Aftermath: The Clinton Impeachment and the Presidency in the Age of Political Spectacle

Conclusion: The Penultimate: The Meaning of Impeachment and Liberal Governance

Conclusion The Penultimate: The Meaning of Impeachment and Liberal Governance Leonard V. Kaplan “My child, child of an old man—Antigone / where are we now? / What land, what city of men? / Who will receive the wandering Oedipus today? / not with gifts but a pittance . . . / It’s little I ask / and get still less, but quite enough for me. / Acceptance—that is the great lesson suffering teaches, / suffering and the long years, my close companions, / yes, and nobility too, my royal birthright.” Oedipus speaks thus at Colonus. “Where are we now?”1 This is not merely a question of place but of spirit. The recent impeachment and trial of William Jefferson Clinton provides an instructive point of departure for analysis because it captures the interaction between our law and our morality. The Clinton impeachment defines political, cultural, and legal limits to liberal toleration in a very concrete situation , with an explicit concern with sex, lies, and the manipulation of media and state power. And with a cast of living players. Around this event we may become anthropologists and see the tensions, if not the contradictions , in the liberal state. In one way or another, all the essays collected here present perspectives on our liberal institutions and culture. In the following discussion I use two metaphors to attempt to integrate the various perspectives that are represented in these essays. I am also after bigger game. These essays represent at their best—and I think they are very good—partial glimpses into liberal culture and liberal modes of 321 governance. Even the concept of liberal is problematic because not all liberal states and cultures are the same. Further, certain issues seem to me to be intrinsic to the human condition and are not merely a consequence of the liberal apparatus, law, and/or culture. Any jurisprudence worth consideration must try to distinguish between what is shaped by liberal institutions and what seems to be endemic to human existence itself. One metaphor goes back to the origin of political theory, and can be found particularly in Greek discourse and in Jewish theology and practice . This metaphor I am calling pollution, or in Greek terms, miasma; it could also be called contagion. Did the Clinton impeachment process create more pollution for our political discourse, for the legitimacy of our legal and cultural institutions, or for our everyday social relations? The pollution metaphor operates as a hermeneutic for a mythopoetic analysis. Oedipus at Colonus and Oedipus Rex are two texts that illuminate the pollution problem for Western political theory and anthropology. The liberal state depends for its very operation on a certain degree of discretion from state officers, which necessarily entails a certain degree of corruption in the form of mistakes, lying, favoritism, stupidity, and downright theft. At some point this corruption—a form of pollution— threatens the legitimacy of liberal governance. It is our intellectual job and our pragmatic job to make sure that history neither repeats itself nor takes the form of an authoritarianism that has been called “fascism with a friendly face.”2 There are no procedural safeguards which by themselves can protect liberalism from degradation. Pollution is central to the stories surrounding Oedipus. The citizens of Thebes “knew” that, to mix literary texts, “something was rotten in the state of Denmark” or rather, in Thebes. Sophocles was telling us that the plague was caused by Oedipus’s “transgressions.” He was telling us that the Thebans were right, that behavior in the polity could pollute the very structure of everyday existence. Another perspective necessary for bringing intelligibility to the Clinton scandal is what I am calling structural analysis. Against the poets, Plato in The Republic and The Laws presented structural analyses on how to shape a polity so as to allow it both to flourish and to allow citizens to find their appropriate place within the particular mode of governance. Both modes of analysis—the metaphor of pollution and the seemingly more scientific idea of structural analysis—can help enlighten (1) our understanding of the significance of the Clinton impeachment, and, per322 l e o n a r d v. k a p l a n haps even more importantly, (2) tell us something about the future of our particular liberal state. This penultimate essay is concerned with what the Clinton impeachment and its cultural reverberations teach about liberal law and culture. Will the impeachment turn out to be only...