May 29, 2007
Monica's Transformation
The girls over at Slate know one when they see one:
When she was White House liaison in Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department, Monica Goodling, 33, had the power to hire and fire seasoned government lawyers who had taken the bar when she was still carrying around a plastic Hello Kitty purse. Goodling, in fact, described herself as a "type-A woman" who blocked the promotion of another type-A woman basically because the office couldn't tolerate infighting between two strong women. ("I'm not just partisan! I'm sexist, too!") That move sounds pretty grown-up and steely. Yet in her testimony this week before the House judiciary committee, Goodling turned herself back into a little girl, and it's worth pointing out that the tactic worked brilliantly.Look past Goodling's long, silky blond hair, which may or may not have been a distraction. She's entitled to have pretty hair. Look past her trembling hand as she swore her oath and the tremulous voice as she described her "family" at Justice. What really shot Goodling into the stratosphere of baby-doll girls were her own whispered words: "At heart," she testified, "I am a fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way." [Late-breaking discovery, courtesy of a sharp reader: Goodling used the word girl in the written rather than spoken version of her testimony.] The idea, of course, was to scrub away her past image as ruthless, power-mad, and zealously Christian. But—as professor Sandy Levinson noted almost immediately over at Balkinization—it was in calling herself a "girl" that the 33-year-old did herself a great favor. It was a signal to the committee that she was no Kyle Sampson. Or Anita Hill.
Oh go ahead, read the whole thing.
And there's more dish about Our Monica.
Her pricey defense lawyer, John Dowd, from the prestigious Washington law firm Akin Gump, did an excellent coaching job on our crispy Christian ingenue, as well as supplying many sweet euphemisms for breaking the law
In these days of government permeated by Christian cult fundamentalism, a girl (probably) doesn't have to sleep with her boss to be promoted, but it's probaboy a good idea to join his Bible Study Group. No sacrifice for true believers.
Photo note: We located the bleeding hearts backed by blonde in the archives , now all we need is a little conditioner
Addendum #1: John Stewart deconstructs Monica's testimony
Addendum #2: Theoretical physicist, Mark Buchanan's, op ed "Our Lives as Atom's: Chain Reactions " has been copied in its entirety below for your edification - it speaks eloquently to Ms. Goodyling' behavior, and ours.
Our Lives as Atoms:
Chain Reactions
By Mark Buchanan
The political party that claimed it would restore “honor and dignity to the White House” has done nothing of the sort. Having on false pretenses led us into the disaster of Iraq, the administration and its supporters are now beginning – cravenly and shamefully – to shift blame onto the Iraqi people. The administration continues to hold hundreds of people without charges in secret prisons around the world, while arguing that torture is O.K. and that President Bush can disregard the laws he doesn’t like. I haven’t even mentioned illegal spying or efforts to keep scientists quiet if they’re saying the wrong thing.
Where’s the honor and dignity?
In her testimony last week before a House panel, Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, admitted that she had “crossed the line” in using political considerations to judge potential Justice Department employees. She may well have broken laws that forbid political influence over civil service positions. But “crossing the line” has been business as usual for the past six years. Goodling’s behavior follows a pattern established across almost all federal agencies, where the administration has sought loyalty over competence at every turn.
Another word for it, of course, is corruption – and it’s natural to wonder how we got so deeply mired in it. If the gathering storm of investigations forces Karl Rove and other White House officials one day to testify under oath, we may have some chance of finding out. And I suspect, if we do, that we’ll discover that honor and dignity were sacrificed at the very top. It will be a familiar story – of a few power-hungry and largely amoral political operatives, the real drivers, whose actions encouraged and directed a small army of fairly ordinary people, the Monica Goodlings of this world, many of whom were hardly aware they were doing something wrong.
People who engage in corrupt acts often do not see them as such. This much has emerged from studies of corporate scandals and fraud at places like Enron or WorldCom. In a study two years ago, for example, business professors Vikas Anand, Blake Ashforth and Mahendra Joshi concluded that most fraud within institutions takes place through the willing cooperation of many otherwise upstanding individuals with no psychological predisposition to be criminals.
