Of Course the Pardon Was Corrupt

If we want to once again live in a society with integrity where things work, we have no choice but to denounce corruption wherever we see it without partisanship or favor.

Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter has me thinking about Sir Thomas More.

As you may recall, More was England’s chief minister under King Henry VIII. Henry wanted to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, but the Pope wouldn’t allow it. Henry therefore announced he was now the supreme religious authority in England and head of his own church. This violated More’s sense of right and wrong. He resigned his powerful position, refused to attend Anne Boleyn’s coronation, and didn’t accept the validity of Henry’s annulment or claim of religious supremacy.

Henry tried him for treason and beheaded him.

More’s act was in many ways foolish. All he needed to do was take an oath accepting an action he believed was wrong. It was just words.

Others were willing, like the Baron Richard Rich. If you’ve seen the play or film A Man for All Seasons, which tells More’s story, you probably remember him facing Rich in the courtroom that condemned him. To secure More’s death sentence, Rich perjured himself in exchange for the office of Attorney-General of Wales. More famously says to him: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”

We like to imagne ourselves as the heroic More. Our society is acting more like those who trade their soul for Wales.

OF COURSE THE PARDON WAS CORRUPT

Let’s be clear: Biden pardoning his son was corruption.

While Biden has the legal authority to use his pardon power for any reason he likes, using it to help a family member in a way no other American would receive is obviously an abuse of power and wrong. There’s no dispute Hunter Biden committed the crimes with which prosecutors charged him. Prosecutors often decline to charge similar crimes, but rarely doesn’t mean never. People do get charged with them, and when it happens they go to jail. They don’t get pardons and nobody calls it a miscarriage of justice.

It’s true, of course, that prosecutors would never have gone digging into Biden’s crimes if not for politics. However, this isn’t such a great defense. Biden’s Justice Department didn’t go digging into Hunter’s life because he was related to the president. They started digging because they learned Hunter was earning millions in what, at best, looks like questionable influence peddling. One imagines Biden’s DOJ had every incentive to let Hunter off the hook, meaning this was them letting Hunter off easy with the most minor charges they thought they could get away with.

Hunter also isn’t a sixteen-year-old who got involved with drugs and made some immature decisions. By all accounts, he isn’t some great guy. He’s a middle-age man who earned millions trading off his family’s name. He left a wreckage of other people’s lives with some callous, reckless, and cruel behavior. If he were your child, do you think he would get a pardon? Do you think your request for clemency would be carefully considered, or laughed out of the room and tossed into the trash?

I think you know.

The pardon might be legal, just like it’s legal for the head of your company to pass you over for promotion to hire his nephew. It’s also an abuse of authority and wrong.

That Biden used his pardon power to help his son, however, isn’t what troubles me most. If many fathers had a magic wand to make their children’s legal troubles go away, they would naturally want to use it. What troubles me is the many people who have tripped over themselves to make excuses and defend it. The chorus of our society right now is this is no big deal. The refrain that anyone would do this should make you angry.

No, not anyone would do this. In fact, some people make extraordinary sacrifices to do the right thing. Here are a few that immediately come to mind:

• Alexei Navalny openly challenged Vladimir Putin’s Russia, running political campaigns that called out the corruption of Putin’s government. Putin naturally sought to assassinate him. When that assassination failed, Navalny defiantly flew back to Russia from Germany knowing a kangaroo court would surely send him to prison. He was sent to a Siberian work colony where he died.

• Protestors in Tiananmen Square stood up to Chinese tanks, when they could have safely gone home. When the tanks ran them over and crushed their bodies, they died to make a point about what they thought was right.

• Daniel Ellsberg exposed the Pentagon Papers to the world, demonstrating the United States had lied to its citizens about its actions in Vietnam. He fully anticipated he would go to prison for treason, which he likely would have done if the government hadn’t gotten caught illegally breaking into his psychiatrist’s office to find dirt on him creating a scandal and mistrial. The Washington Post printed it knowing this might also put them at legal risk.

• Sophie Scholl was an idealistic German girl who circulated anti-Nazi leaflets at the University of Munich during World War II. She was executed.

• Bold protestors during the Civil Rights Movement sat at whites-only lunch counters demanding service, knowing they would be arrested and perhaps beaten brutally for standing up for their dignity.

• Galileo published his theory that the earth revolved around the sun knowing it violated religious dogma and would antagonize the Inquisition. Then he refused to tailor the way he explained his theory to the Church’s demands. The Inquisition tried him, forced him to recant, and put him under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

• Socrates was unjustly sentenced to death for spreading his disruptive ideas. After his conviction, Socrates could have fled Athens but instead remained to face his sentence because he believed in obeying the law.

