An educational aspect of Clarence Thomas's latest scandal is how hard it is not to get distracted by side issues. I'm not casting the first stone here; I've gotten distracted during controversies myself. It's just a reminder how difficult critical rationality is.
In Thomas's case, the issue is that he accepted hefty personal gifts without reporting them, as all government officials are supposed to do. The entertaining distraction is that the donor is a billionaire with a large collection of, among other things, Nazi memorabilia. Thomas's friends and his enemies seem to agree that this is important, and have debated whether having a signed copy of Mein Kampf, for example, means that you are pro-Nazi. Numerous dubious people have come forward to testify to Harlan Crow's personal probity and decency. I have no opinion about it. If it mattered, Crow would have to be investigated and questioned -- I don't know who should do it -- and even then, I'd have to trust the investigators.
But it doesn't matter. I nearly wrote there about Crow's "guilt," though he hasn't been charged with anything. Suppose that a liberal billionaire with a large collection of Martin Luther King Jr. memorabilia were "secretly" buying expensive personal gifts for a liberal Supreme Court Justice, who didn't report them. The ethics violation would be the same. I'm sure that if this fantasy scenario were real, liberal commentators would be lining up to defend the Justice and to testify to the donor's good character, while the right wing would suddenly become very scrupulous about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, and denouncing the stranglehold elites have on our public life. That's politics, and not just American politics: despite all the prattle about principles and ideals, what matters is team spirit and closing ranks against the opposition.
I wasn't surprised at all when this scandal broke. Clarence Thomas has always benefited from the help and protection of wealthy, mostly white men. I suspect one reason he didn't report Crow's gifts was his deep (and not entirely unfounded -- he is an American black man, after all) sense of grievance. Remember "high tech lynching"? I'm speculating here, but corrupt men and women often feel entitled to skim whatever payoffs they can, since they're just barely scraping by on their miserly pay, and they feel put-upon when they get caught; why shouldn't Thomas feel the same way? Their defenders accuse their critics of wanting them to starve on the streets: why shouldn't they earn a little pin money for their years of selfless public service?
I have no idea how this is going to play out. I'm not a journalist, so don't ask me what we can expect; we'll just have to wait and see.