Whether embezzling money, undermining product safety regulations, or even selling completely fake products, the perpetrators rationalize away their responsibility. They deny that they actually had any choice, saying that “everyone was doing it.” Or they deny that anyone really got hurt, so there really was no crime: “They’re a big company, they can afford to overpay us.”
Then there’s the popular appeal to higher authority, a mechanism with special relevance, perhaps, to the loyalty-rewarding Bush administration: “I had to do it out of loyalty to my boss.”
All of this isn’t so surprising, actually, when you realize that we like to feel good about ourselves and about those with whom we work, and that our brains have immense talent for producing reasons why we should. People engaged in corruption, the academic researchers suggest, create a kind of psychological atmosphere in which what they’re doing seems normal or even honorable. So if congressional oversight does ultimately expose the machinations behind anything from secret prisons to the United States prosecutor purge, brace yourself for a litany of the usual excuses – “We didn’t know it was wrong” and “We were told to do it.”
But the psychology of rationalization is only part of the story. The other element in all such cases seems to be a chain-like linking together of individual actions that can undermine social norms with surprising speed – or keep them safe, sometimes if just a single person remains strong.
In the late 1970s, Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter pointed out that the differences among people – in their willingness to engage in certain kinds of acts – can lead to surprises. Think of the dance floor at a party. Some people are more than happy to be the first out there, dancing alone, but lots of the rest of us would like some others out there first. You might be willing to go out if five or six went before you, while others might require 20 or 30. Some might not go out unless everyone at the party was out there.
The point is that each of us has a threshold for joining in, which depends on personality, the music being played and so on, but also – and this is the really important part – on how many others have already joined in. As Granovetter argued, this can make a group’s behavior extremely difficult to predict.
Just imagine, for example, that 100 people at the party have thresholds ranging from 0 to 99. In this case, everyone will soon be dancing, you can be sure of it. The natural extrovert with threshold 0 will kick it off, soon to be joined by the person with threshold 1, and the dancing will grow, eventually involving even the reluctant people.
But notice how delicately the outcome depends on the precise interlocking of these thresholds. If the person with threshold 1 goes home, then after the first person starts dancing the rest will simply stand by watching. With no one willing to be the second person onto the floor, there’s no chain reaction. So just one person can have a dramatic effect on the overall group.
This is just a toy model, but it illustrates something about the logic of people joining not only dance floors, but riots or protests, trips to the pub in the evening, getting in with others to skim cash from the restaurant till – or violating well-known rules against taking political affiliation into account when hiring. Tiny differences in the group makeup, the presence or absence or a few people of the right type, might be the difference between a few renegade violators and division-wide corruption.
I can’t help thinking of the bizarre attempt by then-White House officials Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales to get then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, drugged and in the hospital, to sign off on a secret National Security Agency wiretapping program. Ashcroft – who back then I would have thought would rubber-stamp anything Bush wanted – was clearly made of sterner stuff and refused, as did Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. Again, we won’t know how much effect these refusals had – and just how extreme the program was that Bush wanted to authorize – until someone manages to get past White House stonewalling and digs up the real information.
But the fragility of social outcome, its potential sensitivity to the actions of just one person, brings home the profound importance of individual responsibility. Everyone’s actions count. The laws and institutional traditions we have were put in place precisely to help us avoid these social meltdowns, and to give people the incentive not to step over the line, especially when lots of others are doing so already. In particular, the laws of the civil service prevent hiring on the basis of political affiliation (at least for many positions), and the routine violation of those laws puts our democracy at risk. Many people went along with it, and so might have many more, had the creeping corruption not been exposed when it was.
Restoring honesty and dignity. One might say of it what Gandhi said when asked what he thought of Western Civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”
22 comments so far...
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1.
May 29th,
2007
9:31 pm
Another excellent article! Granovetter’s exposition of the “threshold for joining in” emphatically underlines the importance of the Senate’s advise and consent role, and the perils of a rubber stamp Congress.
— Posted by Partha Neogy
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2.
May 30th,
2007
3:34 am
Well this is certainly Mr. Buchanan’s most partisan entry to date. The first paragraph or two are indiscernable from any one of a number of blog entries you can find on Daily Kos. I wonder what kind of thoughts he had before he hit the ’send’ button.
