spitzer or Patrick Fitzgerald or Michael Bloomberg or Hillary Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama have put it better? Keeping track of your health care, disposing of your money, regulating your food and drink and ration of tobacco: there they all are, ready, able, and willing to run your life for you. Just sign here to dispose of the power to manage your own life responsibly, to make decisions as an independent citizen who is responsible for your own welfare, and those displaced nannies will take care of . . . everything.

The spectacle of Eliot Spitzer’s implosion has provided a good deal of tawdry tabloid entertainment. But really, what matters about Spitzer is not his taste in whores or even his byzantine arrangements for paying them. What matters are–we can now gratefully employ the preterit and say “were”–his actions as a public figure. He recklessly employed the power of the state partly to aggrandize himself, but more dangerously to insinuate state power into areas where it has no business intruding. Probably, few politicians are paid up members of The Emperors’ Club. But how many patronize that other, more amorphous club of emperors, the one staffed by democratic despots whose overwhelming imperative is to relieve individuals of responsibility for themselves, transforming them from free citizens into clients of an increasingly bureaucratized, and increasingly insatiable, state apparatus.

As Andrew McCarthy has noted, the important issue regarding Eliot Spitzer’s abuse of prosecutorial power was not the extent but the irresponsible deployment of that power. “The power wielded by prosecutors is immense,” McCarthy acknowledged, but he went on to observe that

It has to be that way because it is the public’s power, a key ingredient to the order liberty requires if it is to thrive. Still, the prosecutor must bear in mind that the power is a trust, not a personal arsenal. Those who miss that distinction–or, worse, ride roughshod over it–are more apt to leave lives and reputations in ruin than to protect the public welfare.

What we have seen in recent years is a hideous marriage of political correctness and bureaucratic triumphalism. The offspring are the multitude of soft tyrannies we see all about us today–that and an enervation of spirit that renders the public ever less able to respond to the casual indignities that have become such a prominent part of daily life. “Excuse me, Mrs. Smith, please take off your shoes and place them by themselves in a container on the conveyor belt. We don’t go in for racial profiling, so would you mind stepping over here so this new state employee can pat you down to be sure you aren’t carrying any Semtex today. And no, you may not bring that bottle of water or shampoo or those knitting needles aboard.” Of course, Mrs. Smith meekly obeys every order, submits without cavil to every indignity. Obedience to Authority in action? Partly. But there is something else abroad today, something more threatening to our way of life if less psychologically piquant. The immolation of Eliot Spitzer has offered plenty of lascivious distraction. Fine. But it’s time to look beyond his unseemly animal needs to the deeper obscenity of his unfettered moralism. Time magazine once featured Spitzer as “Crusader of the Year.” Quoth James Carville in 2002: “You in New York are so blessed to have an attorney general who just showed what it was like to be a Democrat.” I don’t often agree with James Carville, but this time he hit the nail on the head. I only wish that the disease were confined to Democrats. It isn’t.

A coda on Skittles: Doubtless a reader will comment, “But that New Haven school that suspended an 8th-grader, barred him from attending an honors dinner, and stripped him of his title as class vice-president because he was caught with a packet of Skittles has rescinded the punishments. As an AP wire story puts it, “Conn. School Backs Off Candy Punishment.” While that is good news for the poor teenager, it is not exactly heartening. The issue was not that the school administrators, faced with a firestorm of public opprobrium for their actions, should back down, but that they should have felt justified in acting as they did in the first place. Indeed, their “clemency” has the rotten smell that attends every act of authoritarian largess.

[Update: A reader writes to remind me that "Skittles was the nickname of Victorian England's best rewarded courtesan." Obviously, there are wheels within wheels . . .]

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20 Comments

1. William:

The evidence of the total failure of government schools is on display daily. Instead of holding men and women’s feet to the fire that are running for office; the tendency is to surrender our liberties to them. It should once again be taught that they are auditioning to be our servants.
They are to do our will. They are not to be worshipped. It is time for the schools we pay for to teach the truths of freedom.
It is time to celebrate liberty. It is time to remember men and women who stood on a foundation of sound ideas and who did not pander and deceive. It is time to celebrate men and women who will give up everything for freedom. It is time NOT to accept the premise that a tragedy has occurred when a celebrated unprincipled tyrant falls.
But it is nice that we have the name Spitzer to use instead of tyrant all the time. Great article!!!

Mar 15, 2008 - 9:51 am 2. Denis Eugene Sullivan:

Greetings:

A while ago, I regretfully came to the conclusion that moral superiority is the cocaine of the 21st Century.

Mar 15, 2008 - 10:17 am 3. OmegaPaladin:

So Mrs. Smith should have thrown a fit or refused to use the plane? How would that have helped things? Her compliance was based on American civility, not on subservience.

How exactly do you propose to run things without petty bureaucrats? The simple fact is that bureaucracy is only way to organize a large organization. Sure, we all know of horror stories of bureaucracy. (My favorite was a person who approved fliers who was only there for a few hours on one day a week. No one else would do the job) They come from the inherent nature of bureaucracy – mechanization of people. The bureaucrats are just trying to do their assigned task, not trying to control your life.

The school cases are the result of people trying to absolve themselves of the responsibility of judgement. They want less control, not more – they want to remove the human element entirely. The skittles case is a classic of this kind of mechanical thinking. They treat all banned property as the same, including both candy and weapons

Mar 15, 2008 - 12:38 pm 4. William:

I propose to run my own life. Not have petty bureaucrats interfere whether they know what they are doing or not.

