In Praise of Mass Hypocrisy

A CENTURY AGO, WHEN AMERICANS HAD MORE AUSTERE sexual habits, they elected a President who was widely known to have had an illegitimate child. As a candidate, Grover Cleveland was mocked with the chant “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House. Ha, ha, ha.” Yet Cleveland won the White House, occasioning his supporters’ memorable retort:

Hurrah for Maria

Hurrah for the kid

We voted for Grover

And we’re damn glad we did.

A hundred years later, Americans are more sexually permissive, but not, it seems, when it comes to their presidential candidates. The father of an illegitimate child could not possibly win the White House. In fact, Bill Clinton came perilously near to being politically destroyed by an allegation of adultery. Clinton escaped principally because Gennifer Flowers made a bad witness. It was possible to believe she was lying. Gary Hart, on the other hand, caught in sexual dalliance the evidence for which was prima facie, could not survive.

Why? Why should we care? This is a country in which a sixth of all married adults admit to having had affairs, in which seduction trails only murder as the most popular form of TV entertainment, in which condoms are handed out in the high schools. Yet, as voters, we profess shock that our candidates should behave as we do.

As campaign coverage becomes saturated with questions of personal morality (a.k.a. “character”), candidates respond with by now ritualized pledges of undying fealty to family and, above all, to “family values.” What is curious about these paeans to family, however, is that they come at a time when Americans seem intent as never before on taking the family apart. The divorce rate is more than twice what it was 30 years ago. More than half of , American children will live in a single-parent home sometime before age 18. A quarter of all births in the U.S. occur out of wedlock, five times the rate of 30 years ago.

The paradox is striking: voters are demanding in their leaders the personal virtues that they decreasingly demand of themselves. The trend is not confined to matters of sex and family. There’s money too. The public has worked itself into a righteous frenzy over Congressmen overdrawing checks at the (private — no taxpayer money involved) House bank. This, while the American public, without any discernible protest, annually overdraws its national account by $400 billion a year, which amounts to the average family of four borrowing over $6,000 from its children to pay for its current indulgences. There is a word for the profession of virtue accompanied by practice of vice: hypocrisy. The usual complaint in democracies is that the politicians are hypocrites. The charge is old, common and true. But the equally valid charge, less often made so as not to offend, is that the people are hypocrites too.

And thank God for it.

Let me explain. In the best of all possible worlds, we would all both profess virtue and practice it. But in a fallen world, we will have our vices. And it must be said that the modern vices of overindulgence (dissipation and profligacy) compare favorably with those of a century ago, which carried more than a tinge of cruelty. We no longer, for example, countenance cockfighting, child labor or the hanging of petty thieves.

Given the fact that we are going to have vices, the question is, Is it better that they be publicly despised or celebrated? The choice is not really between a society of vice or virtue — we will never have the latter. The choice is between a society of hypocrisy or cynicism. The cynic does not admit to doing wrong. The hypocrite has the saving grace of paying homage to virtue by at least publicly acknowledging its sovereignty. “Any one may yield to temptation,” wrote William Hazlitt, “and yet feel a sincere love and aspiration after virtue: but he who maintains vice in theory, has not even the conception or capacity for virtue in his mind. Men err: fiends only make a mock at goodness.”

Our conflicted feeling about virtue shows up not just in our electoral obsessions but also in our expressed opinions. A 1987 poll found that most Americans ages 18 to 44 thought the rise of single parenthood and sexual permissiveness, and the decline of religious training for children, constituted a change for the worse. Karlyn Keene of the American Enterprise Institute has gathered a remarkable collection of survey data that show that expressed American attitudes toward family, sex, drugs, etc. have remained quite stable and “traditional” over the past 20-odd years.

These, of course, are precisely the kinds of traditional values to which the politicians appeal — they read the same polls — even as individual behavior veers steadily away from the traditional. Family breakdown, sexual revolution, the drug epidemic are facts. What the polls show is that people are not particularly happy with these facts. They may not be able to help themselves but wish they could.

It would be more seemly, to be sure, for the fallen voter to be a little less ardent in ripping apart candidates for their common human frailties. Nonetheless, better to project aspirations for high conduct on our betters than to have no aspirations to project at all.

The fact that voters still demand these virtues in a leader is a confession, however backhanded, that they respect the very values they violate in their own lives. The situation thus created is both salutary and absurd. And, for the candidates, more than a little cruel. Still, they have only themselves to blame. No one forced them to campaign for the favor of a nation of hypocrites.