In Praise of Mass Hypocrisy

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A CENTURY AGO, WHEN AMERICANS HAD MORE AUSTERE sexual habits, they elected a President who was widely known to have had an illegitimate child. As a candidate, Grover Cleveland was mocked with the chant "Ma, Ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House. Ha, ha, ha." Yet Cleveland won the White House, occasioning his supporters' memorable retort:

Hurrah for Maria

Hurrah for the kid

We voted for Grover

And we're damn glad we did.

A hundred years later, Americans are more sexually permissive, but not, it seems, when it comes to their presidential candidates. The father of an illegitimate child could not possibly win the White House. In fact, Bill Clinton came perilously near to being politically destroyed by an allegation of adultery. Clinton escaped principally because Gennifer Flowers made a bad witness. It was possible to believe she was lying. Gary Hart, on the other hand, caught in sexual dalliance the evidence for which was prima facie, could not survive.

Why? Why should we care? This is a country in which a sixth of all married adults admit to having had affairs, in which seduction trails only murder as the most popular form of TV entertainment, in which condoms are handed out in the high schools. Yet, as voters, we profess shock that our candidates should behave as we do.

As campaign coverage becomes saturated with questions of personal morality (a.k.a. "character"), candidates respond with by now ritualized pledges of undying fealty to family and, above all, to "family values." What is curious about these paeans to family, however, is that they come at a time when Americans seem intent as never before on taking the family apart. The divorce rate is more than twice what it was 30 years ago. More than half of , American children will live in a single-parent home sometime before age 18. A quarter of all births in the U.S. occur out of wedlock, five times the rate of 30 years ago.

The paradox is striking: voters are demanding in their leaders the personal virtues that they decreasingly demand of themselves. The trend is not confined to matters of sex and family. There's money too. The public has worked itself into a righteous frenzy over Congressmen overdrawing checks at the (private -- no taxpayer money involved) House bank. This, while the American public, without any discernible protest, annually overdraws its national account by $400 billion a year, which amounts to the average family of four borrowing over $6,000 from its children to pay for its current indulgences. There is a word for the profession of virtue accompanied by practice of vice: hypocrisy. The usual complaint in democracies is that the politicians are hypocrites. The charge is old, common and true. But the equally valid charge, less often made so as not to offend, is that the people are hypocrites too.

And thank God for it.

Let me explain. In the best of all possible worlds, we would all both profess virtue and practice it. But in a fallen world, we will have our vices. And it must be said that the modern vices of overindulgence (dissipation and profligacy) compare favorably with those of a century ago, which carried more than a tinge of cruelty. We no longer, for example, countenance cockfighting, child labor or the hanging of petty thieves.