-Caveat Lector- : Subject: Private Matters : Date: Tuesday, February 02, 1999 4:48 PM : : From the New Republic : : February 15, 1999 : : Private Matters : : By Peter Beinart : : In weeks or even days, Monica Lewinsky's yearlong stranglehold on American : politics will end. A vote will be taken, a deal will or will not be struck, : pundits will take one long, last stab at what it meant, and Washington will : breathe in the cleansing air of spring. : : For a while. But, sooner or later, probably in the run-up to the 2000 : campaign, the noxious odor of public sex will return. It will return : because American politics is gripped by something larger than the appetites : of Monica Lewinsky and her president. The half-century-long consensus that : politicians' private lives are irrelevant to their public duties began : cracking before Bill Clinton. And it will go on cracking until Washington : figures out how to assimilate two massive social movements that have : radically expanded and denigrated our understanding of politics: feminism : and the Christian right. : : The widespread assumption that the media, by itself, politicized private : life smacks of technological determinism and journalistic vanity (dressed : up as self-flagellation). Yes, the Internet has made it easier to : disseminate gossip, but the tabloids have been doing that for decades, and : only recently have The New York Times and The Washington Post felt the need : to compete. Besides, many of the groundbreaking investigations into : politicians' personal lives--Gary Hart, Clarence Thomas, Bob : Packwood--preceded mass use of the Web. The press is not simply a function : of its technology; it reflects American society and, in particular, : America's political class. And, over the past three decades, that class has : suffered a cultural invasion. : : As recently as the 1960s, women and evangelicals played virtually no role : in public policy. Feminism and the Christian right responded to this : powerlessness in similar ways--by defining politics as something that : occurred not in the halls of government but in the consciousness of : individuals and in their conduct at home. Public policy was not a separate : moral space with its own rules, but a reflection of the way people lived : their lives. : : In this way, the two movements politicized their followers and overcame : their marginality. Today, both are powerful players in government. But : their ideologies of government have not changed. They still assert that : public policy is a mere representation of the personal lives of those who : make it. And that idea, let loose in Washington, has left American politics : in shambles. : : "Women's liberation," wrote Robin Morgan in her celebrated anthology : Sisterhood is Powerful, "is the first radical movement to base its : politics--in fact, create its politics--out of concrete personal : experiences." In truth, feminists had little choice. In 1970, the year : Morgan wrote, one woman sat in the U.S. Senate, and ten sat in the House. : At the Democratic convention in Chicago two years earlier, women : constituted ten percent of the delegates. Not a single feminist : organization lobbied in Washington. : : A half-century after suffrage, women were still largely absent from : American politics; so feminism brought politics to them. The challenge, as : laid out by feminist theory, was to convince women that their lives were : already political. Thus politics began not with a change of behavior but a : change of consciousness. The consciousness-raising session, usually six to : twelve women meeting in someone's home, was feminism's particular : contribution to the organization of American protest. In the late '60s and : early '70s, hundreds if not thousands sprouted across the country. : : The sessions rarely dealt with government per se. Instead, they began with : questions like: "What does `femininity' mean to you in terms of your own : life? What did you do as a little girl that was different from what little : boys did?" The point, as Juliet Mitchell wrote in Woman's Estate, was to : show women that "what they thought was an individual dilemma [was] a social : predicament and hence a political problem." : : Feminists often described that moment of political recognition as a kind of : conversion. Once consciousness was raised, action could follow. But it was : political action in the arena where women lived their lives: foremost the : home. As Kate Millett wrote in Sexual Politics, "[W]omen tend to be ruled : through the family alone and have little or no formal relation to the : state." That distance from government had long reinforced women's sense of : powerlessness, but feminists answered it by insisting that the home was the : primal political sphere; the state was little more than the family writ : large. Millett called the family "[p]atriarchy's chief invention ... both a : mirror of and a connection with the larger society." In "The Politics of : Housework," Pat Mainardi explained that "participatory democracy begins at : home." : : Feminists worked tirelessly to politicize private life, with the : anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo even suggesting that the distinction : between the "public" and "domestic" spheres was the defining feature of : female subordination. Essays were published on the politics of the vaginal : orgasm. Activists defined lesbianism