Fetterman/Mitterand
Fetterman/Mitterand
Ethics, Truth, and Power in Politics
[This was written last week, before the Fetterman/Oz debate, and I haven’t gone back over it in light of that event. Everything I say here is however amplified in light of Fetterman’s performance at the debate.]
What is politics for? There is of course a vast literature in Western thought on this question. One of the perennial dividing lines we can draw to separate different offerings on the question is between those focusing chiefly on politics as exercise of power and those who see politics as intrinsically connected to the pursuit of ethical truths.
In his Politics, Aristotle sets a baseline for the political as cemented to ethics and truth. Statecraft has as its end in this view the creation of the best conditions for the emergence of the wise man, the only kind of man who can know eudaimonia, or how to live well. Real happiness comes only with cultivation, and the path of politics properly pursued cultivates men. Mere pleasure or material gain are not fit goals for the wise man. The contemplative life is the best choice for those seeking eudaimonia, but this is available only to a tiny minority. Politics is a more widely available means for producing not just honor but more importantly virtue (aretḗ).
Carl Schmitt’s understanding of politics as the primordial distinction of friend and enemy, and the subsequent war between the two to determine who wields power, is perhaps the most well-known and controversial version of the second view. In Schmitt’s account, all other human practices, including religion, become possible only once the most fundamental question of who rules has been decided. In this framework, the idea of ethics or truth as necessary goals of politics are also relegated to subsidiary status. They might become the concern of a given ruler, but the process of deciding who wields power takes place outside the borders of those concerns.
The political news cycle has conveniently given us an item with which to concretize the theoretical arguments between these two positions.
It is clearly a matter of importance, regardless of one’s political position on Fetterman. Here is a candidate for the U.S. Senate, with a good chance of winning, who has recently had an ischemic stroke and is suffering significant health effects. He is unable to effectively process speech and reliant on instant transcripts of conversations to follow them, and he is also suffering problems with his own speech.
The media conversation about this has been, as is so much else of what they do, egregious and irresponsible. No real effort to talk about the medical issue and what is likely, and with what probability, in terms of Fetterman’s ability to work and function in political office going forward. Instead, it’s all politics all the time: Left-leaning mainstream media viciously attacking everyone who suggests Fetterman might be too incapacitated to stay in the race, and right-leaning media vigorously going after Fetterman himself, in sometimes cruelly personal terms, for not withdrawing.
This is all perfectly consistent with a Schmittian view of politics as the win-at-all costs agonistic war between two sides. But it constitutes a major disservice to a healthy political process if by that one means a process of collective decision-making about leadership and the direction of the polity, competitive to be sure but also dependent on an agreement by all sides about the essential role of accurate information to a citizenry that is being asked to make reasonable and responsible decisions. Either an ethical commitment to a certain baseline of truth marks our political practice, or it does not.
What do we know about recovery from strokes? They are profoundly serious medical events, first of all. Every 3 and 1/2 minutes in the US, someone dies of a stroke. Only about 10% of all stroke victims recover completely, and only about 1 in 4 recovers with only minor lasting damage. Most recovery is noticeable within three months of the stroke. Fetterman is about five months from the event now, and significant problems remain in his ability to function normally in social interaction, as was evident in the interview he did recently.
There is a substantial risk of subsequent strokes faced by those who have suffered one. Perhaps as many as 25% of those who have a stroke will have another within five years. Those stroke sufferers who do not adhere closely to rehabilitation and treatment regimens have an even higher risk of repeat strokes. We know already that Fetterman was diagnosed in 2017 with serious heart conditions—”atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm [and] a decreased heart pump”—but he never took the medication he was prescribed for these conditions and did not follow up with his physician until the stroke made that unavoidable. There is therefore substantial reason to wonder how well he will follow doctor’s orders now.
