Statesmanship and Imagination: Why Sanford is not the Whole Problem

I was at the gym when I first heard about Mark Sanford. The TV screens that line the walls of Princeton's fitness center all trumpeted the same news: the South Carolina governor, who gained national recognition when he refused federal stimulus money on grounds of principle, had confessed with misty eyes to cheating on his wife with an Argentinian woman.

The networks' reactions were largely unsurprising and their conclusions largely uniform: the primary question at hand was the affair's impact on Sanford's political future, and the featured pundits generally concluded that Sanford's revelation was a blow to his own career and a(nother) black eye for the Republican party. Run-of-the-mill stuff, basically (although, as I noted on my Twitter feed, in my observation, mainstream media outlets seem to predict much graver political consequences for morally reprehensible behavior when it's exhibited by conservative politicians as opposed to liberal ones). One thing that did surprise me, however, was the comment of a woman speaking on behalf of a (liberal) activist group. This woman, when asked for her response to Sanford's confession, said the following: "I don't think it's really that much to ask, that they not cheat on their wives while they're serving in public office."

Read that again. She thinks it's not too much to ask that American political leaders refrain from marital infidelity during their terms of office.

It's remarkable, actually: this woman managed to encapsulate in one sentence the crisis facing American politics today. The problem with the United States is not the Republican party, and it's not the Democratic party. It's not Barack Obama or the mainstream media or global warming or the recession or Michael Jackson’s death. The problem facing America is a problem of imagination.

Last night at dinner, a noted professor of political science at the University of Louisville gave a dynamic and thoughtful address about the relationship between statesmanship and imagination. Of his many profound one-liners, the most important was his statement that the formation of a noble imagination is crucial for statesmanship because “the imagination circumscribes, or unleashes, the potential of the human heart and will.”

In other words: whether we profess to be Aristotelians or Hobbesians, Americans would like to claim that we expect, even demand, moral rectitude from our leaders. (The truth of this assertion is inherent in the nature of republican government and is demonstrable both by history and by the absurdity of the alternative.) Yet how can we expect our leaders to be paragons of virtue when secularism has deprived them of religious heroes and revisionist history has deprived them of secular heroes to venerate and emulate? Why should we be surprised at the infidelity of a Sanford or a Clinton in an era when the founders of the republic are almost uniformly denounced as sexist, racist, elitist hypocrites?

Our country’s political culture is in critical condition because Americans have reached the point at which our collective moral imagination can reach no deeper than John Kennedy—another philanderer, come to think of it—for an example of a model statesman. Our representatives will rise—and fall—to the level of leadership that we tell them it is possible for them to achieve. If we want to redeem the present and secure the future of the republic, we need to reclaim the idea that statesmen not only ought to be, but can be, morally upright and even heroic men. If we’re looking for examples, Athens and Rome might be good places to start.