On the one hand, such a standard issue summation of Bush’s misdeeds makes it look like he has fallen prey to the very sort of cognitive dissonance he warned us about just a few posts ago. On the other hand, avoiding “extreme” views altogether makes it look like he has fallen into the opposite trap, of buying into a false “mainstream” view–pluralistic ignorance, I think it was.
So: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It seems like no matter what you do, someone else can always come along and–somewhat ad hoc, I think–attribute one or another psychological cause to your behavior. But what is the benefit of doing this? What work is being done by the claim, “You did this behavior because of psychological theory X”?
I think that unless some scientific model or theory is actually generating useful predictions, it really doesn’t have any explanatory power. Attributing some psychological tendency to corrupt individuals after their corruption has been exposed is easy–the term “Monday morning quarterback” comes to mind. But what about using these psychological theories and models to predict breakdowns of rationality and morality before they happen?
That would be pretty impressive.
— Posted by David Morris
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3.
May 30th,
2007
3:42 am
Some “corrupt” people, espcially in politics, often believe what they are doing is right, and don’t see “bending corners” to do something “good” as corrupt, even though if someone did similiar things for something they disagreed with (thought was wrong) They’ll see it, and decry it as corruption.
— Posted by Madrone
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4.
May 30th,
2007
5:43 am
It’s something of a vicious circle that you describe, but surely it has existed since humankind began to get itself organized into structured societies.
Around the world, in both private and public sectors, strong people lead and the weaker follow. In the majority of instances the strongest gets to be boss and others follow orders. Whether dignity and integrity are considered the norm within a given company or government or even a division or department is entirely dependent on the tone set by those at the top.
I take issue with the contention that somehow the sycophants are ignorant of the fact that some of the acts they perform to further their bosses goals are corrupt.
The shepherd/sheep analogy seems to apply to most human endeavour. And when it comes to corrupt followers enabling corrupt bosses, the western world is far from unique. I’m a great admirer of much that Ghandi did- but your use of his cute quote re western civilization is just that…a clever and cute quote.
www.reedwrites.ca
— Posted by jim
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5.
May 30th,
2007
6:23 am
This article is wonderful, I am sending it to everyone I know. As individuals some of us have been standing up for six extremely long years to say what this administration stands for is not anything like you will find in the Bible or Christlike. We have been called anti-Christian, traitors, supporters of the enemy and any other label that Carl Rove may think will work to keep his followers in line and hating the truth. The thing that keeps us strong and still fighting back is the fact that every day people or dying, losing their home and country, doing anything to survive BECAUSE of the horrible actions of this administration. When will there be accountability, how many people must die so “THEY DON’T FOLLOW US HOME!” The enemy is already here.
— Posted by Carol Gibbs
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6.
May 30th,
2007
6:47 am
Mark,
Jane Jacobs’ classic book “Systems of Survival” explains why deceit is a necessary aspect of all successful governing bodies. When are our political commentators going to give us something more than a rehash of stories that are centuries old with only the characters changing.
Verne
— Posted by Verne Harnish
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7.
May 30th,
2007
6:59 am
When will there be something new on this front?
— Posted by dan cusick
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8.
May 30th,
2007
7:03 am
As a citizen of Houston Texas I lived under President Bush as Governor - and his successor Governor Perry who has continued the charade Bush started. Bush wanted to end food subsidies to poor children saying it was corrupt. He refused to regulate the poluting industries making it voluntary making the air in certain cities we now have the worst cancer rates in the nation, he cut social services and initiated a tax cut - about enough to send each family a box of pampers - which ended many useful programs and limited what those that remained could do. - What kind of person supports these evil harsh, anti-social programs - a Republican.
— Posted by Volley Goodman
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9.
May 30th,
2007
7:44 am
From the perspective of the butterfly effect, Mark’s optimistic message that individuals can make a difference in stopping bad behavior makes sense. But for the most part, the power of the group to influence individual behavior is overwhelming; especially when emotions come into play.
