The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

the United States and rented a new house in Chevy Chase, D.C. As the house was new, it didn’t have a garbage can, so I phoned the city to ask for one. And phoned and phoned. Finally a neighbor, observing the plastic bags I kept putting out on garbage day, took pity on me. “Don’t call the city,” he told me. “Call your councilman.” That’s what I did, and the garbage can arrived a few days later. Not long after that came the first fundraising mailer from the councilman. I learned how I might be able to “attract the esteem” of my local city councilor, but it didn’t seem much like a virtue. It felt more like a shakedown, as though I might not expect such prompt service in the future if I failed to make a donation. I might have preferred to live in a city where it sufficed to pay my taxes, and where I could have cultivated my individualism without knowing who was on city council. What I wanted was less of politics and more of an honest and impersonal administrative state, one in which garbage cans are delivered without being followed by a solicitation for money. That was the very point of administrative law and civil service reform, which were meant to replace the realm of politics with that of law, with equal justice rendered to all, without special payoffs to the well connected or to campaign donors. If Tocqueville’s politics made Americans less individualistic, it also made us more corrupt.

The Mutual Protection Association

      What happens when the state recedes and people are left to their own devices? That’s more like freedom, and it’s where one finds the clubs and associations that Tocqueville discovered in America and which he so much admired. We’ll find them in the PTA, the Red Cross and the groups that pick up litter along the roadways. They are formed around individuals united in a common goal, often doing things the government can’t or won’t do. To the extent they’re effective, voluntary associations permit us to shrink the state, an insight that won Elinor Ostrom a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.⁶ Conversely, the expansion of the government plausibly explains Robert Putnam’s claim in Bowling Alone that Americans are less likely to join an association today than they were fifty years ago, or in Tocqueville’s day.⁷

      People who join a voluntary association become less individualistic, and that’s all to the good. At the same time, the organization can be seen as what the philosopher Robert Nozick called a “mutual protection association.”⁸ What Nozick had in mind was an association that would do all the things in the state of nature that we would normally expect the government to do: provide a justice system, a police force, a fire department and so on. But even where there’s a government, there are things the state won’t do but which an association of private individuals might do. Sometimes it benefits most of us and sometimes only a narrow interest group. The League of Women Voters, the trade union, the special interest cartel—they’re all mutual protection associations.

      Even if Putnam is right about a declining disposition to join up, we’ll still find more voluntary associations in America than in other countries. People here feel they should lend a hand, and joining a group for that purpose makes people more sociable, more concerned about the opinions of others, more like a little politician. It smooths the corners and wears away sharp edges, which is often a good thing, but it also sacrifices the je m’en fiche individualism of the eccentric, of the Christopher Hitchens who takes a savage delight in eviscerating sacred cows. The desire to please others civilizes us, but taken to the extreme it may smile at corruption.

      There can be material incentives to join up and pay our dues, particularly when noncontributing free riders can be excluded from participation. If an organization is creating its own baseball diamond, for example, we may want to contribute our share if that’s the only way we get to play. Pay-for-play, in other words. Even if free riders can’t be excluded—from what economists call public goods—we might still want to chip in if a failure to do so would be noticed and we’d be stigmatized as a freeloader, and perhaps denied other goodies that might have been tossed our way.

      That, of course, is the secret of the Clinton Foundation. Taken at face value, the Clinton Global Initiative provides public goods on a worldwide basis. There’s no pressure to donate, but there are strong incentives for doing so, especially while Mrs. Clinton was the secretary of state and then widely expected to be the next president. A major donor such as Rajiv Fernando didn’t have to wait for the next world for his reward, but instead got a government position for which he was not obviously qualified. It’s nothing like bribery, but only the expectation of return favors. Without contracts, without promises, a settled pattern of cooperation easily develops when one person gives to another, who then gives a return gift, and this is repeated over time.

      Marcel Mauss and Lewis Hyde called this a gift economy, as opposed to the market economy of legally enforceable bargains, and they regarded it as a worthy alternative to market transactions.⁹ And all it requires to get started is the very human instinct of gratitude, the readiness to repay gifts with return gifts. Stable forms of cooperation can emerge when parties deal with each other over a period of time, as W. D. Hamilton and Robert Axelrod have shown, borrowing from the work of the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers on “reciprocal altruism” in animals.¹⁰ When gifts are exchanged again and again, the parties come to expect that the relationship will be maintained in good faith, and that’s as good as a promise. The historian René Girard called it mimetic rivalry, with good paid back for good, and ill for ill.¹¹ One sees this everywhere, and it might sound uplifting. But grafted onto the institutions of public authority it creates a pay-for-play nexus, and in America it has produced the thickest form of crony capitalism in any First World country.

The Polemarchist

      To understand corruption in America, it seems that all one need do is follow the Clintons around and take notes. And yet Hillary emerged as her party’s candidate for the presidency, supported by voters who cared less about her character than about the causes she espoused. She was buoyed up by a media that draws a discreet veil between the public policies and private acts of the candidates it favors. After the Monica Lewinsky story broke, for example, Time magazine’s Nina Burleigh said that she’d be happy to give Bill Clinton oral sex “just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”¹² More recently, as a Newsweek correspondent, Burleigh labeled Peter Schweizer a “right wing hatchet” man when asked to comment on Clinton Cash.¹³

      There’s nothing dishonorable about supporting a corrupt official if his opponent is still worse. Louisiana’s Edwin Edwards was one of the most ethically challenged governors in that state’s colorful history, but in 1991 he had the good chance to find himself opposed by the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke. “Vote for the Crook” bumper stickers began to appear, as well as “Vote for the Lizard, not the Wizard,” and Edwards handily won the election. Doubtless, many Democrats supported Hillary Clinton because they thought Donald Trump little better than David Duke. It’s different, however, when the supporter ignores the evidence of corruption, winks at it, and absolves her of blame, for then he becomes an enabler and accomplice of corruption.

      A bit of that is to be expected. Just as we are biased in favor of our personal friends, we’ll tend to ignore the lapses of political friends—those who are advancing causes we believe in—while denouncing those of political enemies. But at the extreme, with the Nina Burleighs, politics is everything and personal morality becomes irrelevant. We’ll see the mote in the eye of an enemy while ignoring the beam in a friend’s eye.

      This double standard might be labeled Polemarchism, from a character in Plato’s Republic. On his way home from Piraeus, Socrates encounters several people with whom he debates the meaning of justice. Polemarchus tells him that justice requires doing good to one’s friends and evil to one’s enemies. Socrates replies that doing evil to anyone doesn’t sound much like justice. Moreover, he says, you might think your friends are good, but what if they’re not? You wouldn’t want to do good to an evil person whom you mistakenly think good. Justice requires doing good to the truly good person, not to the friend who in fact is evil. Friendship therefore is not the proper basis of justice.

      Polemarchism is the crudest of ethical