Assholes
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Cheney, in particular, might be viewed in these terms from an older-style conservative’s perspective. According to many conservatives, his policies were a frontal assault on institutions that embody the wisdom of the ages. His doctrine of unlimited presidential power threatened to destabilize the delicate balance among coequal branches of government, while the doctrine of preventive war and the suspension of due process upended standing international treaty and customary law. Even so, he felt entitled to set aside the wisdom of the ages without fear and trembling, without the humble knowledge, well taught by Edmund Burke, that sweeping policy change may easily have unintended consequences that make the cure worse than the disease—for instance, anarchy in the wake of a quick invasion in Iraq.32
We find a more specific example of reckless disregard in the summer of 2002, while President Bush was only considering the decision to go to war with Iraq. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Vice President Cheney made a strong case for war against Saddam Hussein, which allies of the United States took as a definitive indication that Bush had already decided to go to war without consulting them. This in effect undermined U.S. efforts to make a case for war at the U.N. a few months later; the United States naturally seemed to be just going through the motions. Perhaps most strikingly, Cheney gave the speech after circumventing the usual procedures for “clearing” a speech with the president, the CIA, and other parties within the government, so that all are comfortable with its content. Cheney clearly decided that he was exempt from basic institutional obligations, and with great consequence for his president, his country, and for the world.
THE SELF-AGGRANDIZING ASSHOLE
One could qualify as a reckless asshole simply for gross negligence. As this last example suggests, Dick Cheney is also self-aggrandizing, in the sense that he acted to enhance his own power, even to the point of usurping Bush’s office. The self-aggrandizing asshole invokes moral cause, but his cause is ultimately, on balance, himself.
In Cheney’s defense, we can at least say that he is a long-serving public official, who can offer a raft of sincere moral arguments for his policy views. Those are arguments we can seriously engage, quite aside from Cheney’s political tactics. The wild-eyed arguments of Chavez and Ahmadinejad are harder to take seriously and difficult to even grasp. This makes them self-aggrandizing assholes of a purer style. Yet there is a general similarity (even if we finally judge such cases quite differently). Chavez and Ahmadinejad presumably do have some intelligible grievances, even if they are inconclusive in the final analysis (after all, the major powers hardly have a spotless history in Latin American and Middle Eastern relations). In general, then, self-aggrandizing assholes seem to come in a broad spectrum of pure and less pure styles, depending on how motives of enhancing their own power mix with other moral concerns.
Perhaps an especially pure case is Huey Long, the early 1930s’ Louisiana governor and U.S. senator. Though he shared President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s progressive outlook, albeit from Roosevelt’s left, Roosevelt regarded him as one of the two most dangerous men in America (the other being Douglas MacArthur) for his corrupt and demagogic politics.33 Long claimed to be moved by moral concern, as when he condemned the inequalities of his day (“Not a single thin dime of concentrated, bloated, pompous wealth, massed in the hands of a few people, has been raked down to relieve the masses”),34 and indeed he criticized the U.S. political system in terms that resonate today (“They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen”).35 As for political tactics, however, Long felt entitled to take any means, without being especially concerned about whether they really were necessary for his ends, or whether they were appropriate in a democracy. As he put it, “I’d rather violate every one of the damn conventions and see my bills passed, than sit back in my office, all nice and proper, and watch ’em die.”36 “I used to try to get things done by saying ‘please.’ … Now … I dynamite ’em out of my path.”37 When he was accused of demagoguery, he in effect ignored the moral issue of how power is exercised in a democratic society with this convenient definition: “I would describe a demagogue as a politician who don’t keep his promises.”38 In effect, Long justified his political machine by defining corruption out of existence.
On the left in our own day, a less extreme example of moralized self-aggrandizing might be U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader, whose spoiler role helped to usher in what other progressives regard as the disastrous years of George W. Bush. Or one might think of former U.S. senator John Edwards, who seemed to feel that his purported concern for American poverty itself justified his presidential run. Did it somehow make up for his secret unfaithfulness to his cancer-afflicted wife and the risk that a successful bid would eventually be undermined when news of the secret affair surfaced, at a huge loss to the political left? Or was he mainly concerned to augment his own power? The answer seems at best unclear. Similarly, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange invokes high principles of transparency in letting the public know what governments are up to. But the unprincipled and reckless way he exposes diplomatic confidences suggests that he is equally if not mainly concerned with being in a position to do a lot of damage. If he does have moral motives, his smug sense of being above accountability tips the scales of self-aggrandizement the other way.
