"if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us"

Richard Fernandez has an amazing essay PRIMAL SCREAM on the witch hunt now seizing parts of the country. I'm Christian and Calvinist enough to understand that all men are sinners. That none of us would want some other things we have done revealed. Yet, somehow it came to be accepted that purity is the basic requirement for government service.

"Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help" was the usual warning. But somewhere along the line conventional wisdom discarded this injunction and media began to create the myth that there were special people to rule over us. Celebrities. A cultural elite. Role models. The only adults in the room. The smartest woman in the world. As social media exposes celebrity after celebrity as flawed we are relearning just how fragile that foundation is.

Thus we have the NeverTrumpers at National Review:

... call for Roy Moore to drop out of the Alabama race because "there is no such thing as a statute of limitations on standards"

So what is that standard?

... an uncomfortable statistical fact, once widely accepted and prosaically expressed as 'all men are sinners'. Moore may or may not be guilty of sexual indiscretion, but the possibility is not excluded in principle. An earlier generation could probably quote 1 John 1:8 "if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us" to remind themselves of this. Alternatively they might cite James Madison.

what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Where does a lot of this come from? In part from a post-Christian culture and Marxism that seeks to create the Perfect Man.

Things are completely different when a political movement bases virtue on a particular class of human beings. The danger is particularly acute in Marxism which boldly declares in the Manifesto that "Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis". There being no God only institutions raises the stakes for institutions. If the Party, the Vanguard of humanity and the source of virtue is found to have a sinner, or worse yet found to be chock full of sinners, guilt is not merely individual but collective. The whole basis collapses. Unlike God who remains unsullied "out there", the practical effect of vice is to undermine the Party's actual legitimacy.

So this is a new day:

The scandals rocking Hollywood, the political elite and the media are qualitatively different from any scandal that could embroil a conservative because latter was always just a man while the former were special men who stood as judges of all mankind able to nudge or signal virtue as the arc of history bade them do.

Now, so the joke goes, they are all being spliced out of movies by the octogenarian Christopher Plummer because it turns out they are no better than anyone else. Being 'like everybody else' is the ultimate downer for any aspiring ruler. A ruler may be anything except ordinary and it's just the trouble when they aren't.