16 May The Personal is Political and the Political is Personal
This week, unfortunately, marks the definitive collision of two of the least attractive trends in the public sphere of contemporary American society and, as a result, possibly portends an even more dystopian civil society than is already extant in the country (and the West more generally) today. A good example of this collision can be seen in the following, published by this past Tuesday by The New York Times, but it is hardly the only example. Just Google “Pope’s brother” and you’ll see what I mean:
You can often find the eldest brother of the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles down at the Twisted Fork restaurant in Port Charlotte, Fla., where, on Honky-Tonk Thursdays, he is most likely boot-scooting along with the rest of the line dancers.
His ringtone plays the opening riffs of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” He incurred $20,000 in roof damage from Hurricane Ian. And until recently, anyone could read his Facebook posts, which included vulgar potshots at Nancy Pelosi and her husband and a pronouncement that supporters of Joseph R. Biden Jr. suffered from a “mental affliction.”
Nearly a week after the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost became Pope Leo XIV, the world is still adjusting to the fact that he has an American family that does typically American things. The Borgias, for all their many sins, never posted crude or spicy memes to the socials. And indeed, for Louis Prevost, 73, it is the Facebook posts, which he shared online before his brother was made pope, that have earned him the most attention in the last few days.
Oh, FFS. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is prurient and stupid. I’d also like to say that no one cares, but clearly, some people do care. It just so happens that those who do care are creepy as hell. No one thinks this is important. No one thinks it matters in any real way. No one thinks it will have any impact on how Pope Leo XIV handles his pontificate or how he addresses the hot-button issues in the Church right now. The only reason anyone cares is because some people are a**es who think that it’s fun to expose the hypothetically dirty laundry of everyone, everywhere, with no concern whatsoever about the real people whom their voyeuristic obsessions target.
As for the ugly two trends that collide in this creepy, voyeuristic obsession with Louis Prevost, they are the politicization of the personal and the personalization of the political. The former of these two is a trend I have discussed interminably in these pages and that I will say a bit more about momentarily. First, however, I want to discuss the latter, “the personalization of the political.” What I mean by this is the trend, mostly fostered by the left-leaning media, to dig up and publicize as much “dirt” about a political figure and his/her friends and family, regardless of its relevance. One might also call this “Mitch Daniels Syndrome.”
Many of you, I’d guess, know who Mitch Daniels is. If you don’t, then I think he is best characterized by John Greenleaf Whittier’s most famous line, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these ‘It might have been.’”
Among other things, Daniels was the president of the Hudson Institute, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, a wildly successful two-term governor of Indiana, and the president of Purdue University. Wikipedia sums up his governorship as follows:
He won the Republican primary with 67% of the vote and defeated Democratic incumbent Governor Joe Kernan in the general election. In 2008, Daniels was reelected to a second term, defeating Jill Long Thompson. During his tenure, Daniels cut the state government workforce by 18%, cut and capped state property taxes, balanced the state budget through austerity measures and increasing spending by less than the inflation rate. In his second term, Daniels saw protest by labor unions and Democrats in the state legislature over Indiana’s school voucher program, privatization of public highways, and the attempt to pass ‘right to work‘ legislation, leading to the 2011 Indiana legislative walkouts. During the legislature’s last session under Daniels, he signed a ‘right-to-work law‘, with Indiana becoming the 23rd state in the nation to pass such legislation.
Given all of this, it is hardly surprising that many observers assumed that Daniels would run for president in 2012. But he didn’t. And when he didn’t, many assumed that he would be on the Romney campaign’s short-list for running mates. But he wasn’t.
Despite his inarguable qualifications, his clear success as a political executive, his indisputable conservative credentials, and his staid, agreeable temperament, Mitch Daniels never sought higher office. By all indications, he never even thought seriously about it. And the reason he never thought about it was because of “the personalization of the political.”
You see, Daniels is married to a woman named Cheri Herman Daniels. They were married in 1978. And they were married again in 1997. In 1993, they were divorced. Cheri married another man, and she and her new husband moved to California. She left the second spouse three years later, returned to Mitch, and that was that. Mitch and Cheri have now been married for 43 years total, 28 years since the second wedding.
Back in 2011, when people began to speculate about a possible run for the presidency, the mainstream and (openly) left-leaning media went nuts with the Daniels marriage story. Mitch and Cheri were the subjects of dozens, if not hundreds, of columns, profiles, and other media attacks. Because Mitch had custody of their two daughters during their non-married years, Cheri was accused, repeatedly, in print of “abandonment,” even though the charge was baseless. She was attacked and pilloried. His judgment was questioned. And the two were subjected to endless scrutiny for something that they, themselves, had gotten over and had long put behind them.
After all, all is fair in love and war, and war is, as Clausewitz noted, just politics with the addition of other means, right? Moreover, Daniels had the potential to unseat Barack Obama, and the media couldn’t let that happen, could they? It had to be done. Cheri had to be destroyed or, at least, convincingly threatened with destruction.
And it worked. Mitch Daniels – understandably, gallantly – refused to subject his wife to the media’s bloodlust. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop them. Indeed, the taste of victory made them hungry for more. And now everyone connected to any political figure is considered fair game.
The second trend – the politicization of the personal – can be found here in the fact that the media consider the Pope a “political figure.” As I noted in these pages last week, that’s unfair at the very least and theoretically absurd. The Pope is not a political figure. Period. He is a religious figure. And only those so obsessed with politics that they turn it into a religion of sorts are unable to see the difference. The whole business is stupid and destructive and quintessentially characteristic of contemporary American society.
Mitch Daniels may have been a great president. We’ll never know. We’ll also never know who else could have been a great political figure but declined to get involved because of his unwillingness to do that to his family.
Given the obsession with Louis Prevost, going forward, we might also reasonably wonder who declined to be the Pope or any of dozens of other non-political positions for the same reasons. The media thinks Louis Prevost should apologize to his brother for his political views and posts. I’m more inclined to think it’s the other way around, that Pope Leo has apologized to his brother and will continue to apologize to him for bringing attention to him that neither of them ever wanted or expected.
