FLOTSAM & JETSAM: Virtue and power

Thursday, April 22, 2021

Virtue and power

 Sam Smith – I’ve just finished reading some books and watching documentaries on a bunch of public figures I have long admired including Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Winston Churchill, Jack Kennedy, and Ernest Hemingway. The net result is a somewhat lower opinion of them based on their private rather than public actions -  yes, even Eleanor Roosevelt ignored her marriage for a lesbian affair. And, of course, Hemingway was the worst of all, something nobody told me when I was learning how to write in high school thanks in part to him.

On the other hand, I also realized that this inconsistent relationship between virtue and power was not a new experience for me. After all I had long noted that Lyndon Johnson got more good legislation passed than any president other than FDR but you wouldn’t want him anywhere near your daughter. And I had early learned in places like Philadelphia and Boston as well as covering Capitol Hill as a young radio reporter that bad guys could do good things and vice versa.

It turns out that back in 2013 a group of psychologists rated our presidents by their narcissism and at the top of the list was LBJ with FDR in 4th place, Jack Kennedy in 5th with true modern con men Nixon and Clinton only coming in 6th & 7th. In short, back then, love of power did not have to kill virtue.

I believe that television, social media and public relations has changed all that as the perpetual liar Donald Trump well demonstrated. You don’t have to do anything real to gain power, the later crowd – beginning with Nixon - was learning. Fiction would do the job. Before these major tools of deception were handy, virtue was a useful way to help get you to the top. Now you just need to create an image of it.

But there’s still a little hope. Longtime pol Joe Biden, like his increasingly long ago predecessors, is looking for popular virtue and running with it. This is about the best we have ever gotten from a president and perhaps is so rare these days that many do not recognize it.

So where do you look for real virtue?  At the opposite end of society. As I’ve argued before, change comes from the bottom. The top merely chooses that which will help their status the most. Consider the civil rights, labor union, anti-war and environmental movements as prime examples.

But we tend to demand more of our leaders than they will ever provide. The trick is to become so powerful they have no other choice in order to retain power.

Which is one reason I have urged blacks, latinos and white lower paid white workers to discover their common economic interest and organize around it. After all, there are almost twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks.. A revival of labor unions would be the sort of thing that the most narcissistic liberal Democratic president would join in support. Just like LBJ and FDR. We need to reteach our politicians that virtue can add to power.