as a political decision. In September : 1969, a group called The Feminists distributed anti-marriage leaflets at : the New York marriage license bureau. At the Congress to Unite Women in : November of that year, ten women from Boston's Female Liberation took the : stage and ceremonially cut their hair. As Alice Echols writes in her : history of the movement, Daring to be Bad, "[T]he personal is political was : often interpreted in a way that made questions of lifestyle absolutely : central." : : It is not that feminists ignored government. The professional women who had : access to it--and created organizations like the National Organization for : Women (NOW), the Women's Equity Action League, and the National Women's : Political Caucus--worked for the Equal Rights Amendment, publicly funded : child care, and abortion rights. As the years wore on, more women entered : government. Between 1971 and 1991, their number in Congress doubled, and : feminists became a powerful interest group in the Democratic Party. But : feminists were always reminding those women who inhabited the world of : public policy that they were a privileged elite. They must not be co-opted : by male models. They must not betray the mass of women who still had the : home as their only sphere. Ideologically, feminism's work in government : remained an extension, a mirror, of its work in the family. : : As feminists had predicted, women's arrival in positions of authority : changed the culture of Washington. One clear effect was on the media's : treatment of male infidelity. Florence Graves, who broke the Bob Packwood : story for The Washington Post, had gone looking for a case study of the : sexual harassment she believed victimized numerous women on Capitol Hill. : Suzannah Lessard, who in 1979 became the first reporter to expose Ted : Kennedy's philandering, also had feminist motives. But even women : journalists without overt ideological agendas altered the definition of : newsworthiness by their mere presence. In Larry Sabato's book Feeding : Frenzy, Cokie Roberts remembers that "on the [campaign] bus, they pretended : there were no marriages. We women all started arriving on the bus and we : sort of pruded it up." : : The media's tolerance for adultery started to fade as early as the : 1970s--the decade that House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills was : discovered with stripper Fanne Foxe, and Louisiana Representative Joe : Waggoner was caught soliciting a prostitute. The stream of congressional : sex scandals continued through the 1980s. But most of the legislators were : little known, and most weathered the allegations. : : The dam broke in May 1987, when The Miami Herald discovered Gary Hart's : voyage on the yacht Monkey Business with Donna Rice. Hart's downfall : offered the first hint that the ideology of the "personal is political" : might cause feminism problems. Hart employed more women in prominent : positions in his campaign than any presidential candidate in history. But : feminists, conditioned to see politics first as a matter of consciousness, : insisted that the motivations that shaped his infidelity would eventually : shape his public policy. Columnist Ellen Goodman argued that, in Hart's : adultery, "you learn about his capacity for deception ... learn about : impulsiveness, self-control, even the ability to compartmentalize ethics." : Gloria Steinem said he had "a character problem." Suzannah Lessard declared : that "if a man abuses his wife by womanizing, there could be something : abusive in his nature." : : Feminists could afford to abandon Hart--he was just one candidate in a : Democratic pack full of sympathetic contenders. And, if the skewering of a : pro-feminist adulterer provoked in women's leaders any cognitive : dissonance, it was thoroughly erased four years later, in the ideologically : seductive confrontation between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. : : The 1991 Thomas-Hill spectacle represented the first front-page national : discussion of sexual harassment. The enormous attention devoted to the : topic, and the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee's insensitivity to it, : handed the feminist movement an extraordinary opportunity. During the : hearings, NOW received so many calls that it had to institute a backup : telephone switchboard. Months after Thomas had been confirmed, memberships : were still pouring in at five times their usual rate. The Thomas-Hill : confrontation became the defining feminist event of a generation. And, : because the sexual harasser was a conservative, a nominee of the Bush : administration, feminism's predisposition to see the public as a mirror of : the private was dramatically reinforced. Even before the hearings ended, : feminists were working to make them an emblem for their policy agenda. : National Women's Political Caucus President Harriet Woods told the : Associated Press, "There is tremendous potential for a candidate to use : this as the hot button to symbolize all the other double-standard positions : with women." The Nation editorialized that sexual harassment was only one : facet of "Thomas's contempt for women, from his malicious misrepresentation : of his sister's brief resort to welfare to his participation in a 1980 : Reagan transition team report calling for the gutting of sexual harassment : regulations. Hill's charge is simply