The Inquisitor Returns

by Christine Schoefer

Rogin comes out of the New Left; the civil rights and antiwar movements directly shaped his politics. But his progressive roots go back even further. His family was immersed in labor struggles and when he says "My class credentials are in order," a note of pride is unmistakable. Given this background, Rogin's scathing criticism of Bill Clinton is not surprising -- he sums him up as a "Republican President."

CHRISTINE SCHOEFER: If Clinton is doing his best to become a Republican President, why do conservatives hate him? It seems that they would be eager to embrace him.

MICHAEL ROGIN: You have to go back to the '60s. Even though progress toward racial equality was made, basically Reagan defeated the '60s, and we've been living in a counterrevolution. Clinton is our first '60s President. But in order to become the first elected and reelected Democratic President since Roosevelt, he has become a Republican President. He is pro-business; he has made great retreats on racially coded issues like welfare, crime, civil liberties, and in terms of his public persona he's a family values President. This replacement of social justice by family values is part of the neo-liberal, pro-corporate agenda. Clinton is the Democratic President for a Republican age.

But underneath his public persona, Clinton practices "perverse" and nonmarital forms of sexuality. He can't control himself, and everyone knows it. For the Reagan counterrevolutionaries, the '60s battles have been won on the economic and political fronts, but they haven't been won on the sexual front. There the country is with Clinton; it is much freer and more sexually tolerant, and the conservatives are having a kind of collective hysterical attack against this kind of sexuality. The Starr inquisition really is driven by that in important ways.

Why now? Is it changing demographics, the fact that formerly marginalized cultural influences are becoming more important and threatening to conservatives? Or is this part of the redefinition of the American political agenda in the post-Cold War era?

All of the above. The Reagan revolution had three prongs: the economic prong, the military prong, and the family values prong. Reagan won on the first two. On family values -- in which I include the stigmatization of unwed mothers, of black men as criminals -- of gays and lesbians, of abortion, Reagan made a lot of progress, especially through court appointments. And it was those Reagan judges who selected Starr. But the family values issues are still in play. The new right won on the military and on economics, and Clinton doesn't challenge them there, so this is the last thing that is contested.

What's wrong with Sullivan's argument is that the '60s was not only about changing people's private morality; it was about changing society. It wasn't about saying "what you do in private is okay," in fact, it was about saying "what people do in private is not okay, because men are oppressing women in private, segregationists are oppressing black people and saying, "This is just a private matter.'" The '60s was about making things public, and when you make things public, certain political, economic, and social hierarchies are going to break down. All that's left of that spirit today is private freedom. That's not what the '60s was about; it was not about private freedom but about public claims. But all we've got now is this private arena, and they're going after that, too.

That's the fundamental difference between the Nixon impeachment and this one. Nixon probably would have escaped impeachment -- or rather resignation to avoid certain impeachment and conviction -- had it not been for the discovery of the White House tapes. They exposed the conniving, fully involved, vindictive, foul-mouthed private body beneath the public facade. But Nixon faced impeachment for his abuse of Presidential powers, not his character or private immorality. The "smoking gun" on the tapes was the incontrovertible evidence that Nixon himself had ordered a cover-up of the Watergate break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

Clinton, by contrast, has probably been saved by the release of his version of the White House tapes, the grand jury testimony that was supposed to remain secret and whose publication -- intended to expose the private body (or body part) -- actually turned Clinton into the victim of an invasion of privacy.

The '60s did win on a certain kind of private sexual liberation because it was in sync with advertising and Hollywood and Americans' sexual obsessions. So the traditional morality of the Christian right is on the defensive in a way that the economic power of the ruling class or the military is not. On that question, the Christian right is fighting a kind of defensive battle against the tide and they feel like they're losing -- which they are.

How are they losing? If you look at the Starr investigation, it looks like they're winning. Conservatives are certainly dominating political discourse.

It's true that when people are asked which party they trust on questions of morality, they're more likely to say Republicans. Pretty chilling. But when it comes to Clinton as a concrete case, they know better. The American people, God bless them, think Starr has gone too far. They think that what Clinton does in private -- which includes if he has sex in the Oval Office -- is no one's business. The only good thing about this whole episode is the demystification of the Oval Office as a sanctuary in which you shouldn't have sex. People don't care, because they know what their own lives are like or what they imagine they might be like.

I don't approve of this affair with Monica Lewinsky, adultery aside, because of the age difference and the power difference, but we could make a list of extramaritally oriented Presidents before Clinton. Never mind Kennedy. Start with Jefferson and the new DNA evidence confirming his liaisons with his slave and his dead wife's half sister. Roosevelt had two different women convinced that he was going to leave his wife after the Presidency and marry them. Two at the same time. But times have changed for Presidents. For Clinton to think that he could get away with it is disturbing about both his desires and his judgment, but it has nothing to do with impeachment.