Consider the 4,743 lynchings that occurred in the U.S. from 1882 to 1964 as tracked by the Tuskegee Institute. And then compare that with the glee coming from the audience in the last Republican debate when Mitt Romney espoused doubling the size of Guantanamo where suspected terrorists would not have access to lawyers and could be subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’ It can’t be a coincidence the 25 states with the highest number of lynchings per 100,000 people based on 1910 populations, all happen to be red states.
http://www.orderfromrandomness.com/usa360/?chart=lynch+ dthgun100k+srt=v2
— Posted by R. A. Orr
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10.
May 30th,
2007
8:14 am
I think you’re on to something important, Mark. It seems to me that the lack of individual accountability in this administration goes back a generation, to the “birth” of our current Republican extremism, when the Lee Atwaters and Karl Roves of the world made the calculated and strategic decision that right and wrong are, at best, relative. When the basic premises that guide our society are ignored, it’s no surprise to me that more and more people - especially younger people like Monica Goodling - act in such appalling ways. Just following orders.
— Posted by LouK
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11.
May 30th,
2007
8:38 am
Corruption requires deceit, deceit means that not everyone has all the facts, and incomplete information is one of the places where the law of supply and demand breaks down. Conservatives seem to believe so fervently in the laws of economics. Do they consider that the exceptions to the rule — here, incomplete information — may be so overwhelming that the rule itself is in fact not a rule, but merely the exception? Do conservative thinkers know this and continue to spread the lie of “economic laws” as a cover for their rapacity?
— Posted by Mike B.
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12.
May 30th,
2007
8:40 am
I love this column.
— Posted by Mimi Barron
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13.
May 30th,
2007
8:52 am
A good essay, and it’s certainly true that individual actions count. If enough individuals stand up and say this behavior must stop, then the individual actions become group actions–a much more potent force.
As applied to the situation at hand: since we can’t count on the individuals in this Administration to do the right thing, then it must be up to us as citizens. Since this isn’t a dance party, the question then becomes one of deciding what type of action many individuals must take to stop this behavior. Protests? Writing your representatives? Voting them out? Clearly, many people feel the same way, but we have yet to come up with an effective set of individual actions. Certainly many people are doing some of these things, but big change is a long and painful way off at the pace these debacles are happening, 2008 at a minimum. In the meantime, it feels like we are waiting for the Administration to implode on itself, something it seems intent on doing. Unfortunately the damage to our nation gets worse by the day. Rightly or wrongly, I think a lot of us are trying to figure out what actions make the most impact, hoping someone comes up with a good and effective idea so we can join in.
— Posted by Carla M.
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14.
May 30th,
2007
8:57 am
Monica Goodling is an excellent example of someone who clearly didn’t think she was doing wrong when she did it. (Being perceived as doing right is such an important part of her character.) The power of a few powerful people to instigate wrong is something we don’t often think about. (I’ve been reading about Hitler lately.)
I was interested in the chain idea.
I also think groups matter and the tendency of Americans not to join groups (Bowling Alone) may make us more vulnerable to corruption. Groups have the power to encourage us to become corrupt, but also to encourage us to do right. It’s easier to rationalize when the only ones you have to explain your behavior to are yourself and your TV. Harder when it’s a whole community of neighbors, friends, relatives, and so on.
Interesting stuff.
— Posted by Ward
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15.
May 30th,
2007
9:09 am
While I have no quarrel with the overall theme of Mark’s piece,it is a bit of a stretch to describe someone like Monica Goodling as just another ordinary person caught up in a tangled web of corruption beyond her control. By her own admission, and as Mark notes, she admitted that she “crossed the line” when she allowed political considerations to influence her recommendations for U.S. Attorney replacements. Her surreal explanation, that “I crossed the line, but didn’t intend to break the law,” has gone mostly unchallenged by the media, which broadly reported the statement but never really analyzed its import. Mark’s point about ordinary folks getting caught up in an atmosphere of corruption and acting out of ssome sense of misplaced loyalty is valid as far as it goes, but in the case of Ms. Goodling, we have a high level Justice Department attorney who implies in her testimony that she is unaware of the federal law that specifically governs her job responsibilities. We often hear this from CEO’s who claim they were unaware of financial reporting requirements, and as hollow as this sounds, at least we can say that these are business people, not trained lawyers. For Ms. Goodling to cite ignorance of the very law that governs her job as an attorney at the Justice Department strains credibility well past the breaking point, particularly since she possessed enough legal savvy to invoke her 5th amendment rights.