The question of Fetterman’s degree of incapacity and risk of future strokes is but one part of this. Of considerable importance in light of the political theoretical question with which I opened is the evidence that Fetterman’s campaign has not been forthcoming about the seriousness of the stroke.
For Fetterman, his family and his friends, and for human beings with a normal quantity of human compassion even for those they may disagree with politically, the most troubling bit of this situation in human terms is how it might affect his health and life going forward. May God look after him, and may his health continue to improve.
But the purely political questions touch on other matters. If his campaign has hidden details of this to date, how much more might they be hiding? And if he is elected and suffers another stroke or some other health injury related to his ongoing cardiac issues, will they tell the truth about that?
This all matters gravely in a democracy, and it doesn’t make one a morally bad person to point it out, at least so long as you do it without denigrating Fetterman for his lamentable medical situation. It is a widespread human failing to put one’s own ego above questions of broader social interests. Many, perhaps most of those in our electoral system up and down the various levels fail with some frequency at this test. But the fact that many fail to do what is morally right in such situations is not an excuse for overlooking it here.
When Fetterman’s medical situation and his campaign’s handling of it first came to my attention, I immediately remembered reading decades ago about the incredible story of François Mitterand’s medical condition during his presidency. The man who was elected to his country’s highest office in 1981, served one seven year term, and then was re-elected to a second lied to the French people systematically and repeatedly about a desperately serious health issue.
Mitterand was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer just after he took office in 1981 and given only three years to live, as the cancer had spread to his bones. His political ambition was so unrestrained by this reality that he demanded his team keep the fact hidden as a “state secret.” He outlived the prognostications of his doctors and in 1988 he ran for and achieved re-election, all while the French electorate knew nothing about his cancer. In 1992, he underwent an emergency procedure when the pain caused by the tumors started to markedly increase, and his administration finally publicly admitted he had cancer, but they lied that it was in the early stages and completely curable. The American press accounts of the ‘92 surgery indicate how thorough and effective the lie was.
By the end of his second term, Mitterand was so ill he couldn’t attend to his duties. Only after his death in 1995 did the French public learn of the unfathomable deception that had been perpetrated on them by their country’s leader. The fact that he somehow survived and was able to function in the job for nearly the entirety of his time in office does nothing to mitigate the stunning fact that he so blatantly deceived the electorate for so long about this matter.
This is the kind of thing that determines the legacy of a political figure. If he cannot tell his constituents truths they require to make intelligent decisions about whether to vote for him, he does not morally deserve to hold any political office.
The Fetterman campaign seems unconcerned about the moral ground they are treading. It and many of its supporters online are claiming it is “ableist” to be concerned that the consequences of his stroke might affect his ability to do the job he is seeking to obtain. They want the reporter who did the interview in which these problems became apparent to all of us penalized for doing the interview.
From within the view of politics as fundamentally concerned with ethics and truth, this is unacceptable. Disability law simply prohibits using disability alone as a means for discounting equally competent candidates for employment. It does not say that such candidates can hide evidence of the extent of their disability to make it more likely that they will achieve positions for which they in fact may not be functionally competent.
If the Fetterman campaign believes—as political figures on the American left so typically claim—that it is committed above all else to an ethical political practice in which truth matters, and not to a Schmittian view of winning as the condition for deciding on questions of ethics and truth, then it should release all relevant medical records of his condition and deal honestly on this going forward. The partisan interests of an election pale in comparison to the responsibility all who would stand for elected office have to forthrightness and transparency about such serious matters.
The poisonous current atmosphere of American politics makes it unlikely they will do what they should. The knee-jerk response of pundits and partisans on both sides when their guy is called to moral responsibility is to point fingers at the other side and exclaim “But, look, you failed here too!” It is a real dilemma in purely political terms: Tell the truth in cases like this and risk losing political power.
But there is no better summary of the current American situation than that. We are caught up in games of naked pursuit of power that risk destroying the possibility of truth altogether.
Which of the two—power or truth—will be our guidepost?
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