I think the McCarthy analogy is good there. The American people know perfectly well that this is not an impeachable offense, that we all do things that we wish nobody knew about in our private sexual lives, and that there is something really murderous about holding up an ideal family. This ideal family is punitive toward everybody who doesn't live in it, which is most of us.

On the whole, the American people recognize this for what it is and they are not on Starr's side. Clinton won them with his testimony when he implored Starr not to take away his privacy. He must have known that he was speaking to the camera, to the American people, the whole time. He was brilliant; he turned himself into the victim instead of the persecutor. That was the moment when the country shifted from seeing Clinton as the problem to seeing Starr as the problem. That's when it became clear that the American people did not want this guy to be impeached.

But the media has been unbelievable. They can't let it go. The same thing happened in the McCarthy period. A symbiosis develops between a maniacal, obsessed persecutor and the press. The press got so caught up in McCarthyism because it was the kind of scandal they live on, so they became, if you'll pardon the expression, codependents with McCarthy on the exposure of nonexistent Communists. Now with the end of the Cold War, the same thing happens on the sexual front. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the media, which feeds on scandal, can now take the high moral ground. By condemning Clinton, it can be the solution instead of the problem, demanding that he should resign because he has done this terrible thing which is actually only an artifice of their own publicity-making sex-hungry machine. Just like Starr can circulate pornography under the guise of condemning it, so the media can replace OJ and Lady Di with Clinton and Monica.

So everyone tries to take the moral high ground.

Yes, but only in order to keep the thing alive. It's a kind of Beltway phenomenon. Everyone wants this thing to keep going, except for ordinary people, who think it should go away. So you have an engine driving it which is the Christian right, an institutional structure whose interest it is to keep this happening -- the media and the politicians -- and then you have Clinton who set himself up for it. Finally you have the post-Cold War era and the way in which sexual freedom is all that's left of the '60s, the last thing Clinton's enemies want to wipe out, but the one thing they won't be able to wipe out.

What are the political consequences? It seems that one consequence is that public discourse has been completely depoliticized.

That's true. But it's not as though if Clinton hadn't done this and they weren't after him, he could get about the business of running the country. Certainly not the way you or I would like. It's not as if the problems that are actually facing the country would be addressed by Clinton in any kind of decent way, so it's not as if this is diverting attention from what would otherwise be a significant progressive Presidential agenda.

It may be that, thanks to the economy, the Democrats were poised to take back the House of Representatives in last month's elections, and the initial perception was that Clinton had once again hurt his party badly, as he did in 1994 by so mishandling national health insurance and in 1996 by the last-minute campaign finance scandals. But this is the first election since 1934 when the President's party actually gained House seats in a midterm election.

While that may be because of prosperity and what pollster Mervin Field calls "contented apathy," the fact is that 55 percent of the voters in exit polls approve of Clinton's job performance, that 61 percent disapprove of how Congressional Republicans have handled "the Clinton/Lewinsky matter," that Christian conservatives were a smaller percentage of the electorate in 1998 than in 1994, and union members and African Americans were a larger percentage. Little more than a third of eligible voters vote in midterm elections, so it only took 20 percent to pass the 1994 Gingrich revolution. Conservatives hoped for the same thing this time, but it may be that Starr actually brought out votes for the Democrats. Lauch Faircloth, the North Carolina Senator who brought Starr's name to the judges who appointed him -- not that there was a right-wing conspiracy or anything -- was actually defeated.

I understand the impulse for Democrats to distance themselves from Clinton in some ways. But in terms of making this election a referendum on whether Americans want the pornographers as inquisitors, the Christian right with its antiabortion and even its anticontraception agenda, with its homophobia and invasion of private life -- do you really want these people running the country?

Why weren't the Democrats taking that line?

To some extent, at the end of the campaign, they did. But it makes it seem like they're against family values. They couldn't do it with McCarthy either. Until McCarthy attacked a sacrosanct institution, the American Army, he had his own way in the press and his own way in the political establishment. Only when he went after the Army and Eisenhower did the media and the politicians turn on him.

The election results confirm that this scandal was not popularly driven, however much it was an effort to attract popular attention, and that the people were ahead of the elites.

That gap between politicians and the population is quite striking here.

But the same was true of McCarthy. At the time it was said that McCarthy had all this popular support, but it wasn't really true. Ordinary people didn't care about domestic communism. It was the political class that was so terrified of being labeled pro-communist by the right wing and that's the same thing now.