Still more complicated are British imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes, Lord Kitchener, and General Gordon of Khartoum. They operated within a political culture that supplied ready moral justifications for promoting Britain’s power around the world. Even John Stuart Mill, one of the great progressives of the era, infamously approved of the colonial subjugation of “barbarians.”39 Only after being properly civilized, presumably in good English style, could they become fit for self-rule. Mill genuinely believed this was for the barbarians’ own good (and he was not an asshole). But a culture in which paternalistic colonialism was widely accepted of course made it easy for others to seize the opportunities for power from less pure motives.
Cecil Rhodes is a notorious exemplar. Even in his own day, Rhodes was apparently “revered by his intimates, who regarded him as a towering colossus,” but also “reviled by those who saw him as an unprincipled and unscrupulous adventurer.”40 He was ruthless, corrupt, and immensely greedy in opening up diamond mines in South Africa, acting from a sense of both impunity and imperial license. Rhodes also had a tremendous sense of mission. He dreamed of a railroad spanning Africa from Cape Town to Cairo and ultimately hoped the Anglo-Saxon race would dominate the whole earth, with rebellious America eventually returning to the empire (and with America’s best and brightest coming on Rhodes Scholarships to England in the meanwhile).
This turned out to be somewhat overly optimistic. Entitlement born of cosmic grandiosity caught on well in America. Oil baron John D. Rockefeller was apparently enriched not because Wild West American capitalism gave him free rein but because, as he put it without apology, “God gave me my money.”41 An earlier generation was similarly moved by the asshole doctrine of Manifest Destiny, through the westward expansion and beyond, to sweep aside native peoples in their path. Although America was a late comer in the global competition for subjugation rights over foreign peoples, it did have a crack at Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Though the stakes were relatively small, Albert J. Beveridge, in a campaign for the Indiana Senate, saw in the United States “a greater England with a nobler destiny.” In particular, the United States was, he said:
a mighty people that He has planted on this soil; a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history; a people perpetually revitalized by the virile, man-producing working-folk of all the earth; a people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes—the propagandists and not the misers of liberty.42
Beveridge of course then naturally
pressed the question: “Shall the American people continue their march toward the commercial supremacy of the world?” To answer “no,” he went on to explain, would make one “an infidel to American power and practical sense.” It would be to withhold the gift of our talents from the world, “to rot in our own selfishness.” Nor would there be a point in asking for consent from a people now incapable of self-government; we already know they would gladly accept: “Would not the people of the Philippines prefer the just, human, civilizing government of this Republic to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from which we have rescued them?” (meaning colonial rule by Spain).
Now, even the progressive Mill seriously advanced similar arguments from liberty, incapacity of self-governance, and benevolent duty. As uncomfortable as they are for us to contemplate today, one can at least understand the logic behind Mill’s view. But Beveridge also trumpets Manifest Destiny, a doctrine that is asshole in its purest form. That is, it is not just a mistaken justification but mainly a way of refusing to engage the potential objections of others. Imagine, by way of illustration, how it would play in an attempt by Beveridge to justify colonial subjection to a representative Filipino.
Filipino: It seems like you guys are trying to take over. Might I ask why you think that is okay?
Beveridge: It is manifest that our destiny is to rule over you.
Filipino: Really, that isn’t quite manifest to us. Is it that you are somehow forced, perhaps by God, to come all this way to our shores?
Beveridge: No, we aren’t forced; we are right, right because we plainly will rule over you.
Filipino: Sorry, I’m not following. Isn’t the question between us why you have a right to rule, and, in particular, why this is plainly true?
Beveridge: It is plainly true. You just don’t get it, do you? I wouldn’t expect understanding from a savage.
In fact, the Filipinos did eventually make their preference clear. Realizing that the United States was merely replacing Spain as a new imperial power, they kept up the war for political independence. But this of course gave the colonialist little pause; he had no interest in listening. As Kipling would explain, Filipino resistance only strengthens the call of duty to “take up the White Man’s burden,” to “Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild—Your new-caught, sullen peoples / Half devil and half child.”43
It is hard to say whether the American doctrines of Manifest Destiny and exceptionalism became thinner and thinner as rationalizations, over time, than the original British arguments for imperialism. The clear common element is reinforcement of a cosmic entitlement to do pretty objectionable things without a lot of circumspection—assholery and more on a world-historical scale.
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1. The Supreme Court of Assholedom has been officially chosen; see Matt Taibbi, “The Supreme Court Named,” January 31, 2011, www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/the-supreme-court-named-20110131.
2. See Plato, The Republic, book 2.
3. What should those who are worried do? Though this book offers little specific advice, here, for what it is worth, is a thought: treat our exemplars as cautionary tales; keep reminding ourselves that we are all moral equals; and cultivate a healthy sense of gratitude and responsibility to others. See also “Letter to an Asshole.”
