Thirty years ago, the Democratic Party persuaded the American people to stop caring about the moral character of public men.
Thirty years ago, the entire Democratic Party set out to convince the country that the character and morals of our leaders were irrelevant — especially as regards how they treated the opposite sex in matters sexual. Leaders “compartmentalize,” Democrats told us. Only prudes care about whether we are led by people of good character. We should be more like the sophisticated French and not care. We should, in fact, elevate that refusal to care to such a high level of principle that sexual misconduct is a defense to felonies, to abuse of official powers, and to predation on female subordinates in the workplace. This unified philosophical message was carried forward on the now familiar whole-of-society basis by the Democrats — not just their elected officials, messaging apparatus, and formal surrogates, but also their pundit class and their allies in the entertainment world, academia, and the supposedly objective press. They kept up this drumbeat for eight solid years. While it had other beneficiaries — after all, the most influential figure in setting the party’s agenda for four decades was Ted Kennedy — this was all done in the service of one man: Bill Clinton.
It matters not whether any of this was sincere. People fiercely defending the irrelevancy of sexual predation in the workplace had only a few years before, in the 1991 Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings and the 1992 “Year of the Woman” in Senate races, insisted equally loudly that sexual harassment was the most pressing issue of our times. The far more important point than its sincerity (or lack of it) is that it succeeded. The American people bought the argument. Some agreed with it; those who didn’t agree accepted that it had carried the day, and that resisting it was a despised minority position. Of course, the two parties have both opportunistically shifted their tone from one campaign and one controversy to the next in the intervening years. But the abiding lesson they both drew is that Clinton and his defenders had permanently changed the game. They had created a blueprint for not just surviving personal scandal but aggressively dismissing its significance. They had built an audience and a philosophical structure for that argument.
They also unmade the lesson of Watergate. Democrats had the votes to impeach Richard Nixon, but they could never have removed him from office without the support of Republican senators, which in turn was more possible because Republican voters had lost faith in Nixon (as witness his approval rating dropping into the 20s for nearly a year before he resigned). When Republicans told Nixon that it was time to go, it wasn’t just the party’s squishes: leadership in Congress joined the call, and so did conservative stalwarts such as James Buckley and Barry Goldwater. In the intermediate term, that allowed the party as a whole to turn the page, because Ronald Reagan and others who rode to power with him could escape the taint of Watergate even after many of them had defended Nixon at length. But Republicans in 1974 were punished rather than rewarded for turning on Nixon. The celebratory lesson of the party dumping its leader was tinged with recognition that it came at a steep cost.
Democrats in the 1990s tore up that playbook. They proved that you can circle the wagons on a party-line basis and win. It was Republicans who paid the price in congressional elections for trying to impeach Clinton; Democrats won in 1998–2000, reversing the outcome that faced Republicans who turned on Nixon and got pasted in 1974–76. (Granted, at the presidential level, public disgust at the whole spectacle helped Al Gore lose to George W. Bush in 2000 — but by a hair.) Indeed, that dynamic repeated itself in 2020, when Democrats underperformed in down-ticket races after impeaching Donald Trump.
Ever since, we have lived in the moral world made by the Clinton defense arguments. That world gave us Trump, and it gave cover — until Trump shifted the partisan valence of such arguments — to the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. If you’re wondering today why terrible people such as Graham Platner and Ken Paxton think they can run for major public office, this is why: because one of the two parties succeeded in persuading the American people to stop caring about the moral character of public men.