There is a “crisis of confidence,” right? Right. Caused by political stupidities, corrosion of morality, defects of personality? No answer. Nobody rightly knows. The attempts to overcome the crisis are groping and uncertain, at best. President Nixon’s recipe seems to counsel political rhetoric; but then symbolism and appearances have always played an excessively large role in his public actions. One may even say that his vaunted detente amounts to little more than a “let’s pretend” agreement. Nixon’s opponents, at least those with the best intentions, rely on the courts; they desire the certainties of court orders, court-sanctioned proofs, judges’ verdicts. Both sides essentially seek a mobilization of power as a remedy for a lack of power. Each side hopes to overwhelm the other by sheer weight.
This is no way to recover confidence; the country is bound to lose. The crisis is rooted in the politicization of ethics. When political leaders begin to see their own political ends as implicitly and ultimately good, they erase the boundary line between political success and virtue. The good, morally speaking, ceases to operate as the yardstick of judgment and criticism; it becomes absorbed into the vortex of political success. The political begins to cover things which by right are beyond and above politics. And eventually all of human life becomes subservient to political interest and no criterion for judgment is allowed. Then the bond of “public faith,” as Burke called it, begins to wither.
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