Consider a classroom, with a teacher of Euclidean geometry. The teacher lectures on the Elements, and summarizes the work, book by book. The description of the first ten books is conventional and unremarkable.
However, when the teacher comes to book eleven, he tells the students that it’s about Euclid’s postulate of wavy lines, that undulate with the movement of the tides, and change colors with the seasons. A brave student raises her hand, and says that she’s read all the work, and there’s no portion that talks about wavy lines, tides, and seasonal color changes.
In a normal, conventional political culture, of the kind that Americans expect, the teacher would admit his error, one of reading from the wrong book, or being drunk, or simply fabricating the description because he was too lazy to prepare the students’ lesson on book eleven.
In a distorted political culture, that’s not what would happen. The teacher might deny that he was wrong: “No, Euclid did say that. I have the revised copy of the Elements, that only teachers have” or “No, I didn’t say anything about wavy, color-changing lines. You misheard me.”
The teacher might deny that the ridiculously false teaching mattered: “Well, no one cares about book eleven” or “All these postulates are speculative anyway, and no one has to be too exact about them.”
The teacher might even suggest that he had improved on Euclid: “Well, it’s been reported that, in fact, Euclid wanted to change the text of book eleven, to bring it closer to what I’ve said you about lines, colors, tides, and seasons. He would have appreciated my creativity. Oh, and by the way, he always hated students who questioned their teachers.”
There are countless variations.
The explanations for the false teaching all have one thing in common: an upside down notion of what matters most. The teacher holds himself more important than his teaching, and he’s willing to say anything to preserve his own image. The subject, no matter how important or well-established, becomes less important than the teacher’s image. The teacher’s image becomes a principle all its own.
This is the sad state to which a distorted political culture may deteoriate. It’s all about looking good, about political image, substance and policy being merely the appetizers to a main course of self-agrandizement.
That’s a culture of men and women, but not of principle. There’s a difference (one hopes small, sadly often vast) between being an American official and representing American political and legal principles. They are manifestly not the same, but pointing out the difference is often hard for officials to take. Common people understand that difference intuitively; it’s only officials themselves, and a few synchophants, who seem confused or offended by the distinction.
For more on the difference between a government of laws and a government of men, see Jason Kuznicki’s A Government of Laws, Not Men from Cato@Liberty.