Mar 15, 2008 - 12:52 pm 5. anonymous:

Those who think they are entitled to “professional courtesy” when breaking the law, while enforcing it upon the rest of us.

Mar 15, 2008 - 3:04 pm 6. Angus Dei:

I don’t believe I require the term “Spitzer” to be added to my vocabulary: I’ve referred to lawyer-politicians and lawyer-judges as “Shysters” since the ’70’s, and that seems to work just fine for me. Additionally, the term makes all of the right people angry when I use it. I like that.

How come nobody ever talks about the possibility of making anyone with a law degree ineligible to run for office in a legislative body, or to sit on any bench as a judge? I’m betting that would solve 75% of the problems in the US right there.

If we limited lawyers to the adversarial part of the legal process, where their necessary evil belongs, we might have a nice country again.

How is it not a conflict of interest for lawyers to make law and judge law, and how is the legal system not a racket with lawyers making, judging, prosecuting, and defending from the law?

The only difference between lawyers and gangsters is that lawyers operate with the approval of the government, because they ARE the government.

Mar 15, 2008 - 3:11 pm 7. Doc99:

Brilliant! You can pry my Skittles from my cold dead hands.

Mar 15, 2008 - 3:17 pm 8. Mike Manges:

William;
Come to Ohio and try to light a cigar in a private club, a gun club at that.

Mar 15, 2008 - 3:27 pm 9. Mlivius:

I don’t recall who said it, but the most concise comment I’ve ever read on the state of public education is…

“We have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school, to teaching remedial English in college.”

Mar 15, 2008 - 3:57 pm 10. _Jon:

Good post. I agree on many points.
I’d like to quote it and link to it, but you use a lot of – for lack of better term – big words. The people I think would gain from your post wouldn’t understand some of the critical terms, so they would just tune out. I’m sure you don’t want to write to the lowest education, but I think there is a benefit to not writing at the limit of your ability for something you would like to get a lot of exposure on.

Thanks

Mar 15, 2008 - 3:57 pm 11. srp:

It’s hard to beat Tocqueville on how Democratic Despotism:

” resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves… . It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? … [This power] extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; … it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd. “

Mar 15, 2008 - 4:13 pm 12. wanderer:

Denus Eugenes Sullivan

Moral relativism is the cocaine the left and liberals who have been debilitated by it to the point where they have have become a dangerous mob of dirty, smelly, delusional needle scarred addicts with all their external veins collapsed that are threatening the freedoms of all.

Mar 15, 2008 - 4:21 pm 13. Discovery Blog:

How Many “Spitzers” are there in Public Life?

Everyone says that (former) Governor Eliot Spitzer’s flaw was his hypocrisy. I disagree. His most salient flaw was his self-righteous, Javert-like prosecutorial zeal, the ferocious delight he took in putting others in the wrong. And, beyond Victor Hugo…

Mar 15, 2008 - 5:45 pm 14. BlogDog:

First they came for the Skittles and I didn’t care. Then they came for the KitKats and I still didn’t care. etc etc etc ad nauseam.

Mar 15, 2008 - 6:17 pm 15. Kev:

“How exactly do you propose to run things without petty bureaucrats?”

Hiring people who aren’t petty would be a good start…

But seriously, the answer is simple: Term limits. Nobody is allowed to be a bureaucrat (or work for the government at all, save for the military and perhaps the post office) for more than ten years. After that, they have to go out into the real world and do a job that actually produces something.

This dovetails nicely with my solution for the public schools, which are spending way too much money on non-teaching positions: Administrators must also remain teachers. This would keep them grounded in the real world and away from the proverbial ivory tower, with less time to figure out what to ban besides Skittles. (And besides, what can someone who hasn’t taught for thirty years possibly do to help teachers? That’s why administrators should be there in the first place–not to come up with their own agendas, which often have little to do with education.)

“The bureaucrats are just trying to do their assigned task, not trying to control your life.”

Well, maybe it starts out that way, but we’ve all seen, more often than not, how it ends up.

Mar 15, 2008 - 11:47 pm 16. PersonFromPorlock:

I’ve been saying for decades that Liberalism is Puritanism; different details, but the basic idea that government’s job is to herd the sinners to virtue at bayonet’s point still holds.

Mar 16, 2008 - 7:41 am 17. William:

thanks for the invitation mike. If that will further the cause of independence i will come.

Mar 16, 2008 - 8:44 am 18. tonto:

“Term limits. Nobody is allowed to be a bureaucrat (or work for the government at all, save for the military and perhaps the post office) for more than ten years. After that, they have to go out into the real world and do a job that actually produces something.”

I agree with term limits, but I would prefer that they get their real world experience before they are put into office. I slao believe that is how our founding fathers prefered it.

Mar 16, 2008 - 10:04 am 19. Cristina:

Just finished watching the John McLaughlin Show in D.C. the first segment of which was the Spitzer affair. Couldn’t help my glee at seeing the old pompous bulldog’s (no offense to b-dogs!)libidinous/libidinal side come out while discussing whores and legalizing prostitution with 2 women sitting on the panel. Never seen him more engaged.

Mar 16, 2008 - 10:20 am 20. Michael Lonie:

How can we solve the problem of bureaucrats meddling in our lives? Demand that the government, especially the Federal Government, do much less. If the government wasn’t meddling in places it has no business meddling, like housing, it would not need those petty bureaucrats to do the work of meddling. This reduction of governmental functions would also considerably reduce the amount of corruption in our government.

Mar 16, 2008 - 6:49 pm