In The New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Confessore writes about the new lobbying stars in Washington. A new president always creates opportunities for new players. When that president is a non-politician without an established Washington entourage, there’s a lot of uncertainty. Who knows the new president? Who knows the people who know the president?

Confessore tells great stories about newly famous Trumpists such as one-time campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and about “Washington backbenchers, B‑listers and understudies” who suddenly realized they knew somebody who had been part of the Trump campaign.

USA Today has reported on people close to Vice President Pence who have opened or expanded lobbying businesses this year.

It’s a sordid story of how fixers and their handsome fees survive even in an administration that came in promising to “drain the swamp.” But how much has really changed? As Confessore reviews:

There are about 10,000 registered lobbyists in Washington — roughly 20 for every member of Congress — and thousands more unregistered ones: consultants and ‘‘strategic advisers’’ who are paid to help shape government policy but do not disclose their clients. By whatever name, they are the people companies and countries hire to help roll back regulations, unstick bids, tweak legislation or get meetings. Lobbying is at once Washington’s most maligned, enduring and essential industry. Underpaid young politicos and retiring lawmakers depend on Beltway lobby shops — known as ‘‘K Street’’ after the city boulevard that once housed many of them — for the high-six-figure salaries that will loft them into Washington’s petite aristocracy.… But the private sector needs lobbyists the most. The modern federal government is so sprawling and complex that it practically demands a specialized class of middlemen and ‑women.

Over the decades, lobbying has evolved from a niche trade of fixers and gatekeepers to a sleek, vertically integrated, $3‑billion-a-year industry.

Total reported spending on lobbying peaked in 2009 and 2010, the first two years of President Barack Obama’s administration, when trillions of dollars were being handed out or moved around by the stimulus package, the omnibus spending bill, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, the Affordable Care Act, and an ultimately unsuccessful 1200-page energy bill stuffed with taxes, regulations, loopholes, and subsidies. The Washington Post found that “more than 90 organizations hired lobbyists to specifically influence provisions of the massive stimulus bill.” Well-connected Democratic lobbyists like former House majority leader Richard Gephardt and Tony Podesta, the brother of Obama transition director John Podesta, did especially well.

And of course it didn’t start with Obama. As federal spending soared under President George W. Bush, the number of registered lobbying firms climbed. In six years the number of companies with Washington lobbyists rose 58 percent. After the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, party leaders created the “K Street Project” to pressure lobbying firms to replace Democrats with Republicans. They made it clear that lobbyists needed to shift their political contributions toward Republican candidates, or lose their access to Republican policymakers. By 2003, the Washington Post reported, the GOP had in fact placed Republicans in a significant number of the most influential positions at trade associations and corporate government affairs offices—and were getting their contributions. 

Every new administration threatens to shake up some policies, and that creates a demand for lobbyists to get a piece of the new action. It also means opportunities for people who are well connected among the new White House and agency staffs. But the biggest reason that lobbying grows is that federal spending and regulation grow.

As Craig Holman of the Ralph Nader-founded Public Citizen told Marketplace Radio after a report on rising lobbying expenditures during the financial crisis, “the amount spent on lobbying … is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.”

Marketplace’s Ronni Radbill noted then, “In other words, the more active the government, the more the private sector will spend to have its say… . With the White House injecting billions of dollars into the economy [in early 2009], lobbyists say interest groups are paying a lot more attention to Washington than they have in a very long time.”

Big government means big lobbying. When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. And today’s federal budget is the biggest picnic in history.

The Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek explained the process 70 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: “As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power.”

That’s the worst aspect of the growth of lobbying: it indicates that decisions in the marketplace are being crowded out by decisions made by lobbyists and politicians, which means a more powerful government, less freedom, and less economic growth. 

Just before the annual rush to get out of town for the August District Work Period, the Senate Intelligence Committee passed its annual Intelligence Authorization bill by a 14–1 vote. The lone dissenter was Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, a recent guest at Cato and arguably the most articulate and well-informed member of Congress on Intelligence Community oversight issues. Almost a month after the vote, Wyden explained to The Hill why he elected to oppose the bill, which includes language aimed at Wikileaks and its founder and leader, Julian Assange:

“My concern is that the use of the novel phrase ‘non-state hostile intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional, and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets,” said Wyden.

“The language in the bill suggesting that the U.S. government has some unstated course of action against ‘non-state hostile intelligence services’ is equally troubling.”

The specific language in the bill reads as follows:

SEC. 623. SENSE OF CONGRESS ON WIKILEAKS.

