[Imprimis] The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on September 11, 2018, during a conference on "American Political Scandals" sponsored by the College’s Center for Constructive Alternatives.The great difficulty of interpreting political scandals was summarized by a newspaper editor in the western film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Deciding not to publish the truth of an explosive political story, the editor justifies it by saying, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." We have certainly had many legends regarding political scandals foisted on us, especially since Watergate.
Nearly every political administration has potential scandal lying just below the surface. There are always those in government who seek to profit privately from public service, and there are always those who will abuse their power. All governments provide the occasion for scoundrels of both kinds. But the scandals they precipitate rarely erupt into full-blown crises of the political order. What differentiates the scandals that do?
To understand a political scandal fully, one must take into account all of the interests of those involved. The problem is that these interests are rarely revealed‐which is precisely why it is so tempting for partisans, particularly if they are at a political disadvantage, to resort to scandal to attack their opponents. Many great scandals arise not as a means of exposing corruption, but as a means of attacking political foes while obscuring the political differences that are at issue. This is especially likely to occur in the aftermath of elections that threaten the authority of an established order. In such circumstances, scandal provides a way for defenders of the status quo to undermine the legitimacy of those who have been elected on a platform of challenging the status quo‐diluting, as a consequence, the authority of the electorate.
The key to understanding how this works is to see that most political scandals, sooner or later, are transformed into legal dramas. As legal dramas, scandals become understood in non-partisan terms. The way in which they are resolved can have decisive political impacts, but those in charge of resolving them are the "neutral" prosecutors, judges, and bureaucrats who make up the permanent (and unelected) government, not the people’s elected representatives. To resort to scandal in this way is thus a tacit admission that the scandalmongers no longer believe they are able to win politically. To paraphrase Clausewitz, scandal provides the occasion for politics by other means.