another reminder of the inextricable : relationship of personal and public life." : : Perhaps without the Thomas affair, more feminists would have begun to : suspect that the personal-political connection was a time bomb. But, at : that moment, it was what gave the movement life--the 1992 elections nearly : doubled the number of women in Congress. Even the discovery late that year : that Packwood, a champion of abortion rights and the ERA, was a serial : harasser, did not give feminists pause. "It is impossible for me to : reconcile this personal behavior toward women with this man who has been a : leader for women's rights," said Kate Michelman of the National Abortion : Rights Action League, never doubting that they should be reconcilable. : : Feminism, in short, was not well prepared for Bill Clinton. Had its leaders : turned on the president after the revelations about Monica Lewinsky and : Kathleen Willey, they might have forced him out. But Clinton was not Hart : or Packwood--throwing him overboard, in the face of a radicalized post-1994 : congressional GOP, could have had disastrous consequences for the feminist : agenda. The feminist leadership's decision to declare Clinton's actions : apolitical--to try to call a halt to the cycle they helped begin--has : damaged the movement in just the way feminist theory predicted it would. : The old feminist nightmare--yuppie women selling out their sisters trapped : in the home so they could keep government power--has come to pass. Local : NOW chapters have charged the national leadership with betraying its : principles and have split off. Maureen Dowd, in a mock letter to Clarence : Thomas, wrote: "You were right about the feminists. They never cared about : gender politics. They just cared about politics. It's not sexual harassment : .... if the women are N.O.C.D. (not our class, darling)." But the : humiliation of 1998, a year in which countless commentators wrote : feminism's obituary, actually represents a kind of rebirth. For the first : time, prominent feminists are addressing the contradiction at their : movement's core. They have begun to speak of family privacy and the : difference between harassment and consensual sex. To be sure, they are : doing so out of partisan necessity. Few have publicly repudiated the : "personal is political" doctrine, and there will always be the temptation : to reclaim it in the future if it once again proves useful. But thoughtful : feminists have at least started down the difficult road toward a movement : that does not degrade politics by turning it into a synonym for life. The : same cannot yet be said for feminism's de facto partner in the : politicization of private life: the Christian right. To understand the : Christian right's insistence that the personal is political, you need to go : back a century, to the advent of the social gospel. Identified chiefly with : the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, the social gospel formed : Christianity's response to the tumult and suffering of turnof-the-century : America. Rauschenbusch argued that Christians must not ignore the hideous : consequences of mass immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. It : was not enough for the faithful to content themselves with saving souls for : the next life; they had to address suffering in the here and now. In so : doing, the social gospel turned American Protestantism's emphasis away from : faith alone and toward human action--away from the individual sins of the : heart and toward the social sins of the world. : : The social gospel deeply affected America's major denominations. But, to a : core of conservative evangelicals, it seemed to denigrate individual : salvation and make human institutions a substitute for the Kingdom of God. : In 1910, in a series of pamphlets called "The Fundamentals," the : traditionalists laid out their objections. By the 1920s, they had broken : away from mainline Protestantism and formed independent churches--many of : them called "fundamentalist." : : Anchored by the fundamentalists, American evangelicals developed a : theological response based upon the doctrine of pre-millennialism. Human : beings, they argued, could not bring Christ's return by perfecting the : world around them. Instead, the Second Coming would follow a period of : horrific earthly decline and conflict. Only the truly saved would be called : from earth to meet Christ, thus being spared the terrible final days. : : Pre-millennialism's lessons were diametrically opposed to the social : gospel's. If human institutions were doomed, social change was useless. : What mattered instead was saving as many souls as possible. : Pre-millennialism encouraged evangelicals to avoid the world of politics; : it was irredeemable and could compromise the purity of their souls. So, : from the 1920s to the 1970s, evangelicals, like women, remained largely : absent from the institutions of government. Surveys in the 1950s and 1960s : showed evangelicals to have the lowest rate of political participation of : any white religious group. : : That started to change in the 1970s. The liberalization of the : culture--partly the product, ironically, of feminism--worried evangelical : leaders. Furthermore, their followers were migrating from rural areas to : the suburbs, where the new liberalism threatened the raising of their : children. By the late '70s, ministers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, : who had long condemned political activism, began to reconsider. : : But justifying political action in the context of pre-millennialism was : perilous. What separated politicized evangelicals from advocates of the : social gospel? When he formed the Moral Majority in 1978, Falwell was : attacked by apolitical evangelicals like the Reverend Bob Jones, who called : him "the most dangerous man in America so far as biblical Christianity is : concerned." : : Falwell and his supporters were constrained by the pre-millennial notion : that Christianity starts not with action, but with belief. So the emerging : Christian right of the late '70s, like the feminist movement a decade : before, asserted that politics is, first of all, a question of : consciousness. In the words of Christian conservative writer Rus Walton: : "First, the heart, the mind, and the individual deportment must be restored : and reformed. Then--and only then--the home, the church, the school, the : community, and the nation." As Billy Graham sermonized: "Marx said, `All : the problems come from without. You remove the social problems, the : economic problems from society and you'll solve the problems of society.' : Jesus said, `No, you won't--the problem comes from within.'" : : Since Christian right politics flowed from the inside out, it made sense : that, after personal conversion, political action would begin in the : nearest possible arena: the home. For evangelicals, who had little : influence in government, this was pragmatic. It also fit with : premillennialism's traditional emphasis on the family as the primary unit : of Christian separatism, created by God even before He created the Church. : : The Christian right turned the family from the ideal refuge from the state : into an almost Confucian model for it. In the 1970s, as Christian : conservatives were rethinking their rejection of politics, they held : "Congresses on the Family" where national delegates drew up resolutions on : how to structure the home. Christian right leaders are fond of saying that, : if America's families are strong, they can withstand and revive a morally : corrupt government, but that, if its families are weak, the government is : done for. Gary Bauer's Family Research Council may be the most powerful : Christian right organization in Washington. But, until recently, it was a : mere subsidiary of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, which spends most of : its time dispensing advice on child-rearing. : : In an even shorter span than feminism, the Christian right has moved beyond : the family and infiltrated deep into the institutions of American : government. Today it pursues a policy agenda that is ill-served by the : notion that private misdeeds necessarily warrant public attention. This may : now be true even in the case of Bill Clinton--as Pat Robertson acknowledged : last week when he called the impeachment trial a public relations disaster. : But the overwhelming Christian conservative rebuke of Robertson for his : remarks, and his swift retreat, showed how enmeshed in that notion the : movement has become. Like feminism, the Christian right is the product of : an ideology that views government as morally derivative. And together, the : two antagonists have spent the past decade in an unacknowledged alliance to : legitimize the exposure of politicians' private lives. : : When many liberals and secular conservatives were wringing their hands over : the media's treatment of Gary Hart, Christian conservatives joined : feminists in declaring him unfit for public office. A January 1988 : fund-raising letter from Jerry Nims, Falwell's successor as president of : the Moral Majority, declared, "[T]here's absolutely no way that we can : accept him as having the moral qualifications to lead this nation." Two : years later, Christian right ally Paul Weyrich led the attack on John : Tower's nomination to be secretary of defense. While former Wall Street : Journal reporter Ellen Hume was demanding to know "how could a womanizer be : a real role model for women in the military," Pat Robertson was condemning : Tower's "overall moral tone"--implicitly linking allegations of adultery : and drunkenness to the Texan's support for abortion rights. In 1993, the : movements teamed up again, with the Christian Coalition joining NOW in its : call for public hearings on Bob Packwood. : : Only in the past year have the two movements parted company. For, while : Bill Clinton has forced an agonized feminist reappraisal, his effect on the : Christian right has been exactly the reverse. He is their Clarence Thomas, : and, for them, the theme connecting his heart, his private life, and his : public policies is relativism. As Gary Bauer wrote last fall, in a classic : expression of the Christian right view that politics starts with : consciousness, "it is corruption inside a person that fuels corruption on : the outside." : : To the Christian right, the Lewinsky scandal is not just about perjury and : obstruction of justice. In an October article titled "Yes, the Sex : Matters," Steven Schwalm of the Family Research Council argued: "In the : case of President Clinton, social policy closely mirrors now-public : `private sexual' behavior. Both are rooted in the ethos of the sexual : revolution, where sex is free of obligations or restraints, heedless