Does the Rule of Law Apply to Politicians and Elites?

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”
-- Sociologist Brooke Harrington commenting on how many very wealthy people see the rule of law

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”
-- President Richard Nixon commenting on the law and the president

In an interview on the NPR program Hidden Brain, sociologist Brooke Harrington discussed her experience as a financial advisor to extremely wealthy people. Harrington took classes to train herself as a financial advisor. In the interview, she noted that her clients generally viewed both the rule of law and government differently than most people understand it. In general, the financial advisor works to maintain secrecy about the scope and amount of the client’s wealth above all other considerations. They deal with family problems such as cutting family members out of the will and hiding assets from a spouse in advance of a divorce.

Other common tasks are minimizing taxes legally (tax avoidance) and hiding assets to illegally avoid paying taxes (tax evasion). She did not state if or how financial advisors avoid criminal liability for their help in tax evasion. She did not state if she participated in tax evasion. Presumably, some financial advisors show the client how to evade taxes and then turns a blind eye to the client when he (it is usually men) commits the crime.

The rule of law

At 13:20 of the interview, Harrington comments that one of the beliefs that very wealthy people tend to share is that the laws do not apply to them: “National boundaries and laws are all optional. Taxes are optional. All forms of law are essentially optional at that level of wealth.”

Government and society

At 14:05-15:50, she elaborated on attitudes toward paying taxes: “Some of them actually do sound a lot like Donald Trump. When I heard Donald Trump say that not paying taxes made him smart and if he had paid his taxes, they would have been wasted anyway. That was like, ‘Yup, he’s the voice of a lot of very wealthy people around the world.’ .... [Other financial advisors that Harrington spoke to said their clients] are very committed to neoliberal ideology and very committed to the idea that these elite clients are doing the world a favor as wealth creators and their initiatives should be protected against governments and what they regard as theft by taxation by incompetent governments that would just waste any money they collected anyways. They also by the way, regard redistribution of collected tax as immoral because it creates dependency on the part of the poor. .... There is a strong component of ideology here. You see it in the wealth management training program. ..... About a quarter of the people I interviewed really seemed to believe quite unironically in the justice of protecting the wealth of their clients from taxation. They literally view taxation as theft, and they view government as incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. They are deeply suspicious of any sort of welfare state programs because they see it as destroying initiative.”

How the humans deal with the sleazeball

It is somewhat reassuring that only about a quarter of financial advisors feel that way. What do the others feel? At 16:25-18:00, Harrington commented about financial advisors who work for clients who cheat on taxes, wives and employees, i.e., sleazeballs: “Well, some of them don't [sleep well at night]. And I think that is one of the reasons we’re seeing a wave of leaks recently. Some people are so troubled by what they are seeing that they just can’t stomach it any longer and they blow the whistle, often with dire personal consequences. About a quarter of the people I interviewed I would characterize as being conscience-stricken about the larger impacts of their work.” She went on to comment that some advisors try to assuage their moral concerns by gently raising the problem with depriving the state of revenues by tax cheating, Those people risk losing clients who do not want to hear such things. Sleazeballs really do not care about people living in poverty.

Harrington is not the only one saying these things

A previous discussion based on the work of historian Nancy MacLean and her 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America, focused on the anti-government ideology that drives the modern republican party and populism. That mindset is in accord with how Harrington describes some of the very wealthy: “In the radical right vision, power would flow from the central federal government to authoritarian, oligarchic state governments that are captured by wealthy, powerful capitalists and like-minded individuals. The goal of that form of government is to weaken and then destroy the ability of average citizens, especially minorities to work together to defend their interests using equal protection and due process as their main tool to exert influence. The ultimate goal is to elevate property rights above all other rights, including the rights of people to tax property or otherwise burden it in any way.”

Another discussion based on journalist Jane Mayer and her 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, sees the same thing: “Essentially no one on the right will accept Mayer's version of events or the authoritarian goal of the radical right to neuter the federal government, gut regulations, quash civil rights and install an oligarchy of billionaires with proclivities to kleptocracy and brass knuckles laissez-faire capitalism. The radical right sees very little room for government spending on social safety nets. Those things just increase their tax burden and they vehemently reject it. Whatever social good may come from that safety net spending, just like contrary public opinion, is of no concern whatever to the radical right. This is crowd has no compassion for anything except the oligarchs at the top.”