It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.

“Sense of Congress” provisions are legislative puffery—they have no legal force or effect. This is a political messaging and propaganda exercise aimed at the press and the Intelligence Community workforce, not a serious assault on Wikileaks or Assange. To claim otherwise trivializes the real threats that actual investigative journalists and their news organizations face from the U.S. government—such as attempted prosecutions for leaks under the Espionage Act or Congressional efforts to eradicate public encryption technologies journalists and their sources use to communicate securely. 

Genuine hostile intelligence services are not passive recipients of purloined secrets that they subsequently publish for all the world to see. Real spy services employ real human beings to actively seek out the secrets of other state-level actors or non-state entities like terrorist organizations, and they do everything possible to keep their successes—and failures—secret, for what should be obvious reasons. Wikileaks may be many things, but the notion that it is a stateless equivalent to the FSB or Mossad is laughable. 

Instead of obsessing about Assange and his organization, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees would do well to focus on real problems and real bad actors inside the American Intelligence Community—especially those who seem so intent on retaliating against IC employees and contractors trying to expose waste, fraud, abuse, or criminal conduct by IC officials. 

The Cato Institute’s Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org web site has released a new, online version of The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism.

The Encyclopedia offers “a general guide to the social and political philosophy that today goes by the name of libertarianism,” including several chapters of interest to health policy scholars:

• Abortion, by Wendy McElroy
• Bioethics, by Sigrid Fry-Revere
• Drug Prohibition, by Gene Healy
• Euthanasia, by Sigrid Fry-Revere
• Genetics, by Matt Ridley
• Health Care, by Michael F. Cannon
• Illicit Drugs, by Bruce Benson
• Intellectual Property, by Aaron Steelman
• Laissez-Faire Policy, by Bryan Caplan
• Liability, by Richard A. Epstein
• Market Failure, by Tyler Cowen
• Paternalism, by Will Wilkinson
• Price Controls, by Donald J. Boudreaux
• Psychiatry, by Jeffrey A. Schaler
• Regulation, by Michael C. Munger
• Welfare State, by Michael D. Tanner

There’s been some talk this week about a few people who once called themselves libertarians and have now turned up in alt-right circles, at the Charlottesville march or elsewhere. As I told the Daily Beast, “People change ideologies all the time. Some libertarians become conservatives, some become welfarist liberals, a few drift into creepy extremes.” And of course it’s not just libertarians. Hillary Clinton says she was a Goldwater Girl, a lot of ex-communists became the original neoconservatives, and Nobel laureates in economics have tended to move toward classical liberalism (libertarianism). But since the topic has come up, let me just agree with Nick Gillespie that “The alt-right—and Trumpism, too, to the extent that it has any coherence—is an explicit rejection of foundational libertarian beliefs in ‘free trade and free migration’ along with experiments in living that make a mess of rigid categories that appeal to racists, sexists, protectionists, and other reactionaries.” And add my own commentary, excerpted from my 2015 book The Libertarian Mind:

The dignity of the individual under libertarianism is a dignity that enhances social well-being. Libertarianism is good not just for individuals but for societies. The positive basis of libertarian social analysis is methodological individualism, the recognition that only individuals act. The ethical or normative basis of libertarianism is respect for the dignity and worth of every (other) individual. This is expressed in the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s dictum that each person is to be treated not merely as a means but as an end in himself.

Of course, as late as Jefferson’s time and beyond, the concept of the individual with full rights did not include all people. Astute observers noted that problem at the time and began to apply the ringing phrases of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and the Declaration of Independence more fully. The equality and individualism that underlay the emergence of capitalism and republican government naturally led people to start thinking about the rights of women and of slaves, especially African American slaves in the United States. It’s no accident that feminism and abolitionism emerged out of the ferment of the Industrial Revolution and the American and French revolutions. Just as a better understanding of natural rights was developed during the American struggle against specific injustices suffered by the colonies, the feminist and abolitionist Angelina Grimké noted in an 1837 letter to Catherine E. Beecher, “I have found the Anti-Slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land—the school in which human rights are more fully investigated, and better understood and taught, than in any other.”

The abolitionist movement grew logically out of the Lockean libertarianism of the American Revolution. How could Americans proclaim that “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” without noticing that they themselves were holding other men and women in bondage? They could not, of course, and had they tried, they would have been reminded by people such as the great English scholar Samuel Johnson, who wrote in 1775, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” The world’s first antislavery society was founded in Philadelphia that same year. Jefferson himself owned slaves, yet he included a passionate condemnation of slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence: “[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him.” The Continental Congress deleted that passage, but Americans lived uneasily with the obvious contradiction between their commitment to individual rights and the institution of slavery.

