The Road To Redemption: In Defence Of Scott McClellan

[Prophet 451]

Since he released his book, McClellan has taken a fair degree of bashing here. He's been accused of doing it for the money, of putting out his memoirs too late. Of course, that's mild compared to how the right have flamed him but still, it's discomfiting.

I think a lot of people don't understand how easy it is to be caught up in an insular world. I spent much of my adult life in and around professional and semi-pro wrestling. Tortured comparison? Perhaps but bear with me. In both cases, you have a tight group of mainly men, insular and usually distrustful of outsiders, where eccentricity is largely accepted, loyalty insisted upon and your success depends on being able to convince the public that you're something you're not. Of course, in wrestling, we acknowledge that it's just a performance, a show for entertainment purposes and we haven't claimed otherwise for years but in politics, especially conservative politics, your career rests on your ability to fool people. Now, if you take a man and put him in that enviroment, especially a slightly naive man, he will gradually lose touch with the social niceties we all take for granted. In the real world, the rampant abuse of prescription drugs would probably cause comment but in the wrestling locker room, such things don't even raise an eyebrow (contrary to popular belief, the abuse of prescription painkillers is far more prevelent in wrestling than steroids). Drug abuse, fraud, casual criminality, all of these things are taken for granted.

Humans are not individuals by nature. We are social creatures with a strong instinct for conformity (see Milgram and many others). In the real world, that conformity often works to our advantage, it "resets" us back to our normal moral compass. But when we are isolated, surrounded by the type of weirdos and misfits who populate the wrestling locker room and Bush's administration, we lose that reset button. Our contact with normal people is limited or non-existant and so, excesses that might once have shocked us become routine. And the process of coming back is not instant or even quick. The longer we are out of contact with normal society, the longer it takes us to reset once we are in contact again. Within that enviroment, the thought process turns from "he's a mess, what's the matter with him?" to "No-one else seems to mind, what's the matter with me?", a form of group-think that never questions the prevailing standard. It's only when you've been outside that enviroment for a while that you think back on it and as your morals are gradually reset back to normal, you gradually start to realise how extreme the behaviour was.

I think this is what's happening to McClellan. Having left the Bush admin, he kept quiet for a time, he thought and gradually, he came to the realisation that much of what he had been involved in was wrong and he did what any decent person would do: He tried to make amends. First came the book. I'm sure Scott intends to make some money from the book but his advance is only $75k, hardly a fortune and making money is not necessarily a bad thing anyway but still, that could be self-serving. Far more interesting is his agreement to testify to Conyers. It would have been a different matter if they had been forced to subpoena him, to drag him into the hearing but they didn't. Conyers simply asked McClellan to testify and Scotty said "Sure, when do you need me?". The end result is much the same but morally, there's a phonomenal difference between the two.

We have seen arch conservatives come around before. It's often forgotten now but Arianna Huffington was once highly conservative but, over the course of time, her views changed, she came to realise she was wrong and tried to make amends. David Brock went from sliming Anita Hill, through that process of reallignment, to writing a fairly balanced biography of Hillary Clinton and finally, to writing the grand mea culpa that is "Blinded By The Right" and founding Media Matters. I suspect Scott McClellan is going through the same process, gradually revisiting his earlier mistakes and acknowledging and apologising for them. For that, he should be lauded and encouraged. It takes strength to admit you were wrong and even more so to admit that you were involved, even unknowingly, in matters of such moral and legal wrongness. McClellan may always be conservative and that's fine. The political process needs conservative as well as liberal voices, if for nothing else than to check our excesses. But he will never again be a blind conservative and he will never again be a neocon.

And here's where you get to call me crazy because I suspect we may be starting to see the very subtle, minimal, almost unnoticeable signs that the same process is starting in Andrew Sullivan.