of : consequences, and never a fit matter for moral judgement." In a mirror of : the 1991 Nation editorial that linked Thomas's antifeminism to his sexual : harassment, the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly warned last April to "beware : of men who talk about `women's rights' and boast that they are feminists. : They are usually men who exploit women on a personal level." Marvin Olasky, : a Christian right academic and editor, has just published a history of the : presidency purporting to show that "leaders who break a large vow to one : person find it easy to break relatively small vows to millions." : : Fortified by Bill Clinton, Christian conservatives seem determined to : politicize personal life well into the next century. Gary Bauer last fall : defended the public's right to know about Congressman Dan Burton's : illegitimate child. Jerry Falwell backed Bob Livingston's resignation as : House speaker, as did the Christian Coalition's Randy Tate. Lou Sheldon of : the Traditional Values Coalition has even announced that he will ask all : Republican presidential candidates whether they have committed adultery. : : Feminism and the Christian right have, in many ways, been good for American : democracy. They have empowered formerly marginal groups and can take much : of the credit for what little grassroots activism American politics has : witnessed over the past couple of decades. At another time, their peculiar : notion of politics might not have caused much of a problem. But they walked : into a vacuum. The Depression, World War II, and the cold war had defined : what mattered in American politics narrowly--as security and economic : policy. (It is probably no coincidence that the press stopped covering : presidential sex during FDR's administration and began reporting on it : again in the late '80s.) The cold war's end, combined with the demise of : the wasp establishment that had enforced its preeminence in public policy, : led to a collapse of hierarchies in American politics. And that collapse : has allowed feminism and the Christian right to redefine it as everything : and nothing. : : One way out is the return of crisis. A grave threat to the nation's safety : or prosperity might well lead America's political class--despite its : diminished social cohesion--to once again deem topics like adultery : dangerously distracting. Bill Clinton, for one, would probably have : welcomed such a crisis since it would have disciplined either him or his : tormentors. He has been known to remark that he did not have the chance to : become a great president because he did not serve in dangerous times. But : crisis is not the best way out. For one thing, a consensus on priorities : might not return, or might not return in time; America's leaders might just : flail. Second, American government has important business even when the : country is not in danger, business that scandal-mania continues to force : off the public agenda. : : Much better if the two movements could reconceive themselves. There are : strains in both, present from their early days, that question the unbridled : equation of the personal and the political. Some evangelicals have embraced : post-millennial or amillennial theology, which lets them participate in : government without expecting that it be a reflection of the soul. Betty : Friedan has written that "for women to live their lives as a political : scenario" both "violates basic human needs for intimacy, sex, [and] : generation" and "vitiates will and energy for real political changes." What : Friedan recognizes is that, while there is, in every individual, some link : between private behavior and political affiliation, the connections are so : complex and mysterious as to be accessible only to the omniscient. To : believe that activists and the media can explain them by hiding under a bed : is morally naive. And the human and governmental costs of that naivete are : mounting almost daily. : : As feminists have learned over the past year, reversing course is not easy. : A real commitment to depersonalize politics probably would cut off some : women, and for that matter some evangelicals, from the political process. : It would likely split both the Christian right and feminism--with some : evangelicals retreating into separatism and some women retreating into : domesticity. But the movements that remained could pursue their ideals in a : political system free from moral utopianism's crushing burden. They could : take pride in having helped answer, for our time, one of the vexing : questions of American democracy: how to make government work in a nation : not of saints, but of men and women. : : (Copyright 1999, The New Republic) : : ~~~~~~~~~~~~ : A<>E<>R : : The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking : new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust : + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + : Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed : + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + : In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material : is distributed without charge or profit to those who have : expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information : for non-profit research and educational purposes only. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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