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Summer Reading: Corruption and American Politics IV - Wayne Le Cheminant's Essay
Saturday, August 25th, 2012
Robert Wechsler
The fourth essay in Corruption and American Politics, an essay collection edited by Michael A. Genovese and Victoria A. Farrar-Meyers (Cambria, 2011), is by Wayne S. Le Cheminant. The title of the essay – "Bending the Frame to Corrupt the Lenses" – provides a good picture of his fascinating approach to government ethics.
Le Cheminant begins by noting that "corruption is generally seen as a degeneration of that ideal form of politics in which those trusted with power are to do the will of the people." But what is most important to him is perspective:
The ways in which the polity, in general, comes to believe the stories told to them by politicians is a very important part of the story of how the polity perceives and deals with corruption.Le Cheminant believes that how corruption is presented by politicians is very important.
[C]orruption has a great deal to do with how politicians manipulate the very language of corruption to create a favorable playing field so that their acts will generally appear to be legitimate. … Given the manner in which our brains work, … corruption is far more likely to accelerate in a contemporary society since information can be manipulated to benefit public officials.By determining the frames through which we see corruption, officials can manage our expectations and effectively protect themselves against accusations of corruption. "I have the community's best interests at heart" and "I've done so much for the community," they say. Or "I was just doing constituent services." Or "I followed the law," even though they voted for or even drafted the law, or failed to create or improve an ethics program (an alternate version is, "I was not found guilty," even when the reason is procedural or due to a settlement). And there's the ever-popular "Everyone does it," which is really a statement that the conduct is a norm in the ethics environment, and that the speaker has done nothing to oppose it because it works for him personally.
In fact, the term "ethical misconduct" (Le Cheminant uses the term "corruption") "becomes a mere rhetorical tool that can be used to describe a host of bad acts." Nothing is abused as much as the definition of ethical misconduct.
How is this corruption of how we view ethical misconduct accomplished? Le Cheminant provides six ways in which the process works. One, because "experience is merely the rewiring of our brains through new synaptic connections, it is the case that we will take the truth to be what we hear over and over again." Our connections are strengthened by repetition (this is true for humor as well as for propaganda – think Seinfeld or, for older folks, Laugh In).
Two, "politicians can count on using a variety of metaphors to which we respond in order to bend the frames of experience." The most important metaphors used to obscure government ethics are law and rights. They are used so successfully that few question them.
Three, we are "wired" toward empathy and, therefore, "believe those we 'know' we can trust because we have a 'gut feeling' about the person." (And citizens trust their representatives more than anyone else's.)
Four, we "believe that people and things are imbued within a central core that cannot be broken or altered." They are either "good" or "bad." It's hard for us to accept contradictory information. Five is "reciprocal altruism," which means that we "trust others as if we have reason to because we do something for them, like vote them into office, and they seem to do something for us, like feel our pain or understand" our hardships. In politics, there is a serious asymmetry to this relationship.
Six, we believe what we feel, not what we know.
Since most people feel they can tell whether a politician is honest or not, and believe that character is what matters with respect to ethical misconduct, politicians always portray themselves as honest and tend to do what they can to limit information about their actions and motives, so that the public has as little as possible to go on. Since there is limited coverage of local politics, except in blogs that are often strident and not believed (or even read or discussed) by the community, it is not difficult to do this.
This is why it is so important to counter the individual character aspect of what Le Cheminant calls the "traditional story of corruption." It actually gives unethical politicians more power. In fact, they are the people most capable of misusing an ethics program to portray their opponents as unethical. If the issue was not character but the norms of the ethics environment, the possibilities of temptation, the definitions and limitations of roles, formal procedures and oversight, government ethics could be treated like any other institutional issue. But it is not, Le Cheminant believes, in the interest of politicians to normalize government ethics.
Le Cheminant asks an important question about the typical approach to government ethics: "Why [do] we care so much about the intention of actors in general and the politicians specifically"? It is caring about people's intentions that allows politicians not only to criminalize ethics, making it very hard to convict, but also allows them to talk about intentions (and therefore character) rather than about conduct, obligations, transparency, and the like. Talk about character is easy to manipulate. Talk about the other things is much harder to manipulate, much harder, as Le Cheminant would say, to bend the frame and corrupt the lense through which we view our local officials' behavior.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
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