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The Respectable Citizens: Hating Clinton

HB: Finally, I’d like to ask a question about the role of morals in American politics the last decade: Many Europeans never really understood the seriousness and the fuss of the situation that lead to the Clinton impeachment?

CC: This was deep, deep evidence of a social sickness, I think. I opposed the impeachment of Clinton. Most people at the magazine favored it. There were two of us who didn’t: we were totally mystified as to what people were talking about. The best case for impeaching Clinton is that the American regulatory state had gone out of control. Clinton had in a grandstanding way passed the Violence Against Women Act, one of whose provisions was that any man accused by any woman of sexual harassment can have his sexual life opened up in public in front of a court room. Remember that sexual harassment is not a particularly serious crime. It’s not rape. Sexual harassment is being any kind of man that a particular woman doesn’t like, like being a jerk of a boss, for instance.It never occurred to the feminist Clinton that he would wind up in court under this law that he signed. OK! So he deserved that.

The best thing that could have resulted from that situation would have been that once he got into court people would say: Look, now you see what is going on: the constitutional balance of the whole country is being imperiled by this stupid law. So let’s get rid of this law and lets reëxamine this sort of little regulatory tyranny we’re imposing on people’s personal lives. But the opposite happened. They kept going with the court case and these laws are still on the books. If some secretary decided she did not like George Bush she could put him through the same court procedure tomorrow. That is the case for impeaching Bill Clinton:

Clinton’s idea was that the laws of the United States apply to only some people and not him. That’s true. But I think that there was another principle at stake, and that was that the people has a right to the president they elect – and that is a more important principle. That is also why executives are given formal immunity in other societies. The voting public has a right to the president they elected: he should not be removable by another branch of government any more than the president should get to pick his Congress. The attempt to impeach Clinton struck me as an assault on the separation of powers.

HB: So this would go with your argument about the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, that there was a side effect of the growth of influence of the federal political and judicial system?

CC: There is judicial hubris, yes. When I talked about the assault on the separation of powers I meant Congress choosing the president. I don’t approve of that except in extraordinary circumstances. Even the Nixon impeachment was highly dubious, and I certainly find the impeachment of Andrew Johnson dubious. I cannot think of a president who should have been impeached. What a president would have to do is to throw either the constitution or the existence of the nation into danger through his misdeeds. That is obviously what “high crimes and misdemeanors” means in the language of impeachment. “High” means affecting the constitution, the big existential questions of the state. It is not over whether it is right or wrong to screw your secretary!

So what in god’s name was going on during the Clinton impeachment? As I said, there was a kernel of defensible legal doctrine there, but what I think was really going on was a sublimated resentment from the 1960s. This sort of a sociological theory: the 1960s really split America down the middle, and you see that in every country – I’m sure you see that in Denmark too. It appears in different ways to different people. I think that Conservative Americans – non-participants in the 1960s – looked at the people who made the 1960s revolution and, around 1990, around the time of the fall of the Berlin wall, they said to themselves: “You know what: I would really have liked to get laid more in the 1960s. I would have liked to smoke a lot of pot. I would have liked to go see more rock music. Instead, I just went to Texas A & M University, married my wife at the age of 21 and I’ve always been true to her. And I got a 9-5 job when I was 22 years old and I have led a kind of dull life. But you know what: we are the people who defeated communism. We are the people who build a prosperous America out of the ruins of the Carter years. And history has absolved us. It didn’t feel right that I wasn’t getting laid every night in the 60s, but I have been vindicated!”. So a year or two later, while the Berlin Wall is still being taken apart we elect this lying, dope-smoking draft-dodger – you know what I mean?

That drove people crazy: “Wait a minute, you get to smoke dope, avoid the draft, sleep with your interns and then in the moment of triumph of the free world over communism you get to run the free world!?”. It was infuriating. The hatred Clinton attracted was a hatred like I have never seen. Clinton to me looks about as centrist a politician you can find. He was a very minor key politician. He didn’t do much after the attempt to get a national health service failed, except for little tiny things.

HB: Of course there was the Gingrich intermezzo, which impeded him from getting much through Congress?

CC: Gingrich saved Clinton: Gingrich wanted to abolish the Department of Education, he wanted a revolution in government. The Clinton counter-position was not big government. It was “let’s keep doing things in exactly the way we are doing them”. Clinton was a politician who thought in really minor ways. There was nothing in him – politically – that would arouse such fury. This century, the only presidents who have been hated the way Clinton was hated, were Roosevelt for purely political reasons I think, and Nixon. Nixon infuriated the intellectual elite through his anti-communism. Clinton infuriated the populace just by being who he is.

Henrik Østergaard Breitenbauch is a Graduate Student of International Relations (ABD) at the Department of Political Science, Copenhagen, and Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University.

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