Although they were intimately connected in American history, slavery and racism are not inherently bound together. In the ancient world the act of enslaving another person did not imply his moral or intellectual inferiority; it was just accepted that conquerors could enslave their captives. Greek slaves were often teachers in Roman households, their intellectual eminence acknowledged and exploited.

In any case, racism in one form or another is an age-old problem, but it clearly clashes with the universal ethics of libertarianism and the equal natural rights of all men and women. As Ayn Rand pointed out in her 1963 essay “Racism,”

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage … which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

In her works Rand emphasized the importance of individual productive achievement to a sense of efficacy and happiness. She argued, “Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).” That is, some people want to feel good about themselves because they have the same skin color as Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Edison, rather than because of their individual achievements; and some want to dismiss the achievements of people who are smarter, more productive, more accomplished than themselves, just by uttering a racist epithet.

And as I wrote when a group of newsletters seemed to connect racist ideas to the libertarian movement:

Libertarians should make it clear that the people who wrote those things are not our comrades, not part of our movement, not part of the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick. Shame on them.

More on libertarianism, individualism and race — and feminism and gay rights — in The Libertarian Mind.

From The American Spirit, Simon & Shuster, 2017:

Why do some men reach for the stars and so many others never even look up? Thomas Jefferson reached for the stars.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Never, never anywhere, had there been a government instituted on the consent of the governed.

Was Jefferson including women with the words “men” and “mankind”? Possibly he was. Nobody knows. Was he thinking of black Americans when he declared all men are created equal? Ideally, yes, I think. Practically, no. He was an eighteenth-century Virginia planter, it must be remembered, as the slave quarters along Mulberry Row… attest. He was an exceedingly gifted and very great man, but like the others of that exceptional handful of politicians we call the Founding Fathers, he could also be inconsistent, contradictory, human.

And more important than how he interpreted his ringing words, is their sustaining power to inspire, beyond influences of time and place.

“All honor to Jefferson,” wrote Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War, “[all honor]to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”

All honor to Jefferson in our own world now… Indeed, we may judge our own performance in how seriously and what effect we take his teachings to heart.

As part of a yearly tradition, the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation co-host a debate in which interns of both think tanks debate whether conservatism or libertarianism is a better ideology. Following this year’s debate, the Cato Institute conducted a post-debate survey of attendees to ask who they thought won the debate and what they believe about a variety of public policy and social issues.

The survey finds that millennial conservative and libertarian attendees agree on matters of free speech and religious liberty, the size and scope of government, regulation, health care and what to do about climate change. However, striking differences emerge between the two groups particularly on matters of immigration, the temporary Muslim travel ban, gender pronouns and bathrooms, government’s response to opioid addiction, the death penalty, religious values in government, domestic surveillance, foreign policy, as well as evaluations of the Trump administration.

Full LvCDebate Attendee Survey results found here

Priority Differences and Similarities

Examining conservative and libertarian millennial attendees’ issue priorities offers a quick overview of their similarities and differences. The survey asked attendees how concerned they are about 21 different issues:

As the chart shows above, conservative millennials are more concerned about morality in society, abortion, terrorism, national security, drug use, and immigration. Libertarian millennials are more concerned about government domestic surveillance, the criminal justice system, and trade. Top priorities shared by both groups include the size and scope of government, free speech, government spending and debt, the economy, and taxes. Notably, libertarians and conservatives share their lowest priority: few are concerned about income inequality.

Voting in 2016

Although 88% of conservative millennial attendees identify as Republican (and 100% do if you include independent leaners), only 51% voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Nevertheless, this is considerably higher than the 20% of libertarian millennial attendees who voted for Trump. Among both sets of Trump voters, fully 7 in 10 said their vote was against Hillary Clinton rather than a vote for Trump. Thus, President Trump received few enthusiastic votes among this group of politically engaged millennial conservatives and libertarians.

While a majority of conservative attendees ultimately voted for Trump, a majority (55%) of libertarian attendees voted for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson instead. Few voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton (3%). In fact, more said they did not vote (19%) than voted for Clinton.

Party Identification

Conservative millennials overwhelmingly (88%) identify as Republicans, while most libertarian attendees identify with the Libertarian Party (42%) or as politically independent (36%).