I'm not as convinced as a lot of people are that there will be long-term consequences. I think the battle lines are drawn on the question of whether we're going to have a Christian right, prosecutorial, inquisitorial invasion of privacy. Although the Christian right is going to win a lot of battles, I think on the whole they are going to lose. This Clinton thing will not make it easier for them to win because now they've gone after a centrist kind of figure and it's upset people.

Thanks to the election, Clinton almost certainly won't be impeached. You have a humiliated, weaker President, but whether that will work to the advantage of Republicans in 2000 is not clear. Remember, Ford almost beat Carter after Nixon resigned. If it hadn't been for the economic downturn, he probably would have. And the Nixon people -- like Trent Lott, who supported him to the end on the House Judiciary Committee, and Nixon's Justice Department lackey William Rehnquist, whom Nixon made Chief Justice of the Supreme Court -- are now in positions of political power.

True, the resurgence of the old Nixon hands -- Bush was one -- depended on the Reagan revolution, and I don't see that coming now from the other side. But not because Starr has stopped a left-wing turn. Nor will he generate one in reaction against him. "After Monica" is going to be pretty much like "Before Monica," even if Clinton doesn't have the authority he might otherwise have had.

So the presidency is weakened?

The presidency isn't very strong now. What's strong is corporate America and the Christian right -- they're setting the political agenda. There are some local fringe efforts to resist, but Clinton is not mounting a left-wing redistributive agenda, a rebuilding of the infrastructure, not even a real education program. He's for school uniforms. He's probably going to support privatizing Social Security in some form. It's a scandal. That's what's happening in American politics. That was happening before Monica Lewinsky, and that's what will happen after it. Of course, a takeover by the Christian right would be a very scary prospect, no question about that.

Some people talk about the erosion of the democratic process that is set in motion when a legal inquiry like Starr's can be so blatantly politically motivated.

Well, that's true; McCarthy was like that too. But it has to be said that everything that is being done to Clinton by Starr is what Clinton has supported doing to alleged criminals who don't enjoy his kind of protection. Even though I am opposed to it being done to Clinton, there's a certain poetic justice here. Clinton is powerful, he has a lot going for him, but this kind of thing is happening to all kinds of anonymous people.

The use of the Grand Jury for fishing expeditions and to force people to perjure themselves -- this is not the way Grand Juries are supposed to be used. They began to be used that way in the wake of the '60s against those suspected of hiding members of the Weather Underground. Clinton has supported the erosion of civil liberties; he just didn't imagine he would be the accused criminal.

What could the left be doing here?

The left is even further marginalized, because the best people in national politics are rushing to Clinton's defense. It seems to me they had a little more choice in terms of making the election a referendum against the Christian right and the invasion of privacy. But it's probably too hard to differentiate their political position from Clinton's right now. Michael Moore, for instance, is a populist leftie who advocated voting Democratic as a protest against Starr. So someone like me who didn't vote for Clinton in 1996 is supposed to help prop him up now. As long as Starr is center stage there is not much else to do. I think there are possibilities for mobilization out there -- on Social Security, on genuine education and childcare, on union issues -- but who can say whether they'll happen or where they'll come from?

The policing of private life goes back a long way in this country, as does sexual hysteria about alien threats to the American way of life, be it Catholics in the 19th century or communists in the 20th. Now that those containers are gone, it's just sex, sex, sex. The mixture of religion and family values is a distinctive American contribution to advanced civilization, and Clinton, if you'll pardon the expression, also gives lip service to it.

But why is there so much political charge in the sexual issues?

The ideology says that you have to have a stable heterosexual family to teach values, otherwise we will have these morally reprehensible people running around in society. With private economic gratification, on the other hand, there are no limits. So celebration of economic gratification goes with punishment of sexual gratification. Clinton at least is consistent. He's for both, although he can't admit it.

So that's the argument: if we have freedom in the economic realm, what's going to stop us from being the most immoral, corrupt, and perverse people? What's going to stop society from disintegrating? If you take off the economic restraints, the restraints have to be in people's character and their family -- that's the ideology.

Isn't there a contradiction here -- conservatives advocate sexual restraint, yet they're putting oral sex on the front page of family newspapers?

The ideology is a cover for, or maybe generates, a fascination with forbidden, nonprocreative sexual activity. Some years ago the eminent sociologist Daniel Bell, a cultural conservative but no right-wing fanatic, wrote a book called The Winding Path, in which he argued that oral sex is the emblem of American disintegration. The Starr Report, as many people have observed, is not so much a legal document as a pornographic novel. Or rather it is the former by being the latter, with the inquisitor serving as pornographer.

