Daddy Dearest: When patriarchy goes bad - President Clinton and the Senate impeachment trial

National Review, Feb 22, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

Where do we stand as the Clinton trial winds down? Where we often do-in trouble, but with reason for hope.

The best guide to our troubles is an author who fits nicely into all the recent rummaging in theory and precedent-Robert Filmer (d. 1654). Filmer was a country gentleman from Kent who enjoyed scribbling essays on a variety of topics. The reputation of his most interesting essay, Patriarcha, was entirely posthumous. English Tories published it for the first time in the 1680s on the eve of the Glorious Revolution (John Locke attacked it); American Tories revived its arguments again in 1775, on the eve of the American Revolution; and apologists for slavery discovered it a third time during the Civil War. The White House legal team made no use of it, but it describes the president's situation, and ours.

Filmer thought the pattern for all human society was patriarchal. Men needed to be ruled, or they would tear one another like beasts, and the only legitimate rulers were father-kings, descended from Adam. In any given "multitude" of men, the true patriarch might be unknown, his place usurped. But he was there, and God would lift him up, in His own good time.

As the historian Forrest McDonald pointed out, Filmer never persuaded anyone by eloquence or logic, since he possessed neither. (Why should Adam be the fount of authority, considering how he bungled the job in Eden?) But Filmer lasted because he articulated widely held assumptions- and, I would add, reflected certain psychological realities.

Men crave direction, and a small number have the ability to supply it (a far smaller number have the ability to do so justly). When they appear, in the form of heroes, we give them a more than rational allegiance. Filmer muddies the question with fundamentalist genealogy, but the need to be ruled and the yearning to seek rule in father figures will persist as long as men are not angels, and as long as they have childhoods.

Such ways of thinking are anathema to our laws, and rightly so, for even the greatest heroes are men, subject to human limitations, so the best they can do is limited. Heroic leadership cannot be routinized, or prescribed. But our political practice must always keep an eye on the patriarchal situation-aware of the needs that underlie it, and willing to let them be gratified. If we ignore patriarchal impulses, they don't go away. They come back, in degenerate forms. The more we deny them, the more unpleasant the recurrence. This is what Bill Clinton and his popularity represent.

The feminist abuser; the pro-V-chip thong-snapper; the guardian of children and pawer of interns; the war protester who bombs aspirin factories; the wonk meritocrat surrounded by thugs, cronies, and consiglieri-everything Bill Clinton professes to be, he is not. And everything his supporters fear in the enemies they look to him to keep at bay, they hail when it happens on his watch. Clinton is known for appropriating Republican policies (welfare reform, free trade). But this is traditional reverse-field politics, as old as Disraeli, or Jefferson ("we are all federalists"). More interestingly, Clinton incarnates liberals' worst fantasies about masculine and traditional authority, but because he does it in the style of an undisciplined boy, they are content to behave like children. Although the legal basis of his impeachment and trial was not "just sex," his popularity most definitely is about the sexual symbolism of patriarchal politics. For over a year we have been arguing about the king's scepter.

This is bad, and it's not likely to get better anytime soon. Maturity is not going to be fostered by popular culture, with its Spielbergs and Lucases, its history for the ignorant and fairy tales for morons. The antecedents of Clintonism are not the creation of liberals only. If only liberals were responsible for Clinton, he would be as popular as Michael Dukakis. Clinton's America is not, as Rep. Barr said, some other country. It's his, and ours. Specifically, what conservatives have contributed to our situation is that part of Reaganism that ran from Mike Deaver, Reagan's producer, on out to Jerry Zipkin, Mrs. Reagan's socialite walker-the feel-good, be-happy self-esteem splurge of the Eighties. (Reagan's sunny personality fit with the nonsense, but he himself had a stubborn, don't-care streak he could show to welfare queens or Communists). The ideologues of ga-ga Reaganism were the snake- handling supply-siders, declaring (in Jude Wanniski's words) that the electorate is always right. Bill Clinton and Dick Morris learned the lesson well; that is why they take so many polls.

What is the half of the glass that is full? That in 1998 and 1999, the case against Clinton got as far as it got. In the face of peace and prosperity, Clinton's political skills, Filmer's fourth revival, polls pointing to clemency and indifference, and conventional wisdom pointing insistently to the polls, there was still enough residual integrity in institutions and in the political classes to bring an obvious perjurer and sicko to a Senate trial.