However, after asking independents and libertarians if they lean toward a political party, 100% of the conservative millennial attendees leaned with the Republican Party. A majority (58%) of libertarian millennial attendees did as well, while a third said they are truly independent, and 6% identified as Democrats.

Evaluations of Trump and Key Political Figures

Although few of the libertarian and conservative millennial attendees were enthusiastic supporters of Trump during the election, 64% of conservative attendees approve of Trump’s job performance. In stark contrast, 80% of libertarian attendees disapprove. Nevertheless, conservative approval is “soft” with only 12% “strongly” approving. Libertarians are more ardently opposed, with 53% who “strongly disapprove” of President Trump.

Major differences also emerge in evaluations of key political figures. Notably, while 8 in 10 conservative millennial attendees have a favorable opinion of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, 8 in 10 libertarian attendees have an unfavorable view of him. Libertarian aversion likely stems from disagreements about the criminal justice system, policing, and drug policy. Conservative attendees also have favorable views of Kellyanne Conway (62%), former campaign manager and now Counselor to President Trump, while libertarian attendees do not (22%). Conversely, libertarian millennial attendees have positive views of former Gov. Gary Johnson (61%), while conservatives do not (18%). Conservative attendees are also about twice as likely as libertarians to have positive views of Senators Ted Cruz (88% vs 50%) and Marco Rubio (91% vs 48%).

Libertarian and conservative millennial attendees come together in their shared favorable views of Senator Rand Paul, Education Secretary Betsy Devos (likely due to their shared support of school choice), and writer George Will. They also share unfavorable views of Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ann Coulter, figures more closely associated with the “alt-right.”

Where Do They Get their News?

Conservative and libertarian millennial attendees share similar news consumption habits, sharing five of their top six news outlets: the Wall Street Journal (85%, 86%), the New York Times (66%, 75%), the Washington Post (68%, 72%), CNN (50%, 48%) and National Review (76%, 61%). However, conservatives are about 30 points more likely to regularly watch Fox (74% vs 45%) and 15 points more likely to read the Federalist (51% vs 36%). Conversely, libertarians are 53 points more likely to read Reason (24% vs 77%).

Culture Wars and Transgender Issues

Conservatives and libertarian millennials are starkly at odds when it comes to what pronouns to use when referring to transgender people. When referring to a transgender person, 68% of libertarian millennial attendees choose to use the person’s preferred gender pronouns. In contrast, 67% of conservative millennial attendees say they use the pronouns corresponding with the transgender person’s biological sex.

This difference extends to bathroom access as well. Eight in 10 conservative millennials say transgender people should be required to use the restroom corresponding with their biological sex. Conversely, 70% of libertarian millennials say transgender people should be allowed to use the restroom of the gender they identify with.

Most conservatives (81%) disagree that we as a society need to do more to ensure LGBT people feel fully accepted. Meanwhile, libertarians are split, with 50% believing more should be done for LGBT people to feel accepted and 47% agreeing with conservatives that no more needs to be done.

Despite these differences, conservatives and libertarians agree on religious liberty: 99% of conservative and 87% of libertarian respondents believe that businesses should be allowed to refuse service to same-sex weddings.

Immigration

Conservative and libertarian millennials diverge dramatically on questions of illegal and legal immigration. While 79% of libertarians support increasing the number of immigrants allowed into the country each year, only 20% of conservatives agree. Instead, most conservatives would prefer to decrease the number (35%) or keep it the same (45%).

When it comes to handling illegal immigration, a majority (52%) of conservative attendees support deporting illegal immigrants and 24% wish to bar them from citizenship. In contrast, 70% of libertarian attendees want to allow illegal immigrants to stay in the US and be able to eventually apply for citizenship.

Finally, 69% of conservatives favor building a wall along the Mexican border, but 90% of libertarians oppose. However, conservatives are less intensely in favor of the wall than libertarians are opposed to it: only 14% of conservatives “strongly favor” while 67% of libertarians “strongly oppose” its construction.

When it comes to passing a temporary ban on Muslims immigrating to the United States, conservative attendees are evenly divided, while 86% of libertarian attendees are opposed.

Opioid Epidemic

While most likely share concerns about overuse of prescription painkillers, conservative and libertarian attendees starkly disagree about what government should do about it. Eight in 10 conservatives agree “government needs to do more” to combat prescription painkiller addiction, but 8 in 10 libertarians disagree that government should take on this role.

Organ Donations

It is currently illegal to buy or sell human organs. However, 92% of libertarian attendees believe such a market should be legal; 8% agree with the status quo. Conservatives are ardently opposed with 72% who think such a market should remain illegal, while 28% would favor legalization.