The pornography had redeeming legal value, according to the prosecutors, because Clinton's evasive definition of sexual relations required the showing that he actually had touched Monica Lewinsky in intimate places and not only she him. But why report that he masturbated into the sink? Why identify one of their encounters as happening on his anniversary? Why the prurient interest in all the sexual detail? Are the authors of the Starr Report just getting off on humiliating Clinton, or also on the activities they linger on describing?

Senator Joseph Lieberman is shocked at what Clinton has forced his children to watch on television. But children are not learning about oral sex from the President; they're learning about it from Starr. Starr, who is in favor of keeping pornography off the Internet, is rushing to put his pornography on the Internet. These people are obsessed with nonconventional, nonmarital, nonprocreative sex.

You talk about the importance of private sex lives, but there are issues attached to this that are not in the private realm.

From one point of view Starr is invading privacy, but since the driving force is not just to remove this President from office but to stigmatize certain identities -- gay and lesbian, feminist, black -- then, for members of these groups, behind Starr's attack on Clinton's right to privacy is their right to be who they are publicly.

Gay people are justifiably frightened of the Christian right. Look at the Defense of Marriage Act. The law of the land is still that a state can outlaw consensual sex between homosexuals or lesbians. When Matthew Shepard was killed in Wyoming, there were a lot of letters to the Times, saying that people have to be able to attack homosexuality -- although not by killing homosexuals or hurting them -- because this is an immoral lifestyle. You can't say that about race anymore, but you can say it about homosexuality.

Gays and lesbians make sense. Why blacks?

Toni Morrison has called Clinton our first black President. What she has in mind, beyond his comfortableness with African Americans, beyond the saxophone and the religious background, is the way Clinton has been made vulnerable: from being the child of a single mother through the Starr strip-searching, the attack on him through his sexuality. She thinks Starr is going after African Americans through Clinton, and that is why black politicians have become his strongest defenders -- including, it may be, the middle-aged black women on the Grand Jury who seemed uncomfortable with forcing him to expose himself.

It's certainly true that the family values issue has been coded black since Nixon's Southern strategy for winning elections. Starr, the son of a segregationist fundamentalist preacher, has updated the politics of sexual demonology for our allegedly color-blind age. Open racism is now taboo, but sexual minorities and their sexual practices are still -- as exemplified by Trent Lott -- legitimate targets.

I think that Toni Morrison was right when she said that sexuality is coded black in this country. I don't think you can separate out the sexual Puritanism from the racial prejudice -- they go together. They grew up together because it was black people who were stigmatized, to quote Toni Morrison, as representing "insanity, illicit sexuality, and chaos." The fantasy of a nexus of sex and race is very bad for black people, reinforcing sexual Puritanism at the same time as it reinforces a kind of fascination with black culture and the longing that is exemplified by blackface. People are so drawn to the notion of black exoticism even as they stigmatize it, and it all gets mixed up together.

And there is a similar conservative fascination with and exoticization of gay and lesbian culture?

Why does the neoconservative Weekly Standard's crusade against gay and lesbian sex, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, lead the magazine to publish extended allegedly parodic gay and lesbian pornography? Do the boys at the Weekly Standard bond homosocially around not just homophobia but their shared fantasies about the forbidden activities?

Historically, blackface was an extremely important form of entertainment for white people, but so was female impersonation. I think the fascination with homosexuality is more covert, more forbidden, less able to be embraced, but I think it's driving a lot of this.

Maybe it's more covert because there's always the possibility that it is true?

That's right. You know you're not black, but you might be gay.

Toni Morrison goes so far as to say that the Starr investigation is an attempted coup against Clinton.

But the irony is that Clinton got elected and reelected by distancing himself from African Americans -- from flying back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a brain-damaged black man, to repudiating the alleged "quota queen" Lani Guinier, to firing Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders for advocating masturbation as a form of safe sex, to his drug and crime policies, to "ending welfare as we know it." Before Monica, black politicians were Clinton's most prominent critics on the left. But as he's fallen, they've come to his defense. In part it's the legitimate fear of the alternative, but in part you could say that as Clinton has turned on African Americans politically, they have rushed to embrace him culturally.

Yes. Think of Primary Colors, the book and film supposedly sympathetic to Clinton -- The New Yorker celebrated the movie as an exemplar of political realism. Primary Colors twice gratuitously inserts race into the 1992 Presidential campaign. It paints black both the George Stephanopolous character and the black teenager that the Clinton stand-in knocks up. Since both the girl's family and the black aide end up supporting the candidate, Primary Colors turns the 1992 campaign into Clinton's seduction of African Americans. He screws blacks; they forgive him. That's one fantasy that the Starr inquisition is fulfilling.

