Somehow, the Harvey Weinstein story became a Hillary Clinton story.
Clinton, who received campaign donations from the Hollywood mogul and attended fundraisers hosted by him, was criticized for saying nothing in the days after the New York Times published an account accusing Weinstein of repeated sexual assault and harassment. And then when she did say something, she was accused of not saying enough.
Weinstein has long been associated with Democratic and liberal politics, hosting fundraisers for Clinton and Barack Obama (also called on to release a statement of condemnation); donating $300,000 to the Democratic National Committee, and more to individual legislators; and publicly championing women’s rights. In the days since the Times’s account (and subsequent revelations in the New Yorker), any progressive or Democratic institution that’s been associated with Weinstein has been expected to cut itself loose quickly, entirely, and permanently. And any Hollywood figure who’s expressed progressive opinions has been expected to do the same.
The investigatory zeal is different than it was for Republican Party politicians who were friendly to Roger Ailes. The former Fox News head advised President Trump on the debate even after he was pushed out at Fox News in 2016 amid allegations of widespread sexual harassment. For that matter, a year after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, Donald Trump has never been made anyone’s problem — except Billy Bush’s.
The disparity between these two scenarios suggests something perverse but inescapable about the media’s expectations for politicians’ response to scandals. Public figures who talk about a social problem in the abstract get pressured to repudiate their associates who contribute to it. Public figures who weren’t vocal about the problem to begin with get to stay silent when it’s one of their friends.
This isn’t limited to liberal condemnation of sexual predators. It’s a trap that any public figure can fall into if they dare to express a belief that the world should be better than it is — if they dare, in other words, to be political.
It’s easier to expose hypocrisy than systemic rot. And that means problems that can be named, and the people who name them, become the most obvious targets when their ideals are failed.
Hypocrisy is the most powerful gotcha of all
It still feels somewhat superficial, or even venal, to dig up dirt on someone for the sake of digging up dirt, even if he or she is a powerful figure. But it feels both more justifiable and more powerful to prove hypocrisy: A public figure uses his power to advocate for a particular morality, but privately either engages in or supports immoral behavior.
Obviously, that applies only to people who are willing to advocate for particular moralities in public: politicians and certain businesspeople and celebrities. And it applies most starkly to those who have the most past statements to wade through, for the hypocrisy to be proven — those who have been most out front in public life the longest.
Sex and sexual morality are particularly touchy — but not all sex scandals appear to say something about the perpetrator’s belief system. Seattle’s first openly gay mayor, Ed Murray, was forced to resign last month among allegations that he sexually abused multiple teenage boys; that hasn’t become a national story, because it’s accepted that this isn’t a scandal that says anything about the belief system Murray espouses. On the flip side, the years-old divorce saga of Catholic Newt Gingrich made a lot more waves during the 2016 presidential primary than the years-old divorce saga of not-previously-religious Donald Trump. So violations of sexual morality are particularly juicy.
The weird thing is that progressives and conservatives have totally separate concerns when it comes to sexual morality — with conservatives mostly concerned with abortion and the breakdown of the nuclear family, and progressives mostly concerned with sexual consent and sexism.
Think of attention paid to religious Republicans paying gay escorts while married. Most progressives would condemn that behavior because they don’t support cheating on one’s spouse, but they attack it because it undermines the “traditional family.”
Hypocrisy critiques are powerful because they don’t require you to buy into a particular morality — just to believe that people ought to act in accordance with their own moral compasses. “You fail to live up to my morals” is an impotent attack in a diverse society; “you fail to live up to your own morals” is an impossible indictment to escape.
Journalistic ideals of objectivity make the difference even starker. In traditional reporting, whenever you recognize something as a moral argument, you’re supposed to avoid it — or at least allow other people to make it for you in the form of quotes. That means that debates among different moral frameworks become “he said, she said” reporting, while hypocrisy becomes a matter of investigative journalism — digging up the quote in which the subject condemned the exact thing you’ve found him engaging in now.
Cases of massive wrongdoing like Weinstein’s require follow-up reporting, an attempt to figure out how something happened — which means sharing blame more widely. After all, if something is a systemic problem, it can’t be just one person’s fault. But most people don’t have the information necessary to figure out exactly who helped Weinstein or failed to stop him. And the information the public does have makes it pretty clear that the assistants who helped Weinstein set traps for young actresses were at best powerless and at worst victims themselves — not exactly the people it feels comfortable to blame.
So the existence of public statements becomes not just a way to hold perpetrators accountable but the equivalent of an investigative lead. “Who should be called for comment?” becomes the same thing as, “Who should be held accountable?”
The news cycle requires people like Hillary Clinton to go through the motions of issuing a statement to make it clear that no, really, they oppose a violation of sexual morality even when they know the person accused of it. But really, the statement isn’t the point. The statement, if anything, simply cements the idea that there was something to apologize for. The point is that people who believe in a better world have been implicated in the fallen world we live in.
Hypocrisy is a great way to make specific, solvable problems seem like unfixable human frailty
When you don’t actually believe in the morality you suspect someone of violating, though, it’s easy to suspect that they don’t believe it either.
Commentators on the right have started using the term “signaling” to refer dismissively to progressive efforts to denounce racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. — meaning that the denunciation is born out of a desire to impress other progressives, to look “woke,” rather than out of deeply felt outrage. In its strongest form, this can imply that progressives don’t actually believe in any of the ideals they’re espousing, that they’re just code words that must be used to stay in the progressive club.
Anti-gay Republicans, meanwhile, tend to get their own sexuality questioned. (How many jokes about Mike Pence’s sexuality have you seen in liberal spaces?) The thinking there, too, is that believing that same-sex marriage is a threat to the nuclear family must be motivated by some baser desire than ideology.
To successfully call out hypocrisy means to prove that a politician’s words aren’t to be trusted, because they don’t reflect her beliefs. That’s why the statement of repudiation is just theater: The whole point is that words are empty.
If expressing beliefs is performative, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Forcing people to say things, to disown each other, becomes an acknowledgment that morals are just theater anyway.