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The Moral Imperative
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10509 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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1 / 1993 |
2,058 Words |
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Robert Royal
Robert Royal is a vice president at the Center for Ethics and
Public Policy. |
In ancient Rome, when a victorious general celebrated in a triumphal procession, a priest rode in the chariot with him, whispering in his ear, "Remember, you are not god!"
Human nature has not, at last report, changed much in the past two thousand years. Bill Clinton would be well served if people around him on his triumphal trip from Little Rock to the District of Columbia performed the essential and timeless function of reminding him about the dangers of hubris in the White House.
Clinton let power go to his head in his first term as governor of Arkansas, trying to impose elite liberal goals on an unwilling populace. The Arkansas voters responded by immediately returning him to private life for a while. He seems to have learned a lesson from that defeat. But the temptations, both political and personal, in Washington are on a scale without equal in any other seat of power. The principal challenge for the new president is to establish a new vision for the country while keeping a clear head about the nature and limits of what government--any government--can and ought to do.
Clinton has earned his triumph by his success in creating hope for the future in an election in which Bush's "vision thing" finally died its natural death. The White House staff who early in the Bush administration vaunted a "New Paradigm" in the end were revealed to have No Paradigm. The American people, tired of Bush's moral bankruptcy, returned a vote of No Confidence. They now expect some pragmatic approaches to economic problems from Clinton. But they also seem to be searching for a new national purpose, a vision beyond the national malaise that descended upon us with the end of the Cold War.
As Aristotle observed long ago, politics is a branch of ethics, but a branch with some specific characteristics. In politics, we do not try to turn every moral principle into law, but we do seek to order public life, so that civic amity may emerge from chaos of individual interests. Where politics fails to ensure that large framework of public morality, the discrete political successes will soon fail of purpose. In a speech he gave at Notre Dame last fall, Clinton recognized as much in observing:
All across this country, we are in quieter crisis. Yes, it is a crisis of economy. Yes, it is a crisis of our educational system. Yes, it is the crisis of our environment. But, most of all, it is a crisis of spirituality and community--a crisis that calls upon each of us to
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