Obviously, not all wealthy people or corporations feel the same way about the rule of law, government and taxes. The question is, what portion do feel that way? The entire GOP has fallen to this radical anti-government ideology. The GOP is redistributing wealth from the bottom to the top, e.g., the 2017 tax cut law, where some wealthy people and corporations believe it belongs. Harrington’s comments about financial advisors suggest that at most, about 25% of them feel conscience-stricken, leaving the remaining 75% to be in full or partial accord with neoliberal anti-government ideology. Those people are helping to cheat governments worldwide out of trillions of tax dollars. And, where governments are corrupt, it is usually or always the same wealthy anti-government people and companies who are fully participating in and fomenting the corruption. That includes fomenting corruption in the US government.

Our Besieged Rule of Law

The New York Times reports that the president's legal team is arguing in legal briefs that all criminal inquiries into a sitting president are unconstitutional. The NYT writes:

“Lawyers for President Trump argued in a lawsuit filed on Thursday that he could not be criminally investigated while in office, as they sought to block a subpoena from state prosecutors in Manhattan demanding eight years of his tax returns. 

Taking a broad position that the lawyers acknowledged had not been tested, the president’s legal team argued in the complaint that the Constitution effectively makes sitting presidents immune from all criminal inquiries until they leave the White House.

The lawsuit filed on Thursday was the latest effort by the president and his legal team to stymie multiple attempts to obtain copies of his tax returns, which Mr. Trump said during the 2016 campaign that he would make public but has since refused to disclose.”

The president is arguing that both criminal charges and investigations against a president are unconstitutional. That makes a sitting president above the law. This is another step toward tyranny and corruption.

The president has declared his admiration for Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Kim Jong Un, Mohamad bin Salman, and Xi Jinping all and and expressed his jealousy at their dictatorial power. All are murderers and brutal dictators who demand respect, obedience, loyalty. They all want their followers and citizens to believe and do anything they are told. The president admires all of these dictators, once commenting:

“He’s [Kim Jong Un] the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

Good Lies vs Bad Lies: A Fuzzy Gray Zone

Readers here may have noticed a recent uptick in content here that focuses on some aspect of morality, mostly as applied to politics. That is inspired by a growing personal belief that politics is significantly driven by moral beliefs and judgments. This discussion focuses on good vs bad lies-deceit in politics.

Good vs Bad Lies

There are times when politicians lie to the public. Essentially all, if not all, do this from time to time. Motivations range from honestly wanting to serve the public interest to honestly wanting to serve self-interest, even if it betrays or harms the public interest. One commentator wrote this in 2016 shortly before the election:

“You just have to sort of figure out how to — getting back to that word, ‘balance’ — how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today,” she said [Hillary Clinton in a 2013 speech]. She added: “Politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching all of the back-room discussions and the deals, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So you need both a public and a private position.”

In politics, hypocrisy and doublespeak are tools. They can be used nefariously, illegally or for personal gain, as when President Richard M. Nixon denied Watergate complicity, but they can also be used for legitimate public purposes, such as trying to prevent a civil war, as in Lincoln’s case, or trying to protect American prestige and security, as when President Dwight D. Eisenhower denied that the Soviet Union had shot down a United States spy plane.

During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama promised to televise negotiations over health care reform, but when the real work had to be done, the negotiators shut the doors. In a study of defense bills in Congress, the political scientist Colleen J. Shogan quotes a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director as saying: “Why should we do it in the open? It would wreck the seriousness of the purpose. Staff needs to give candid views to senators, and you can’t do that in open session. Governing in the sunshine shouldn’t be applied to everything.”

Is it hypocritical to take one line in private, then adjust or deny it in public? Of course. But maintaining separate public and private faces is something we all do every day. We tell annoying relatives we enjoyed their visits, thank inept waiters for rotten service, and agree with bosses who we know are wrong.

