Leaders Who Don’t Want to Govern

James Pittendrigh McGillivray, King Lear

"Lear" by James Pittendrigh McGillivray

“Nature, be thou my goddess,” exclaims Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester in King Lear as he prepares to embark on a course of action that, before he is stopped, results in the disinheritance of his legitimate brother, the blinding and banishment of his father, the poisoning of one sister by another, and the execution of Cordelia. Sacrifice civil institutions to your natural desires, Shakespeare is telling us, and all hell will break loose.

Am I being overly partisan when I detect Edwardian self-indulgence in rightwing Republicans? In today’s post I am going to focus particularly on those institutions that help us study reality and how they are under attack. In far too many instances, I see people less interested in truth than in undermining the scientific basis upon which policymakers try to base their decisions. The Academy and many branches of scientific study are under fire by anyone who doesn’t like the results that emerge. There is a fair amount of scientific consensus that the world is warming, that abstinence-only sex education isn’t very effective at preventing teenage pregnancy, that the American Muslim community is for the most part collaborating to catch domestic terrorists, that crime by immigrants is not on the rise but in fact has dropped, and that the Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy did not improve the economy. How does the right respond? Attack the scientists and social scientists as partisan hacks.

As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has said in looking at Republican proposals to simultaneously lower taxes and lower the deficit, it’s as though they want to repeal the laws of arithmetic.

Whenever President Obama’s administration voices an area of concern, certain Republicans act like a two-year-old going through its “no” stage and throw a fit. So First Lady Michelle Obama says that childhood obesity is a problem in America? Sarah Palin decries “nanny state” and takes cookies to a school she is visiting. The government is concerned about an epidemic of diabetes and warns that Americans drink too many soft drinks? Rally to the defense of sugared water.  In response to government warnings about energy shortages, some turn their thermostats up.

Like many Americans, I am sick to death of ideologues who think that shouting in a very loud voice makes something true. The end result of insisting that Saddam Hussein attacked the Twin Towers and that he had weapons of mass destruction is that we are a poorer and a weaker country now than we were ten years ago. Never has the shouting commanded such a loud microphone, and I see a worrisome intersection in the thin line between being media commentators, whose job it is to raise adrenaline levels, and politicians, whose job it is to solve problems. In fact, one of the most difficult decisions a number of potential presidential candidates have these days is when to step off the very lucrative Fox payroll and start officially running.

In short, the new foundation for truth appears to be, “Reality is whatever I say it is.” Or to quote Edward, “Now, nature, stand up for bastards.”

In King Lear, Edward finds his opening because those in power have been acting irresponsibly. King Lear wants all the privileges of being king without the responsibilities of governing. (We could name far too many too many politicians about whom this can be said.) Gloucester, Edward’s father, boasts openly without any sense of shame that he had “great sport” in fathering Edward. In short, when those in charge of the government fail in their duties, the institutions we rely on to provide order take a hit.

We can go back over the past thirty or forty years and find many politicians from both parties who have undermined our institutions. Newt Gingrich’s slash-and-burn rise in the early 1990’s was set up by decades of arrogant Democratic Congressional leadership. Bill Clinton’s reckless behavior with Monica Lewinsky (positively Gloucester-esque) set off irresponsible Republican efforts to impeach him—all at a time when we should have been paying attention to Osama Bin Laden. Then there were shady election politics in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, followed up by the Supreme Court’s Bush vs. Gore 5-4 decision—both of which seemed to indicate that the winner was decided, not by the Constitution, but by whoever had the power. The Bush years were shaped by Rovean politics—federal attorneys, supposed to be above the law, were fired and hired for their party politics while torture, indefinite detention, and preemptive war were employed following 9-11. Both Congressional Republicans under Bush and Congressional Democrats under Obama used dubious maneuvers to pass major pieces of legislation (“reconciliation” was used to pass both the Bush tax cuts and Obamacare while Bush’s budget-busting prescription drug plan was made law by another trick). Now we’re seeing efforts across the country to take away people’s voting rights, whether those of ex-felons in Florida, college students in New Hampshire, or people without picture identification in Georgia. In short, immediate winning is more important than the governing institutions.

“Is this the promised end?” I heard a despairing Kent ask.

I’m a liberal so perhaps my examples are slanted. I ask my conservative readers to step in and balance the scales. The fact is, we all have an investment in this country and will rise and fall together. We all lose if the bastards stand up and seize power.

Here’s a final thought: In King Lear, the good brother Edgar (let’s think of him as principled truth) must go underground as Edward ascends. For a while he appears as a mad man, but he works quietly, humanely nurses his blinded father, and when he finds an opening, confronts Edward and overthrows him. Despite all that has happened, he is able to step up and is prepared in the end to rule the fractured kingdom. (Albany, not feeling up to the task, abdicates in his favor.) The bastards are always defeated by the end of Shakespeare’s tragedies. He is so good at holding the mirror up to nature elsewhere, let’s hope that the bard knows what he’s talking about when he gives us these endings.

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