• George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the other American Founders had much to lose when they committed treason against their king by starting a rebellion. If they lost—quite likely when challenging the world’s then superpower—they would have lost their property, reputations, and heads.

History is packed with stories of whistleblowers, protestors, truthtellers, and martyrs because some people in fact do sacrifice their own interests to do the right thing. In fact, it’s less rare than you might think. You probably know some stubborn and noble people who refused to cheat, cut corners, lie, steal, hurt others, take the easy way, or turn a blind eye, and paid the price to hold their heads high.

So no, not everyone takes the easy way.

CORRUPTION IS BAD BECAUSE IT’S BAD

Almost as bad as the people making excuses for Biden’s corrupt pardon are those only willing to criticize it with consequentialist arguments. They say the pardon is bad, but only because it makes it easier for other people to do bad things. This is meant to sound like they’re calling out corruption, when in reality they’re making excuses and running interference for their guy. It’s true that every abuse of power makes it harder to hold the next abuse to the law, but even if it didn’t it would still be wrong. It would be wrong because high-level corruption is always wrong.

The pardon was corrupt not because of what it will allow future presidents to do. It was corrupt because Biden used his public power to benefit his family in a way contrary to how it’s applied to every other citizen. In fact, this pardon was arguably a worse abuse of authority than the one that drove Richard Nixon from office. Nixon authorized some goons to break into the Democratic National Committee to find dirt and then tried to cover it up. That was pretty bad, but it was also normal criminality as opposed to the corruption of presidential authority. Anyone can send some goons for a break-in. A pardon takes a president.

Would Nixon’s actions even cause him to resign in disgrace today? Nixon only resigned because heavy hitters of his own party, ashamed and worried about the public, sat him down and told him that, if he didn’t leave office, they would impeach him. Would the heavy hitters of either party today sacrifice their president for doing something wrong?

I think we know the answer.

We now live in a society that takes such corruption for granted so much that it celebrates it as savvy. We expect powerful people to behave this way. We make excuses for it. We say, how else would the world work? Only a fool would sacrifice his interests to do the right thing. According to the brightest lights of our ruling class, having integrity and playing by the rules is for chumps and suckers. Why not? The only people who ever pay are naïve middle-class whistleblowers who step up expecting the world to have their back for doing the right thing, when it never does.

A WORKING SOCIETY REQUIRES INTEGRITY

This isn’t just a partisan problem, since both parties act this way. It isn’t even just about government. Leaders in all our institutions similarly lie and cheat and engage in selfish corruption all the time—businesses, universities, police forces, media, even churches. It’s across every institution in our society. It’s an epidemic among our leadership class.

The excuse that this is simply human nature does not hold. It’s human nature to want to abuse your power for corrupt purposes. It’s not inevitable that society allows leaders to behave this way. Some societies do, in fact, have a sense of honor. They have a sense of right and wrong and standards they uphold. They enforce them, and leaders enforce them on each other. The samurai really did slice themselves open with their tanto knives when they disgraced themselves and sullied their honor.

Smart ruling classes police integrity and duty amongst themselves with vigilance, holding their fellows not to lower standards but higher ones than everybody else. This is where the idea of noblesse oblige comes from. It’s what all those Victorian novels are about. Ruling classes that aren’t stupid understand their claim to leadership depends on being better than oligarchs or warlords, ruling wisely with integrity and duty and following their own rules. Maintaining their privileges depends on it, since failure to uphold the integrity of the system is what brings the pitchforks out.

Those in power like to ponder where all this anti-establishment sentiment is coming from—it must be demagoguery, lies, or “misinformation.” No, this is where it’s coming from.

Widespread toleration of selfishness, corruption, and elite failure is why so much in America right now is broken. It’s why public services are terrible. It’s why bosses don’t take care of workers. It’s why so many industries treat their customers shabbily. You can’t run a successful society like this for long. The most important part of maintaining a prosperous, free, safe, and happy society isn’t enacting the right laws and rules, but creating a leadership class with integrity that fulfills its duties and obeys those laws and rules. This is what creates a high-trust society. For things to work in the real world, the people running things have to do the right thing instead of the easy thing. They have to fulfill their duties the way they’re supposed to, with others in leadership holding them accountable when they don’t.

No, not everybody would have done what Biden did. If we want to live in a society with integrity in which things work, we have no choice but to denounce corruption wherever we see it without partisanship or favor. We must clean up our leadership class, replacing those without integrity with people who have a sense of honor and believe doing the right thing matters. We have to hold people in authority who fail to account. Saying a little corruption is okay when we’re the ones doing it is the how societies collapse and nations fail.

What do you think about the pardon? Join the conversation in the comments.