Politicians and shame culture

Ross Douthat opines:

Larry Craig was arrested for public indecency, pled guilty, and promised to resign. But he didn’t; instead, he served another year in the Senate before retiring in ’08. David Vitter confessed, albeit without offering specifics, to having been a customer of a D.C. prostitution ring. The madam was arrested, convicted, and committed suicide; Vitter is running for re-election. John Ensign slept with an aide’s wife, and ended up embroiled in a scandal involving payoffs and accusations of blackmail; he plans to run for re-election. And Mark Sanford, remarkably enough, is still the governor of South Carolina.

Now we have Max Baucus, who tried to push his mistress into a U.S. Attorney’s job. Maybe Baucus is just staying at his desk till health care reform is through the Senate; maybe he’ll resign once that great work is accomplished. Or maybe not.

Of all the politicians who’ve let their private lives corrupt their public duties lately, only Eliot Spitzer took the once-routine, now-remarkable step of actually relinquishing his office.

What always strikes me about political sex-scandals is that for normal people this sort of thing could quite easily lead to the loss of one’s job. In many companies these sorts of affairs and cooking of the books that come part and parcel so often with these affairs would spell the end of your days working for that company – especially if the person you had an affair with worked for you as an aid or intern (and so forth).  But in politics, where this should be even worse and have even greater shame and consequences, time and again we see the people responsible paying no penalty at all, not resigning, and going on as if nothing happened.

Maybe it’s the shame problem.  In the real world people have to face their shame.  Those around us won’t let us escape it (though this is becoming more and more of a problem in our increasingly atomized culture).  But in the world of celebrities and politicians, people take on a sense of being untouchable and perpetually unashamed.  That’s not good for our culture or our leadership.

A little shame can go a long way after all.