Measuring corruption — and moving on
Since classical logic doesn’t appear much in school curricula these days, it is interesting when one of its terms enters everyday use. That happened in 2016, when people suddenly began using the words “false equivalence” more than I’d ever seen or heard, especially in the comments sections following op-ed pieces on presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
It happened again with the candidates of 2020, but to a much lesser degree — for good reason, and for bad.
The examples of false equivalence from Wikipedia are good and memorable: A painting of Jesus and photo of Hitler show both with mustaches, “but that does not make them the same.” And, “the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is no more harmful than when your neighbor drips some oil on the ground when changing his car’s oil.”
In everyday speech we sometimes call it “comparing apples and oranges.” Or we object with phrases like, “That’s in another league altogether!” Significant variations in kind and magnitude, then, catch our attention, or should, but we often disagree — in politics, anyway — as to which we are seeing.
If you were foolhardy enough, in 2016, to discuss the Clinton family’s financial shenanigans in the same space as the Trump family’s financial shenanigans, you could expect one out of, oh, three comments to decry the “false equivalence.”
It smelled like a partisan talking point, and with 5% of voters choosing an alternative party candidate and almost 2% choosing no president at all, the election’s outcome arguably demonstrated that plenty of voters were saying of Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton, “Um, no, this is true equivalence.”
Or, “they’re awful enough that I reject them both.”
That was my stance back then — a Never Trump, Never Clinton voter — but it still struck me as funny and sad that Trump supporters would say, “He’s no worse than the Clintons — just more open about it” and Democrats would tacitly concede, with their “false equivalence” trope, that the Clintons were indeed corrupt — just not as much as Mr. Trump.
I disagreed with this ethics assessment in 2016, and I still do, even as rumors of different scandals echo in 2020.
We expect people to cheat in business, to bend laws to the breaking point in pursuit of profit, and even to ignore them completely. It is wrong, and wearying, but we are not surprised.
We may not be surprised when people do this in the realm of public service either, but we should be dismayed. Disgusted, even. Since our form of government is a public trust — our civil religion — we shouldn’t tolerate the corruption of it for personal gain.
As Harry Truman put it, “An honest public servant can’t become rich in politics.”
I take this principle a bit further, finding post-public service profiteering unseemly — unless it’s funny, like Hillary Clinton’s agreeing to give a speech at a 2019 summit on cybersecurity. (She canceled a few weeks and many punchlines later.)
This year the Trump campaign tried to make much of Hunter Biden’s improper business dealings in Ukraine, and of Joe Biden’s claiming not to know about it. I learned that alluding to it alongside Mr. Trump’s ethical lapses quickly garnered the “false equivalence” complaint.
Of course, even if you set aside the Bidens’ Ukraine problem — and “setting it aside” is exactly what most journalists did — you’d still have Mr. Biden’s very hands-y way with women, his false assertions that the driver who killed his wife and child 50 years ago was drunk, his plagiarizing a British politician’s speeches, and so on.
For enough voters, however, there was adequate difference between the two candidates’ flaws — whether in type or in magnitude — to make a choice.
And beyond ethics, there is mood. Joe Biden is a cheerful fellow. He does “positive and upbeat” far better than Mr. Trump. It is a sobering commentary on contemporary life that this feels like a respite — and that this is enough.