Bulworth is the other. In that film Bulworth is saved from self-destruction by his black identification. Is it that African Americans get to speak through him, as the ad for the film makes it seem, or that he gets to speak for them? Bulworth is a blackface film, but for many black intellectuals I admire, the racial stereotyping and the sexual wish-fulfillment (old white guy gets young black chick, and gets her to say "Yo ma nigger") were less important than the cross-racial solidarity. Clinton is now doing a Bulworth, only without Bulworth's radical politics.

So when Toni Morrison or Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel or sociologist Orlando Patterson support Clinton as being one of them, it's just one more sign to me of the retrograde politics Starr has forced on the country. He's succeeded in making Clinton the victim -- as Clarence Thomas was not -- of a high-tech lynching. That still doesn't make Clinton our first black President, but it gets him closer.

Speaking of Clarence Thomas, let's talk about the feminist response. Earlier we talked about the Democrats' reluctance to take a position. It seems to me that feminists have been the only group willing to take a clear and differentiated stand.

My own initial reaction was far more critical of Clinton than that of many of my women friends. I focused on the power imbalance, Monica Lewinsky as service-provider. Why aren't more feminists talking about sexual exploitation, I wanted to know. There were two reasons. First off, feminists did not see this as a case of sexual harassment, and the Starr Report has confirmed their view. Sexual harassment, the initial pretext for Starr's taping of Lewinsky, has vanished from the Starr Report.

You have to treat Monica Lewinsky as an autonomous human being who made her own choice. That choice made her a public woman, with a lot of unintended bad consequences for other people drawn into Starr's net. You can feel sorry for her, sorrier for some of them, but you can't treat her as a victim of sexual harassment. Feminists see this case as fueling the Christian right agenda and as an attack on women's liberation, which it is.

And that's the second reason feminists have supported Clinton. On women's issues, he's on their side. That's not so true where gender and class go together, since he could care less about the feminization of poverty or about class issues generally. But in spite of Clinton's sexual behavior, there's less pathos in his feminist support than in his black support. And then there's Hillary, and the way Starr has turned her into a Clinton asset.

How does Hillary Clinton fit into the conservative agenda? In what sense is she a target?

Originally it was Hillary who was the target. She was the independent career woman running the President, supposedly, before the makeover into loyal spouse. But that view of her has dropped away in favor of sympathy for the brave, humiliated wife.

Hillary is humiliated, Bill is never humiliated. What's going on here?

I don't think that's quite right. Part of Clinton's appeal now is his humiliation. He's like the charming teenager, out of control but so charming that he gets away with it. Travolta captured that quality in Primary Colors. Even the humiliation is part of the charm. If he were really an authority figure, he couldn't last, but he's like your brother. When Clinton originally admitted he lied about Monica and then attacked Starr, he generated tremendous hostility because he hadn't exposed himself enough. Now, thanks to the grand jury testimony, he has. It's hard to watch that and not sympathize with him.

So boys will be boys but Hillary cannot redeem herself to the media.

Except by being loyal. So instead of coming across as the liberated '60s feminist -- with all those rumors about her sexual, even bisexual, activity -- she can practice the family values Clinton preaches.

Did you say that the feminist agenda is not so threatening to the Christian right?

Are you kidding? The liberated woman is at the center of Christian right and neoconservative sexual demonology. The woman who earns her own money, is in charge of her own sexuality and reproduction, is the ur-menace. What pleasure it must have given the authors of the Starr Report to be able to announce that when the President finally allowed himself to come in his intern's mouth for the first time, she saved the semen-stained dress with the DNA evidence of Clinton's exposed smoking gun.

But this smoking gun, whatever its distinguishing marks, is not an impeachable offense. The parallel here is with Alexander Hamilton, who defined impeachable offenses in The Federalist Papers, as "the abuse or violation of some public trust," and then himself faced impeachment as Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton, whose single-mother childhood foreshadows Clinton's, was accused of bribing James Reynolds to buy up Revolutionary War pensions so that Hamilton would benefit financially from his own political program of funding at full value the Revolutionary War debt. That would have been an impeachable offense by Hamilton's own definition. But since private transgressions were not impeachable, Hamilton confessed that, far from capitalizing financially from his public position, he was buying Reynolds' silence about his affair with Reynolds' wife. End of impeachment talk but a disgrace to Hamilton. The scandal ended in the famous duel with Aaron Burr, when Hamilton held his own fire and was killed.

Instead of forcing Clinton's private parts into the American public realm, maybe Starr should challenge Clinton to a duel. Clinton, the challenged, could choose the weapon.