Not sexually harassing people should be a very, very low bar. In a country of hundreds of millions, it shouldn’t be hard to fill 50 governorships, 100 U.S. Senate seats, 435 U.S. House seats, and one Oval Office with individuals who possess some sense of common sense and decency.
Yet both seem rare in the halls of government today, and their combination rarer still. As Plato noted in his “Republic,” good men are not naturally inclined “to hold rule and office and take other people’s troubles in hand,” and so “the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse.”
While some allegations against political figures are no doubt baseless fabrications for political points, the number of credible allegations (of harassment as well as other scandals) surprises us. Disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is just the latest example. If these people really are servants of the public who work at the bidding of their voters, why do they act like the rules don’t apply to them?
Quite simply, they’ve been allowed to believe the rules don’t. We’ve seen it in the less criminal, but still sinister, actions of political shot-callers living by different rules than the draconian lockdowns they told you to follow over the past year.
From lecturing us on climate change from private jets to holding massive, ornate funerals while expecting the rest of us to tell dying loved ones goodbye over FaceTime, elites like Cuomo aren’t just hypocrites — they live by a hierarchy in which their actions are defended by the willfully blind eye of a fawning corporate media.
We saw the same double standard at former President Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash, where hundreds of celebrities and other well-connecteds partied while their political camp threatened the rest of us with new lockdown measures. True to form, Annie Karni of The New York Times covered for them, excusing their actions because they were a “sophisticated” crowd.
Oh, they don’t, do they?