The Soul of a Tyrant
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Via HBL, I came across a very disturbing portrait of Eliot Spitzer, who very fortunately ran afoul of the very type of law he should have opposed, but decided to wield instead:
Whether it was Spitzer's involvement in the Dirty Tricks and Internal Revenue scandals that targeted Senate Republican Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, his threats against Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and other Assembly Democrats, his undermining through rumor and innuendo of Lt. Gov. David Paterson, or his seemingly paranoid hostilities to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Spitzer's style struck many as so far out of line with his public claims of righteousness that many started using the jargon of abnormal psychology to describe him. [bold added]The above passage is disturbing for two reasons. First, it describes a widely respected and admired man who actually held elected office in New York, and who had legitimate presidential aspirations. Second (and worse), it draws the wrong conclusion about the relationship between Spitzer's "claims of righteousness" and his megalomaniacal, controlling personality.
What did Eliot Spitzer do to be able to claim "righteousness"? He prosecuted citizens for victimless "crimes", some of which were forms of productive activity. The laws that made these acts crimes were legal codifications of arbitrary religious and altruist proscriptions against behavior that violated the rights of no one and, therefore, did not belong on the books.
In other words, Eliot Spitzer was not motivated by a desire to protect the individual rights of the people who elected him, but by a moral code that is incompatible with personal freedom because it calls for the sacrifice of individuals. Whether Spitzer was benevolent but misguided at first (which seems very unlikely to me) or a power-luster from day one is irrelevant.
In either case, his implicit ethical system condoned human sacrifice and the only difference would be whether that moral code demanded sacrifice of others for the "common good" (benevolent Spitzer) or his own aggrandizement -- and whether Spitzer's actual motivations stemmed from the source the public originally thought or were camouflaged by it. This is because his implicit ethical system (whatever it is) and his explicit one (what the public elected him on) are variants of the same theme, differing only by who Spitzer thinks is entitled to drink the sacrificial blood.
If you later start seeing some of the very actions Spitzer was once admired for being re-cast as evidence that he was "selfish" (which he wasn't) or merely crazy, it will be only because Spitzer drank of that cup himself, and not, alas, because he filled it in the first place.
Yes. Spitzer's personal behavior sounds like that of a disturbed man. But that fact makes him no less of an altruist, nor does it make him "inconsistent". He is gone, but the idea that man should be sacrificed to others remains at large, ready to empower others like him or worse through the mantle of undeserved respectability.
Spitzer will get only poetic justice, and his political demise will not save us from tyranny for long.
-- CAV
4 comments:
New York has a long history of such tyrants. The two Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, both of whom were Governors of New York and U.S. Presidents, come to mind. Reading the words they used to excoriate the business titans of their eras makes my hair stand on end.
Just a couple examples (I have encountered many): Teddy Roosevelt denounced the great business achievers of his day, men such as J.P. Morgan, as the "malefactors of great wealth." FDR regularly denounced businessmen during the Great Depression, a disastrous era his own policies helped create. An example is this one, which manages to be both anti-Semitic and threatening: "Whenever the lone wolf, the unethical competitor, the reckless promoter, the Ishmael or Insull whose hand is against every man's, declines to join an end recognized as being for the public welfare and threatens to drag the industry back to a stage of anarchy, the government may properly be asked to apply restraint."
As Presidents, each of the Roosevelts inaugurated massive expansions of government-sponsored business hostility, the Progressive Era and the New Deal, respectively.
What would Spitzer have accomplished if he had more years as Governor or even somehow became President? My guess is nothing of this magnitude. He seemed to be too petty and personal in his hostility. He was less an enemy of business as such than he was an enemy of particular businessmen whom he felt had opposed or slighted him in some way. He was definitely an enemy of business, but in a small-minded way. Certainly with the power of the prosecutor or governor's office he could and did hurt a lot of good people, but it is in the same way Al Capone and Don Corleone would kill, extort and hurt the people around them. As an example, witness how he had a penchant for personally threatening men such as John Whitehead, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs.
Even if he was no Roosevelt, this Mafia thug thoroughly deserved his fate.
Good point. You could even argue that the short-range, criminal mentality that would have limited the damage he could do manifested in his choice of illegal entertainment.
I hope we do not one day regret that THIS thug "self-limited" his damage too soon.
Galileo blogs writes:
"He was less an enemy of business as such than he was an enemy of particular businessmen whom he felt had opposed or slighted him in some way ... As an example, witness how he had a penchant for personally threatening men such as John Whitehead, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs."
Thank you for this insight that is right on target.
When Spitzer ran for governor in 2006, I entered the voting booth with an overriding theme: vote against the Republicans. And so I voted for the Dems across the board, no matter who they were, so long as I knew them not to be evil, such as the explicit racist Charles Barron, a former Black Panther who sits on the New York City Council. The only Dem I refused to vote for was Spitzer. To hear Republicans prior to his resignation praise Spitzer for some of his politics simply confirmed that I made the right choice in voting that year—both in voting against them and the thuggish Spitzer.
"To hear Republicans prior to his resignation praise Spitzer for some of his politics simply confirmed that I made the right choice in voting that year—both in voting against them and the thuggish Spitzer."
It did and it showed that the Republicans share his moral premise of sacrifice. Either they meant their prase or they were afraid to attack him for frea of losing the moral high ground.
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