The Japanese, whose political culture is less idealistic than our own, have a vocabulary for socially constructive lying. “Honne” (from “true sound”) is what we really believe. “Tatemae” (from “facade”) is what we aver in public. Using honne when tatemae is called for is considered not bravely honest but rude and antisocial, and rightly so. Unnecessary and excessive directness hurts feelings, foments conflict and complicates coexistence.

If one accepts those comments as basically true, government cannot operate under full transparency. The question is whether things can be more transparent than now, and the answer is yes. Often much of what is hidden is to shield the actors from bad publicity, not to serve the public interest.

Another commentator points out instances where a politician lies to deceive an uninformed public:

Political leaders often conceal their true views when the latter diverge from majority public opinion, or from the beliefs of a key part of their base. Both Barack Obama and Dick Cheney spent years concealing their then-unpopular support for same-sex marriage – only coming out of the closet when the political winds changed. Well-informed observers knew that their true views differed from their public positions long before Obama and Cheney openly admitted it. But they nonetheless kept up the pretense because it did effectively fool some substantial number of less knowledgeable voters.

Widespread voter ignorance also incentivizes another common type of political deception: lying about the nature of your policies in order to overstate benefits and conceal possible downsides. The most impressively successful recent deception of this type was Barack Obama’s promise that, under the Affordable Care Act, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

In view of the foregoing, it is inevitable that there are times when it makes sense to lie to the public or to be opaque and hide truth. The problem is that there are many times when service to the public interest is not the motivating force. As discussed here yesterday, the politicians and bureaucrats involved in neutering DEA drug enforcement efforts in 2016 to deal with the opioid epidemic clearly served the drug companies and the politicians who received benefits, while clearly harming the public interest and allowing many more people to die from drug overdoses. Everyone involved is doing what they can to hide what they did from the public.

Sometimes the line between a ‘good lie’ and a bad one is hard to know. It can be more of a gray zone than a line. Sometimes there simply isn’t enough information available to the public to make a reasonably informed assessment. In those situations, there is no choice but to trust the morality of public servants and the people they interact with. If one accepts that logic, then one could argue that immoral lying, immoral deceit and unwarranted opacity by public servants is usually more morally reprehensible than when it comes from most private sector actors.

A Bit of Cognitive Science Snuck into a Journalist’s Mind

I look for signs that journalists are looking to cognitive and social science as a way to help them communicate. Occasionally, some of that seems to be happening. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, columnist Dana Milbank makes an important point about the word “racist” based on cognitive science research. He writes:

President Trump is a horrendous racist. And it’s time for Democrats to stop calling him one. 

Counterintuitive? Yes. But substantial evidence shows that labeling Trump “racist” backfires against Democrats. It energizes his supporters without providing any additional motivation to Democrats, and it drives soft partisans — voters who could be up for grabs in 2020 — into Trump’s arms.

This doesn’t mean letting Trump off the hook for being the racist he obviously is; I’ve been using the term for four years because it objectively describes him. But this means talking about his racism in a different way:

Say that he tears America apart by race and threatens our democracy.

Say that he pits Americans against each other by color and religion to distract from his cruelty.

Say that he enables and encourages white supremacists.

Milbank points to social science research showing that the term ‘racist’ has become politicized. Research during the 2016 campaign found that voters with high levels of racial resentment who read a statement saying that some people oppose Trump “because he supports racism,” became much more supportive of Trump. By contrast, researchers found that the term “white supremacist” didn’t backfire the way “racist” does. Other research that Milbank points to found that Republicans are two to three times more likely to reject the label “racist” for racially charged attitudes than Democrats and most independents. Thus, calling Trump a racist tends to anger some or many whites who are racially resentful. They double down on their support for him. Americans do not agree on what is racist and what isn’t.

The Morality of American Capitalism in Action

The New York Times reports that the the New York attorney general’s office tracked about $1 billion in offshore wire transfers by the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma and the opioid epidemic. As usual for rich people, Swiss bank accounts are part of the story. The money transfers are Sackler family’s attempt to hide assets in advance of lawsuits against them for opioid epidemic. They don't want to pay any more than they have to. From 2008 through 2016, the Sacklers paid themselves over $4 billion, so they have a lot more wire transferring to do to hide it all.

