ANDREW SULLIVAN, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 11, 1998:
I can’t remember now at which point during the Starr report I stopped reading. Maybe it was the sudden prim reminder that “the President’s wife” was out of town during one of President Clinton’s hallway trysts. Or the superfluously wounding inference that the President was considering leaving his wife after his second term. Or the inclusion of the date for one of the President’s liaisons: Easter Sunday. Or any one of the points when it simply became obvious that the narrative, compelling and lucid as it was, seemed to be building a case not so much for the President’s public, legal impropriety but for a private, moral iniquity. And I stopped reading not because I sympathize with President Clinton’s repeated public lies, or his abuse of power and of his office. [...]Nor because I am instinctively liberal. I stopped reading at some point because it became depressingly clear that the Starr Report and its aftermath represents not simply a case study in what has gone wrong with an American presidency, but also a case study in what has gone wrong with American conservatism.
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This scolding, moralizing conservatism[...].
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It would be hard to put better what was so surprising, and so dismaying, about the Starr report and the Republican Congress’s subsequent behavior. The report was driven, as the Republican leadership seems to be, not merely to prove perjury but to expose immorality. In this universe, privacy is immaterial, hence the gratuitous release of private telephone conversations, private correspondence and even details of the most private of human feelings. For these conservatives, there is only a right, as Starr revealingly wrote, to a “private FAMILY life” (emphasis added). A private, nonfamily life is fair game for prosecution and exposure.
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[I]t’s worth remembering that Reagan’s domestic moralism was also of a very different variety than that of today’s conservatives. Rather than sternly criticizing liberal mores, Reagan tended to ignore them, preferring to praise conservative ones, finding in small human examples object lessons of traditional virtue. It was occasionally a goof moralism, but also a sunny one. Rather than pinpoint moral demons, Reagan would point out moral heroes in the gallery of the Congress during his State of the Union addresses. Whereas conservatives in the 1990’s obsessed about Clinton’s draft-dodging, Reagan went to Normandy to eulogize a different kind of ethic. It is a telling contrast.
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Reagan’s view of America was never bleak, and he was careful to stay away from the front lines of the cultural wars. Although he was nominally anti-abortion, for example, he never attended an anti-abortion rally. Moralism, for him, was always a vague but essentially positive construct. As a divorced man who rarely went to church, this was a fittingly modest—and conservative—approach to the world. And it was far more in touch with the center of American culture.
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The pages of The Standard and First Things are crammed with horror at the decline of American politics and culture into nihilism, self-indulgence and rampant liberal individualism. In this picture of moral chaos, there is little space for nuance. So Bill Clinton, arguably the most conservative Democratic president since Truman, becomes, for these conservatives, the apex of 1960’s liberalism. The fact that he balanced the budget, signed welfare-reform legislation, has shredded many civil liberties in the war against terrorism, is in favor of the death penalty and signed the Defense of Marriage Act is immaterial to his conservative enemies. For the model of cultural collapse to work, Clinton must represent its nadir.
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[Mark Helprin’s writings in Commentary.] By any measure, this is an extraordinary outpouring of anxiety. It is also, in almost all of its particulars, false. To take a few examples: Helprin claims that murder is neither a surprise nor necessarily punishable at the end of the century. Yet in the 1990’s, murder rates have been dropping precipitously, and the prison population and execution rate are at record highs. Helprin claims drugs are rife. Yet drug use is far below the levels of two decades ago. He says that responsibility has become entitlement. Yet a Democratic president recently ended the Federal welfare entitlement and welfare rolls have been free-falling nationwide. He argues that marriage has become divorce. Yet again, divorce rates have been steadily dropping for a decade. He says that birth has become abortion. And yet abortion rates are now at their lowest since 1975. One begins to wonder what country Helprin is living in.
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[A]n era of peace and prosperity and conservative cultural values has been transformed in their eyes into a liberal hell. These conservatives have become like Japanese soldiers on a distant island who don’t realize the war is over. And even when they’re told, they disbelieve it, because they need the war, even if the war itself has no reality except in the prose of Mark Helprin.
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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.
WHITMAN KNAPP, LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 9, 1998:
[Mr. Knapp is a senior United States District Court judge in New York. The letter concern’s Starr’s coercing “voluntary” patient waivers from witnesses.]
What would have happened if Monica S. Lewinsky’s therapists had refused to testify on the grounds that their patient’s “waiver” had not been voluntary but coerced, each of them telling Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel, “If you hold me in contempt, we can have a Federal judge decide whether a physician must treat as voluntary a waiver that had been obtained by threatening to send the patient and her mother to jail”? Would Mr. Starr then have proceeded with the matter?
MS. JULIA F. GRANT, LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 12, 1998:
The worst injury Clinton has inflicted on the nation is that he has given Starr credibility. Clinton has made it impossible for us to criticize Starr’s methods and acts without seeming to defend Clinton’s. And Starr is far more dangerous. If honesty is the test, Starr fails: this was and is a dishonest investigation. He gleefully created crimes by asking questions that should never have been asked, knowing that no person could answer them honestly without hurting others and so would be tempted to lie. Clinton’s lie are low crimes and misdemeanors. His punishment should be, at most, censure, but it seems superfluous. Does anyone doubt that trashing your legacy and your family and being the targets of endless jokes are punishment that perfectly fits the crime? Starr’s conduct, on the other hand, is the Big Lie. And that scares me.