Foreign Policy and National Security

Conservative and libertarian millennials sharply disagree on questions of foreign policy. Nearly 90% of conservative attendees support either increasing (38%) or maintaining (51%) our military presence around the world, while 84% of libertarians support decreasing this presence. Moreover, 92% of libertarian respondents support cutting defense spending to help balance the federal budget, while 72% of conservatives oppose such cuts.

Conservative and libertarian attendees also make different trade-offs between national security and privacy. Seven in 10 conservatives say they’d be willing to give up some personal freedom and privacy for the sake of national security. In contrast, 9 in 10 libertarians say they would not be willing to give up more freedom and privacy for security.

In line with such priorities, 60% of conservative attendees approve of government collection of domestic telephone and Internet data, while 92% of libertarians disapprove of this collection.

Health Care

On matters of health care, conservatives and libertarians are often aligned—particularly when it comes to repealing the Affordable Care Act/​Obamacare (99%, 95%). However, similar to what’s playing out at the Congressional level, libertarians and conservatives disagree about how to improve the health care system in the country. Three-fourths (76%) of libertarians say the health care system “needs to be completely rebuilt.” However, conservatives are evenly divided with 49% agreeing that the system should be rebuilt, but 46% who think the system “needs major reform but doesn’t need to be completely rebuilt.” Less than 5% of either group think the current system works well and only needs minor changes.

Climate Change

Libertarian and conservative millennial attendees disagree about the causes of climate change but they agree on a solution. Conservatives are more likely to believe climate change is a natural phenomenon, with 54% believing increases in Earth’s temperature are either mostly or entirely due to natural causes. Meanwhile, 62% of libertarians think climate change comes partially, mostly, or entirely from human activity. Despite these different underlying beliefs, 99% of conservative and libertarian attendees agree that technological innovation in the free market will better solve climate change than government regulation.

Criminal Justice

Majorities of conservatives and libertarians reach consensus on several criminal justice issues. Both agree that police departments using military weapons and drones are not necessary for law enforcement purposes. But libertarians (92%) agree more than conservatives (61%). Both groups also favor eliminating mandatory minimum prison sentences for people convicted of selling drugs (64% conservative, 84% libertarian).

However, conservative and libertarian attendees diverge on the death penalty: a majority (56%) of conservatives favor it while a majority (75%) of libertarians oppose it. Respondents also diverge in their perception of racial equality before the law, with 54% of conservatives saying that African Americans and other minorities “receive equal treatment with whites” in the criminal justice system and 73% of libertarians believing that minorities do not receive equal treatment.

Free Markets and the Welfare State

Despite the variety of policy differences between libertarian and conservative attendees outlined above, the two groups largely agree about economic issues, the benefits of free markets, and trade.

For instance, 100% of both groups say they favor a smaller government providing fewer services and low taxes. Nearly 100% of both oppose raising taxes on wealthy households and also agree that regulation too often does more harm than good. Eight in 10 conservatives and nearly 100% of libertarians believe free trade must be allowed even if domestic industries are hurt by foreign competition.

Religion

Conservative and libertarian millennials have different ideas about the role of religion in society. An overwhelming majority (83%) of libertarian attendees say religious values should not play a more important role in government. But, 62% of conservative attendees disagree and think such values should play a more important role. Conservatives also believe that it’s important for kids to be brought up with religious values. Libertarians are divided, but tend to disagree (56%).

Much of this contrast may stem from differences in religious affiliation and habits. While 95% of conservative respondents have a religious preference, 38% of libertarians describe themselves as “non-religious.” Moreover, conservative millennial attendees are twice as likely as libertarians to attend church weekly or monthly (80% vs 41%). A majority (58%) of libertarian respondents either never or rarely attend a religious service.

Who Won the Intern Debate?

Who won the intern debate depends on whom you ask. Among conservative millennial attendees: 53% said the conservative team won and 44% said the libertarian team won. Among libertarian millennial attendees, 94% said the libertarians won while 5% said the conservatives won. Among the moderates, liberals and progressives in the audience, 83% felt the libertarian team won and 12% thought the conservatives won.

Implications

This survey provides a useful snapshot of young politically engaged conservatives and libertarians who are interested enough in politics and public policy to intern in Washington or attend an event for Washington interns. Thus, this data offers an idea of the direction young activists may take public policy as they age and the cleavages that may animate policy debates into the future. 

Full LvCDebate Attendee Survey results found here

David Kemp contributed to this report.

