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Chapter 18 Abuse of Power as a Cultural Construct Lawrence Rosen Politicians and pundits alike were mystified by the public support that President Clinton maintained throughout the impeachment process. With favorable job ratings at near record highs and no popular outcry for the President’s removal ensuing from their own jeremiads or analyses, commentors frequently characterized the American electorate as puritanical or cynical (with varying degrees of hypocrisy attendant on either state), or simply more offended by the Special Prosecutor’s actions than by those of the President.1 But there is at least one other explanation that may account for the President ’s support, one that draws together many of the emphases that pervade American political and personal life and thus gain force by reverberating through a host of cultural domains. For what may have been at issue, in no small part, was the belief held by many Americans that, in the absence of any underlying act tantamount to a criminal offense, Bill Clinton did not appear to be a man who abused his official power. To understand what “abuse of power”means in this broader cultural sense it is necessary to consider a set of interrelated issues—from the distinctive American style of struggling against temptation, to the linkage this implies to the concept of character, to the place that hypocrisy occupies in the American moral imagination , to the implications of federalism as the relinquishment of personal freedom. As measured against these cultural criteria President Clinton was not, I believe, seen by the majority of Americans as an abuser of power. It may have been this larger cultural view that ultimately supplanted any legalistic concept of high crimes and misdemeanors as the defining feature in the popular political imagination of an impeachable offense. The Constitution does not list “abuse of power” as grounds for impeachment .2 Indeed, the House of Representatives avoided returning 243 charges against the President for abusing his office through any unspecified noncriminal actions. Yet lurking behind both statutory language and formal charge may lie an idea that resonates through the whole of popular political culture and constitutional faith. Though poorly articulated (as indeed the entire affair demonstrates) and perhaps (like pornography and injustice) more clearly felt than defined, the abuse of power as a cultural concept would appear to embrace several distinguishable elements. In the American cultural view, abuse of power is an attribute of a person rather than the characterization of a single act. Indeed, it is the repetition of acts that, at some unspecified point, converts into a feature of an individual’s overall character. In this sense, Americans are implicitly more committed to the ideas of Hume than they are to those of Kant, for while they recognize with the latter that fairness requires some opportunity to assess the risks attendant on one’s conduct they tend toward the former’s view that blame should attach to an individual if inappropriate acts point to undesirable character traits. We may have laws that permit strict liability offenses, and we may punish people even though they are ignorant of the law, but popular sentiment (as indicated in everything from moral assertions and political support to jury nullification and popular ideas about child rearing) supports the idea that the act must say something about the person if it is to be regarded as more than an idiosyncratic event. This linkage to character will, as we shall see, be crucially bound up in religious ideas that permeate American popular culture. To constitute abuse the differential of power must, in addition, be seen as largely inescapable: Only when this is so can any particular victim stand as representative of the larger public. If there are other ways to get around the powerful—particularly if they operate through established institutions that, formally or informally, are touted as checks on the powerful —it is far more difficult to overcome the ethos of personal responsibility in asserting a claimed abuse of power. This sentiment is evident in numerous cultural domains: In economic competition, when market dominance is perceived as restraint of trade; in familial life, where the public can identify with the abused spouse or child on whose behalf others can finally see no way out; in love, when one party plays on the emotional weakness of another in ways that outsiders can empathize with as a form of being trapped; and in politics itself, where the secretive exercise of power (as in Watergate) contravenes the image...

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