— Posted by robh
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16.
May 30th,
2007
9:35 am
If you like it…go ahead and keep your neat little chain reaction theory. But please spare us the moralizing. Your metaphysical framework doesn’t allow it. Bush’s actions (and our response) were determined at the Big Bang. Words like “shouldn’t” or “immoral” have as much meaning as a well timed burp.
— Posted by Adam
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17.
May 30th,
2007
9:38 am
Having just revisited “Judgment at Nuremberg”; I am struck by just how much some of this analysis was prefigured in the legal argumentation of Maxmillian Schell in defense of the Nazi defendant’s. Even more striking is the film’s conclusion which affirms the significance of individual responsibility on the same basis as does this artical. In the face of mass corruption, however, it does take a great deal of faith to sustain a belief in the efficacy of such responsibility. Either that, or a lack of imagination.
— Posted by michael ormond
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18.
May 30th,
2007
10:01 am
The analysis was excellent. There does seem to be a consistent theme in much of the corruption . . . the use of the “highest authority” to justify all. Ms. Goodling came out of the Pat Robertson law school,Regent University School of Law, which trains lawyers to go into the administration and essentially take over the executive branch on behalf of their beliefs. And so corruption is not corruption. It is the act of reclaiming the nation/world on behalf of God, who seems to be whatever they want him/her to be. From their first day of work they are there to restore “honor and dignity”. It is not a rationalization after the fact. It was part of the plan. So even if she is legally wrong, she can believe she is morally extremely right.
— Posted by D Powell
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19.
May 30th,
2007
10:41 am
Good analysis. Two points: the administration has not only positioned the Iraqi people to take the HEAT round to the chest, but the US military as well. David Patraeus was not elected President, G.W. Bush was. The civilians make the policy, and the military carries it out. Waiting until September is quitclaiming policy to the military. H.S. Truman knew where the buck stopped. These guys don’t even know what the buck is, much less where it stops. Two, do not hold your breath for any real information even on 20 JAN 2009, for there will be nat’l security pardons for all by then.
— Posted by Skip
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20.
May 30th,
2007
11:29 am
“So even if she is legally wrong, she can believe she is morally extremely right.
— Posted by D Powell”
scary…don’t terrorists think this way too?
— Posted by a reader
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21.
May 30th,
2007
11:33 am
Great analysis, but I wonder if this doesn’t just boil down to the old problem of “ends justifying means.” Whether the “ends” are short term (small victories) or long term (winning the ideological war), many people claim to do things “on principle” and thus feel their methods are above reproach. This does happen in all cultures. Compare the rather amoral “means” analysis of the idealogues on the political right, claiming to own Christianity and have a monopoly of understanding as to God’s will and God’s plan (abortion clinic bombers, corrupt Attorney Generals, televangelists), with the amoral “means” analysis of the Islamic idealogues, claiming the Q’uran gives them carte blanche to do whatever it takes to bring to fruition their reading of Allah’s plan. A harsh comparison to be sure, and emotionally charged, but step back a moment: each side uses all means necessary to accomplish what it believes to be the only true understanding of God’s will. Some means are just more insidious than dramatic.
— Posted by D Stahl
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22.
May 30th,
2007
12:05 pm
Both extremes, socio-liberals as well as whatever you choose to call Bush and his gang of thieves (they’ve been disavowed by so many conservatives because of Iraq) believe that the ends justify the means. Trouble is, the ends here seem to be just more power to the oligarchy.
Who was it that said, “In order to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.” Oh yeah, Stalin.
— Posted by dorothy
About Our Lives as Atoms
Mark BuchananMark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, is an associate editor for ComPlexUs, a journal on biocomplexity, and the author of "Ubiquity: The Science of History," "Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks" and, most recently, "The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You." He lives in Normandy.
Posted by Dakota at May 29, 2007 06:48 PM