Andrew Cuomo and the corruption of power
Andrew Cuomo (Vanessa Carvalho/ZUMA Press Wire)
This week we have had at least one notable illustration of Lord Acton’s much misquoted maxim about the corrupting effect of power. Andrew Cuomo, the long-serving Governor of New York, has been investigated by his own attorney general, Letitia James, on allegations of sexual assault and harassment by 11 different women. Her detailed report has found against him. Both New York senators and most state representatives in Congress have called for his resignation. The state legislature has begun impeachment proceedings and in Albany County he faces a likely criminal prosecution. The game is up for the Governor. For the sake of the Empire State and the Democratic Party, Cuomo must go.
Yet he shows no sign of doing so. Instead, Cuomo — the most prominent Italian-American in US politics, often touted as a presidential candidate — issued a video statement in which he not only denied all the accusations, but depicted himself as the victim. Not the 63-year-old Governor, who has enjoyed three terms in office and was evidently counting on a fourth, but his accusers, who were half his age, are the implied villains of the case.
It was they, it seemed, who had all misunderstood his flirtatious words and tactile behaviour (which included groping). Mamma mia, his beloved mother, had apparently taught him to express love by touching people’s faces — and his lawyer produced footage of him doing precisely that to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. As for ordering one of his named accusers, Charlotte Bennett, to do twenty press-ups on his office floor? He was empathising with her suffering as a victim of sexual assault, which reminded him of his own pain when told of a similar ordeal by an unnamed member of his own family. In other words, it was all about him.
An excellent analysis of “Cuomo the Mad King of New York” by John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, can be found here. As Podhoretz points out, all the actors in this drama are Democrats. His colleague, ally and rival Joe Biden has said that Cuomo must resign if the charges are proven — by which we must presume the President means proven in a court of law. (How much more evidence does he need?) The fact that even the attorney general who investigated him and those who are likely to prosecute him are all Democrats points to an inconvenient truth: New York is a one-party state. Their desire to be rid of Cuomo is motivated by damage limitation, so that life for the Democratic oligarchy can go on as before.
So: back to Acton (pictured below). What was it precisely that the Victorian polymath had to say about power? “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This, his most famous quotation, dates from 1887, but did not appear for another three decades, long after his death. Lord Acton published little in his lifetime; though he was what we might call a public intellectual, much of his reputation was owed to his private conversation and correspondence. It was in a letter to his friend Bishop Creighton, included in a posthumous collection of essays, that the immortal words appeared. But what did he mean, and do they apply to men like Cuomo?
The context is, as always, illuminating. Acton was taking issue with Creighton on the question of whether historians should hold those they study to account for their actions. The bishop thought popes and kings should be judged more leniently than lesser beings; the baron thought the opposite. “Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
It is not irrelevant to observe that Acton and Creighton were both distinguished historians, who held chairs at Cambridge; Acton founded the Cambridge Modern History and Creighton was the first editor of the English Historical Review. They were also both Christians, of course: Creighton an Anglican bishop, Acton a Catholic — and a liberal. To be a liberal Catholic was, after the First Vatican Council in 1870, an oxymoron: Pope Pius IX had condemned liberalism as a dangerous heresy. Acton, who had dedicated his life to the grand project of a History of Liberty, found himself condemned by his own Church. The inner conflict between liberty and authority that this generated explains the vehemence with which he condemns the “certainty of corruption by authority”. Hence, too, the passion with which Acton insisted that he would never spare a bad king or pope: “I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science.”
Andrew Cuomo is not the Pope in Rome, but the Governor of New York. Unlike the successor of St Peter, he does not exercise moral authority ex officio. Yet, like any elected politician, by virtue of his office he is expected to set an example of decency and probity. Indeed, all such representatives swear an oath to do so. Cuomo has manifestly failed to uphold the standards expected of and implied by leadership in a democracy. He therefore has a duty to resign, regardless of whether or not he is ever brought to trial. Acton was probably thinking of popes when he wrote that the office does not sanctify the holder, but the converse applies: any office, especially the papal one, may be damaged by a corrupt incumbent. It is equally true of secular statesmen that their misconduct can bring their office into disrepute.
That is what has happened in the case of Cuomo. If he has any remaining shred of integrity, he will pack his bags and hand over his office to his Lieutenant Governor, Kathy Hochul. Great men may or may not be “almost always” bad men, as Acton avers, but Andrew Cuomo is living proof that a man who is anything but great may yet be bad. If he were to resign now, he would at least have done the decent thing for once in his career.
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