On Humility
The last couple of weeks have been rocked by huge political stories that aren’t really about politics.
On the one hand, Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation as governor of New York following an explosive report by Attorney General Letitia James detailing his myriad abuses of office and pattern of sexually harassing women, and on the other, the Taliban reconquered Afghanistan with astonishing speed following Biden’s withdrawal of American troops. The press treats both as stories about powerful men running up against the limits of that power; Cuomo obviously expected he’d be able to Trump his way out of the scandal by acting like it wasn’t a big deal, only to find that the Democrats wouldn’t put up with that, while Biden’s proven an inevitable inability to control the chaos that was always going to follow the end of the forever war.
Neither story, though, is actually about either of them. The Attorney General’s report painted the pattern of a predatory politico, but it’s a pattern that runs through the lives of almost a dozen women, with one case including the horrifying detail that the soon-to-be former governor altered the job requirements for his police detail specifically so he could transfer a woman state trooper into it because he’d identified her as a potential sexual partner; elsewhere, the report states that staffers instituted an informal rule to never leave women alone with the governor.
That means, over the eleven years of this administration, countless women have had to face the reality that advancement meant putting up with a man who would repeatedly ask if they would ever cheat on their husbands or for “help finding a girlfriend,” or with insinuations that they were swingers or should wear “tighter clothes”, or with unwelcome touching and nonconsensual kissing.
Meanwhile, across the planet, the collapse of a tenuous, fragile democracy erected two decades and three presidents ago in Afghanistan isn’t just a black eye for Joe Biden; these are the consequences of actions carried out by multiple administrations, spanning the political spectrum, and going back decades, and the people who will suffer for them are the Afghan people. The Taliban has ruled Afghanistan before and brought with it public executions, severe repression of women, capital punishment for homosexuality, and the policing of everything from the hanging of portraits to hairstyles to clapping at soccer matches.
While there may be indications that the Taliban intend to rule more moderately this time because it does not wish to be an international pariah, previously banning women from employment and executing their opponents but now encouraging women to take government jobs and announcing a general amnesty for state employees, there is no way of knowing what the future will hold. This is a country that’s spent the last forty some-odd years in a state of continuous internal warfare; the Taliban’s return to power may presage further death and destruction subjected upon over thirty-one million Afghans.
Focusing on the man in the center makes these realities harder to see. Cuomo, the son of a former governor, a repeated presidential prospect, and the product of New York’s famous political machine, clearly wasn’t looking beyond himself. He authorized the state AG to perform the very investigation that turned up a staggering amount of evidence, as though he expected Attorney General James to sweep it under the rug for him. His response to the scandal? Half-hearted, defensive non-apologies easily reducible to a “pobody’s nerfect” t-shirt.
The president offered a stark contrast to Cuomo’s Eliot Spitzer redux (fun fact, at a holiday party in 2008, Spitzer, when asked how he was enjoying life as a columnist at Slate, replied “It sucks. I used to be governor of New York.”). To Biden’s credit, and because I believe he’s a fundamentally decent person, his speech on the rapid events of the last week didn’t focus on deflecting blame but on explaining the cost of staying while acknowledging the cost of leaving. While he made clear he inherited the withdrawal agreement from his predecessor, his real focus was on the humility of stepping back from imperial adventure, of no longer pouring billions of dollars that could be better spent, as well as thousands of American lives, into maintaining the colony for a third decade. That ultimately, there was arrogance in the attempt to remake Afghanistan into a version of the United States and in the assumption that we were better equipped to make those decisions than the Afghan people were themselves.
One man denied, deflected, and dismissed any besmirching of his, ahem, “character.” The other stepped up, took responsibility for the decision, and kept the focus where it belonged: on Afghanistan, the suffering of the Afghan people, and the men and women we’ve asked to die there.
There are many lessons to be taken from these examples. Lessons about how to communicate during a PR crisis, or about how to read the moment, or how to elicit sympathy or respect and turn a failure into a triumph. But to speak to those issues seems crass; human beings were on the line, and remain so. Neither of these stories is really about politics at all. They’re about victims, and power, and how we do or do not use that power. There is no PR-ing your way out of that.
Perhaps the real lesson, then, is one of humility: humility before truth, humility before power, and most importantly of all, humility before humanity.