It gets much worse

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting that drug companies got together to sabotage federal drug enforcement efforts in 2016. They formed a group that successfully blunted DEA enforcement efforts at the height of the opioid epidemic. Members of the group included corrupt politicians in congress and Obama administration officials. WaPo writes:

“In 2016, the drug companies convinced members of Congress and Obama administration officials to rein in the DEA and force the agency to treat them as “partners” in efforts to solve the crisis. The crowning achievement of the companies was a piece of legislation known as the “Marino bill,” named after its original sponsor, which curbed the DEA’s ability to immediately suspend the operations of drug companies that failed to follow the law. ..... But the full story has never been told because so few of the people involved will talk about it. The list of people who have declined to be interviewed includes former congressman Tom Marino (R-Pa.), who first proposed the bill; former acting DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg, whose agency surrendered to the pressure; former attorney general Loretta E. Lynch, whose department did not stand in the way of the legislation; and, finally, then-President Barack Obama, who signed it into law.”

One can reasonably presume that an awful lot of free speech (campaign contributions) went into that patriotic effort to vindicate the valiant revenue streams the speech was defending.

What about a social conscience for businesses?

As discussed recently here, and here, the moral code that many or most US companies operate under is ‘profit first’. That may also be the moral code that most politicians operate under. According to the code, anything that reduces profits, e.g., spending for a social conscience, is immoral. As the modern leader of the moral code once said, CEOs with a social conscience are “highly subversive to the capitalist system.” No one wants to be highly subversive to the capitalist system, right?

Opacity, especially the plausible deniability brand, is a wonderful thing. It helps shield all the bad acts of deceivers, emotional manipulators, tyrants, demagogues, crooks and liars.

And, it is not the case that such a moral code cannot exist under socialism, fascism, tyranny, anarchy, libertarianism, etc. There just seems to be something irresistibly seductive about profit and to hell with everything and everyone else. Maybe it's a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.

In view of how the profit first moral code usually seems to work, one can argue that corollary moral values often include some combination of contempt for inconvenient facts and truths, opacity is good, transparency is bad, and/or, unwarranted emotional manipulation to keep the masses fearful, angry and above all, distracted.

Does this, or some variant of it, also apply to voting democratic?

Or, is this assessment of the profit first moral code inaccurate, too harsh or unfair?

Ideological Asymmetry in Moral Approval of Lying in Politics

Researchers publishing in the journal, Personality and Individual Differences (Volume 143, 1 June 2019, Pages 165-169), report finding a difference in acceptance of lying between individuals that score high on a particular personality trait and those who score low. The research investigated the relationship between ideology and moral disapproval of spreading misinformation by politicians.

The researchers found that people having higher scores on Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) were positively related to tolerance of politicians lying by commission, paltering (using truthful facts to create a false impression), and lying by omission (hiding facts or truth). The researchers wrote:

“Also, republicans were more tolerant towards politicians lying by commission and paltering than democrats. Experiment 2 (N = 395) replicated these results, and examined partisan bias. Democrats (but not republicans) showed a partisan bias in tolerance of lying by commission, whereas republicans (but not democrats) showed a partisan bias in tolerance of paltering. In both experiments, RWA and SDO mediated the relationships between political party and approval of spreading misinformation. These results suggest that right-wing individuals are more tolerant to the spreading of misinformation by politicians, although it should be noted that overall levels of approval were relatively low.”

What is interesting is the data showing that levels of tolerance toward misinformation are “relatively low.” If one accepts data showing that the president has made over 10,000 false or misleading statements is true, then most of his supporters disapprove of misinformation and lies but still support the president. If that is true, then many, maybe most, of supporters do not believe the president lies and misleads nearly as often as he doe, and/or they are unaware of unbiased assessments of the evidence as usually or always fact-based.

The other interesting observation is that the data suggests that authoritarian mindsets are somewhat more accepting of misinformation from their own side, but presumably not from political opposition. It may be the case that for hard core partisans, pundits and political players, this personality trait could be more pronounced and acceptance of lies is even greater than the subjects in the experiments described here. That would be an interesting experiment, assuming it is possible to do.

As is usual for most new social science research, these results need to be replicated to at least partly confirm their validity.