Clinton as Sacrifice

It is pretty easy to explain Bill Clinton’s current troubles in terms of Freud’s myth of the primal horde. The leader who seems to have sexual access to any woman (not so different from every woman) must be destroyed by the band of brothers. Yet, even though sex seems to be at the center of the Clinton story, it might be a good idea to step back a little, and think about the story in terms of sacrifice.

Sacrifice is the primal political drama, the sacrifice of the leader is its greatest expression. Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother, but he is sacrificed in order to save the city of Thebes from a dreadful plague. It worked, at least for a while.

We sacrifice our leaders in order to prevent the outbreak of a cycle of group violence that knows no limits. It is the primary purpose of leaders to offer themselves as sacrifices to the group. The leader dies, or goes into exile, so that the group may live. Not every leader is sacrificed, but every leader must be prepared to be the sacrifice. That is the point. I am following the thinking of Rene Girard here, in Violence and the Sacred (1977), but it is a story as old as Moses and Jesus.

What is unusual about Clinton is the way he seems to offer himself up for sacrifice, eagerly sticking his neck onto the chopping block, only to pull it back at the last minute. He does it again and again, at once the most willing of sacrifices, and the man who seems most able and willing to resist the people’s desire to sacrifice him.

It is no accident that Clinton is widely regarded as being at his best at funerals, elegiast for those who have sacrificed themselves for the public. About this he speaks from the heart, one who knows exactly what is expected of public figures. To die, so that others might live. Only he always stops short of our complete satisfaction, a trope of his apparently, Clinton as sacrificial tease.

Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky—one might think about Clinton’s eagerness to sacrifice himself in terms of his sexual risk-taking, never very far from the public eye. But perhaps the real dynamic is simpler and more basic than that. Clinton always comes back for more. He will, he has said, throw himself against a brick wall a thousand times. He will, we know, survive a thousand brickbats. He never quits, and he never gives up. It is, I think, exactly what we want, a leader who knows his role as sacrifice, while resisting our efforts to sacrifice him. “Bubba Bounces Back,” said a tabloid headline the day after his videotaped grand jury testimony played on TV. We were proud.

Why we want this is clear enough, at least in principle. It is the same thing we want from our parents: that they be able to withstand our rage and our hatred. We need to destroy mother a thousand times in our minds, only to discover she is still there. Only then can we learn something about our own limits. Only then can we learn to contain ourselves, because we have been contained.

What is less clear is why this resistance to sacrifice has become the leading attribute of our President, what we seem to require above all else. It must have something to do with a collective fear of our own greed, our own rage that whatever we will be able to acquire in this magnificent economy will not be enough to satisfy. Too much is never enough.

Clinton, it is widely assumed, survives in office because our economy prospers. This is true, but not just in the sense usually attributed to it: that we are satisfied with the economy so we are satisfied with Clinton. We are satisfied with the economy, but we are still unsatisfied, so we must have Clinton to sacrifice. But only if he will not die, taking all this goodness with him.

Sacrifice, says Girard, is the alternative to bloody civil war. In the United States today this does not apply. But there are other ways in which nations may be torn. We are torn between the values we preach, the values we practice, the values we don’t believe in any more, and the values we dare not disbelieve, lest there be nothing left.

We are torn between generations, Clinton representative of a generation that is not necessarily less moral than the previous, but certainly less confident in its morality. In this world, Clinton is the sacrifice to our own inability to make the splits upon which public life depends: between man and office, between what we say and

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what we do, between what we know and what we cannot let ourselves believe.

Splitting is not much esteemed these days, and for good reason. Still, we should not forget the leading lesson of Melanie Klein, who first elaborated (not discovered, but elaborated) the concept. While depressive integration is good, the more profound danger is “inadequate” splitting and idealization. The result is confusion, the inability to distinguish good and bad, and terror: that in our confusion we might destroy the good. We are now seeing what happens when the splits fall apart, and we can no longer keep apart what is properly held separate.

Reenacting the confusion between good and bad, right and wrong, the pure and the abject—this is what sacrifice has always been about. Sacrifice reenacts the confusion that occurs when traditional distinctions fail, in the hope of reestablishing these distinctions on a clearer and firmer basis. Sometimes it works, but sacrifice is always risky business, always in danger of merely reenacting the confusion rather than reestablishing traditional boundaries. The sacrifice of Clinton is becoming risky. If he is removed from office, we will, I think, become not less but more confused over the distinction between public and private, upon which liberal democracy depends.

Liberal democracy is classical liberalism, the liberalism of John Locke, in which government serves the individual. Totalitarianism is the opposite, private life is nothing but a resource for the public. Clinton crossed the line in the first place, taunting us with his affairs—or so it sometimes seems, with no little help from the media. In making his sexuality public, Clinton has caused us to become more confused. This is his great sin against democracy. But if my analysis is correct, the successful sacrifice of Clinton will only enhance the confusion.

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