Ripping into President Trump on “Morning Joe” last week, historian Jon Meacham invoked FDR: “the presidency is preeminently a place of moral leadership.” When I heard that, I thought, man: if that’s right, then we are well and truly…er, doomed. But is it right?

A lot of people seem to think so, including some conservatives. In his Washington Post column this week, Michael Gerson laments “the sad effects of President Trump’s renunciation of moral leadership on American politics and culture.” And in a piece titled “Conservatives Need to Remember, Presidents Affect Culture,” National Review’s David French writes that “In 1998, Bill Clinton damaged the culture for the sake of preserving his political hide”; now, “a GOP president is inflicting even deeper wounds.” Instead of minimizing President Trump’s morally blinkered response to the murder at the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, French argues, “it’s time for conservatives to remember the cultural power of the presidency” and recapture the moral clarity they had in the Clinton years. 

Back then, French argues, conservatives were right to insist that “adultery and perjury matter.” Fair enough: the latter may even have been reasonable grounds for impeachment, though there were better ones, as the great Nat Hentoff noted at the time. Still, where’s the evidence that Clinton’s transgressions “damaged the culture”?

Remember Bill Bennett’s Index of Leading Cultural Indicators? First published in 1994, it armed conservative Cassandras with charts showing the world going to hell on multiple metrics: marriage, sexual license, abortion, drug use, crime, etc. Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Oughties: in the era of Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers, most of those trends started heading in the right direction.

Toward the end of ‘90s, when the second edition of the Index was being readied, declinism had become a much tougher sell, leaving Bennett harrumphing that: “conservatives are going to have to face the fact that there is some good news on the landscape.”

Declining divorce rates, lower birth rates for unmarried women, and decreased tolerance for adultery were just a few of the trends complicating the narrative of Clinton-induced cultural rot. Oddly enough, Bill’s extracurricular hijinks didn’t lead Americans to take their marriages less seriously. The number of Americans who believe that “marital infidelity is always wrong” actually went up.

The taboo against adultery, as measured by the answer to that question, began weakening again around 2008. Whatever drove that trend, it couldn’t have been the examples set by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. They were lousy presidents, but worthy enough role models as far as marriage goes. Maybe the “cultural power of the presidency”—for good and for ill—isn’t as vast as French imagines.

How could it be? There’s abundant political science evidence casting doubt on the notion the Bully Pulpit moves the needle much when it comes to public policy. Transforming the nation’s moral landscape by word or example is a harder job by far.

That doesn’t mean the example Trump sets is irrelevant. His rise to power has obviously had what might be called a “cretin mobilization effect,” emboldening some truly vile people, as French himself has experienced firsthand.

However, when public intellectuals frame Trump’s norm violations in religious terms—“sacrilege” by America’s “high priest and chief unifier,” according to Jonathan Haidt—it makes me itch. We don’t need the president to be a “consoler-in-chief,” a “theologian-in-chief,” or any of the various extraconstitutional roles lately proposed for him. This atavistic, quasi-mystical orientation towards government is notably absent from the Federalist, where the president is described as a figure who will have “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.”

The chief executive officer of the federal government isn’t the Great Helmsman of our culture, but he has, in the corporate jargon, an “outward-facing role.” By default, he’s the head of state in our system, and Americans have a right to demand some minimum standards of conduct. There are remedies for behavior “grossly incompatible with the proper function and purpose of the office.”

But will Trump’s tenure—however long it lasts—result in what French fears: the widespread triumph of “hate, division, and rage”? Here, I’m skeptical. The overwhelming majority of Americans aren’t so far gone as to take their cues about right and wrong from any president—let alone this one. A good thing too, given that, in living memory, presidents have conducted themselves abominably in their personal relationships, lied us into war, and used “the available federal machinery to screw [their] political enemies.” Anyone looking for a personal role model might do better by randomly selecting a professional athlete or reality-show star (some exceptions may apply).

Sure, “presidents affect culture,” but the biggest effect they have is by influencing how we think about the presidency—often in ways they don’t intend. Watergate obviously had an enormous impact on American attitudes toward the office. Nixon’s lawlessness helped puncture the myth of “the implicit infallibility of presidents,” by revealing that the man in the Oval Office could be a petty, paranoid, foul-mouthed little crook.

In a less dramatic fashion, Bill Clinton also helped demystify the presidency. As Judge Posner correctly predicted in his book on the Clinton impeachment, that episode’s “most abiding effect… may be to make it difficult to take Presidents seriously as superior people.” If we needed a refresher course in that lesson, we’re certainly getting one right now.