4. The complex criteria for narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders are pretty good, if not quite definitive of the asshole. They include narcissists who aren’t necessarily assholes, such as what some call (in terms not found in the DSM) “piece of shit” narcissists, who suffer from a firm sense of inferiority. The asshole concept does include what some call the “piece of gold” narcissist, who affirms his superiority over others, although that category might apply in other cases as well.
5. One blogger, who puts Noel Gallagher in his top four assholes in rock, cites his comments about members of rival band Blur (who should “catch AIDS and die”), Phil Collins (“the Antichrist”), Green Day (for plagiarizing “Wonderwall” in much the way Oasis plagiarizes other artists), and Radiohead (“at the end of the day people will always want to hear you play ‘Creep.’ Get over it. I never went to fucking university. I don’t know what a paintbrush is; I never went to art school”). See http://brettwatts.blogspot.com/2008/05/top-4-assholes-in-rock_19.html.
6. As Gallagher himself emphasizes in this interview at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNe4qkfkLws. He claims he is not an asshole, even as he makes numerous asshole remarks.
7. To compare other boorish assholes, Ari Gold, from the television show Entourage, is gratuitously aggressive, much as Gallagher is. Gregory House, from the television show House, is aggressively rude but justifies this in the name of his manifest talent as a doctor in saving lives. His argument from moral cause seems more plausible than either Limbaugh’s or Moore’s, though he is still plainly an asshole.
8. Collected by Robert Edwards at www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=706.
9. H. L. Mencken, “The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet,” The Atlantic, November 1914, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1914/11/the-mailed-fist-and-its-prophet/6393/.
10. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006).
11. The book title is an asshole title—since it lacks a serious philosophical refutation of the existence of God of the sort that Dawkins is not, as a biologist, professionally qualified to provide.
12. One friend explains Summers’s related view of salaries this way: “Larry felt that it didn’t make sense that while he was being paid well by Harvard, some other professors were being paid in his ballpark. After all, he was Larry Summers, and who the hell were the rest of them?” See Ron Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 199.
13. Suskind, Confidence Men, 348–49.
14. www.famousquotescollection.com/author/Gustave-Flaubert.
15. The phrase is due to Michael O’Donnell’s “Another Frenchman Assesses Our Democracy,” a review of Lévy’s American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 2006, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/29/RVGHUGQ7341.DTL.
16. Bernard-Henri Lévy, “A Moral Tipping Point: Bernard-Henri Lévy on the Unsettling Implications of Gaddafi’s Gory End,” The Daily Beast, October 23, 2011, www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/23/a-moral-tipping-point-on-gaddafi-s-gory-end.html.
17. James Crabtree, “Philosophes sans frontières as Plato Battles Nato,” London Financial Times, April 1, 2011, www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/986a997e-5c8d-11e0-ab7c-00144feab49a.html#axzz1nXUYMxy1?
18. Here we might compare Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne within a year to marry an American divorcée. Although he was spoiled and self-indulgent, and lacked any sense of duty to his country, he does not qualify as an asshole in our sense, since he did not seem to act from entitlement, not even the royal institutional entitlements at his disposal.
19. Hugo Chavez called Bush an asshole on the implausible grounds that he heeded advice from “imperialist” aides to support a 2002 coup against him. “He was an asshole to believe them,” Chavez said at a rally in Caracas. See Patrick Markey, “Chavez Calls Bush ‘Asshole’ as Foes Fight Troops,” February 29, 2004, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17578-2004Feb29.html. Merely believing someone or heeding their advice—whether good or bad—is hardly sufficient to make someone into an asshole. Perhaps presidential responsibilities in an important decision require not believing too readily. But believing, per se, would not suffice.
20. Belt
way insiders apparently distinguish between aggressive campaigning, aimed at scoring points against the opponent, and a “dick move,” which crosses some fine line. Such moves put one a step in the direction of being an asshole while stopping short. To pull dick moves systematically would move one into asshole territory, as in “What a dick, what an asshole!”
21. However, no one has ever accused Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, of being an antiasshole. For discussion, see Matt Taibbi, “Supreme Court of Assholedom: Rahm Emanuel et al.,” March 4, 2011, www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/supreme-court-rulings-daniel-snyder-rahm-emanuel-elton-john-et-al-20110304.
22. Gail Sheehy, “The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich,” Vanity Fair, September 1995, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newt/vanityfair1.html. Not that he seems terribly insecure when he explains, “I think grandiose thoughts,” comparing himself favorably to great American leaders such as Abraham Lincoln and Henry Clay. See Alana Goodman, “Gingrich’s ‘Grandiose Thoughts,’ ” Commentary, January 20, 2012, www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/20/gingrich-grandiose-thoughts/.