There comes a moment in the life of a nation when the most important word in its political vocabulary is also the shortest.
No.
The Greeks have a rather magnificent word for it: Oxi.
On Oct. 28, 1940, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini presented Greece with an ultimatum: Submit to the occupation of strategic positions by Italian forces or face war.
Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas refused.
It is one of history’s little ironies that Metaxas was himself an authoritarian ruler. Yet on that particular morning, he understood something that seems to have escaped a considerable number of modern Democrats, Republicans and assorted custodians of Western civilization.
There are demands to which the only honorable answer is no.
Eighty-six years later, as Greece prepares to commemorate Oxi Day, I find myself wondering whether America has forgotten the moral and political utility of that simple word.
For we have arrived at a peculiar inflection point in American politics, one at which the indefensible is presented as perfectly respectable and the proximity of private wealth to public power as just another charming feature of the Washington social calendar.
We are invited, almost daily, to admire the ingenuity of financial arrangements that in another administration would have produced congressional hearings, prosecutorial inquiries and a gratifying explosion of moral indignation.
But there is a larger question here, one that goes beyond Donald Trump, beyond Republicans and Democrats, and beyond the latest revelations from the increasingly lucrative business of knowing the right people in Washington.
At what point does a nation become so accustomed to the erosion of its standards that it no longer recognizes when those standards have been abandoned?
The $50 million question
President Donald Trump announced a new initiative encouraging ordinary Americans to report fraud involving federal government programs, with financial rewards for information that leads to enforcement action.
A splendid principle that becomes rather more interesting when we consider the upper echelons of American power.
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported an arrangement that deserves far more than Washington’s customary shrug.
According to the Times, the family of Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan billionaire seeking a presidential pardon, hired Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal attorney, on extraordinarily lucrative terms.
The arrangement guaranteed Habba more than $50 million over four years to serve as general counsel to a company established by Herrera Velutini’s daughter.
Fifty million dollars.
Not for discovering a cure for cancer. Not for negotiating peace in the Middle East. Not for inventing some miraculous technology capable of transforming the productivity of the American economy.
For a legal and corporate position at a company whose business, according to the Times, was unclear even to some familiar with the family’s commercial empire.
One imagines that a considerable number of lawyers who spent years at Harvard and Yale might reasonably wonder whether they had misunderstood the economics of their profession.
Habba began the job Jan. 1.
When she finalized the deal, according to the Times, Habba was still working at the Justice Department, and people familiar with her contract told the paper they believed she had been hired to help with the pardon effort.
Habba denies having played any role in securing the pardon and says her employment was disclosed to and vetted by the Justice Department. The White House and Justice Department likewise deny her involvement.
Very well.
Nothing made public so far shows that this arrangement was an unlawful exchange for clemency. But the absence of proven criminal wrongdoing is not the absence of legitimate questions.
Why should an arrangement of this size, this close to presidential power, be treated as anything less than an urgent matter of public interest?
If the questions mattered then, they matter now
Remember the national convulsions over Hunter Biden?
For years, Americans were invited to contemplate the moral horror of Joe Biden’s son earning roughly $83,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company.
There were, rightly, questions about influence and the monetization of a famous political surname.
But if those questions were legitimate then, by what feat of political contortion do they become irrelevant when a former Trump lawyer is guaranteed more than $50 million by a family seeking presidential clemency?
Is the objection to influence-peddling, or merely to the people suspected of practicing it?
The principle cannot depend on the party affiliation of the person writing the checks.
And here is where our politics has gone terribly wrong.
We have become remarkably good at recognizing the moral failures of people we oppose and remarkably inventive at explaining away the conduct of people we support.
We demand accountability when the other party is in power and call it persecution when the questions reach our own side.
We speak of the rule of law as though it were a sacred inheritance, only to treat it as an inconvenience when it interferes with our preferred political outcome.
This is not the defense of principle.
It is the surrender of principle to partisanship.
When proximity becomes its own currency
Washington is beginning to resemble Palm Royale, the television satire of social climbing in 1960s Palm Beach. The difference is that the social climbing now comes with government credentials, the private clubs have become gateways to presidential influence and the favors at stake are no longer dinner invitations but matters of public authority.
The club member becomes the presidential acquaintance.
The acquaintance becomes his personal lawyer.
The lawyer acquires access, status and opportunities that would astonish even the most ambitious graduate of an elite law school.
And somewhere along the way, we are asked to believe that this is simply how business is done.
No.
We should say no to the normalization of the political hustler, however expensive the suit, however magnificent the club membership, however intimate the presidential acquaintance.
No to the proposition that private wealth may purchase the appearance of privileged access to public power without serious scrutiny.
And no to the increasingly fashionable suggestion that questioning such arrangements is somehow more offensive than the arrangements themselves.
We should not have to choose between loyalty to our political beliefs and loyalty to the standards that make those beliefs worth defending.
One more exception
The problem is not, in isolation, an extraordinarily remunerative corporate contract. Nor is it, in isolation, a presidential pardon.
The problem is the steady erosion of the distinction between public office and private advantage.
It is the assumption that what can be arranged through proximity to power need no longer be justified to the people from whom that power is borrowed.
And it is the slow accumulation of exceptions that, over time, threatens to become the rule.
This is where the Greeks have something to teach us.
Oxi was not merely a rejection of an ultimatum. It was the recognition that there are circumstances in which acquiescence becomes more dangerous than resistance.
We are not confronting Mussolini’s armies.
We are confronting something less theatrical and, for that reason, easier to excuse: the gradual destruction of standards through repetition, tribal loyalty and the exhausting daily demand that the public accept one more exception.
One more favor.
One more coincidence.
One more arrangement that everyone insists is perfectly lawful.
Eventually, resignation begins to pass for wisdom.
Conduct that once demanded an explanation becomes something we are expected to accept. And the ordinary American who works, pays taxes, follows the rules and has never been invited to a presidential private club is left wondering whether there is one system for people like him and quite another for those fortunate enough to know the right people.
Perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of Washington’s political class is its ability to persuade the public that such arrangements are not evidence of a problem but proof of how the system operates.
And that questioning the system is somehow more naive than participating in it.
The word America must remember
There will always be those who tell us that this is simply how Washington works.
That everyone does it.
That the money is lawful.
That nothing has been proved.
That the critics have political motives.
That the outrage is selective.
Some of those arguments may contain elements of truth. Some accusations will not withstand investigation. Some transactions will have perfectly legitimate explanations.
That is why we have evidence, due process and the presumption of innocence.
But those protections were never intended to relieve public officials and those connected to them of scrutiny.
Nor were they intended to persuade a free people that anything short of a criminal conviction must be accepted without question.
The question before America is not whether we can summon another burst of outrage.
We have more than enough outrage.
The question is whether we still possess the judgment to know what should trouble us, the independence to recognize it in our own political allies and the courage to insist upon an answer.
That courage need not be theatrical.
It need not be angry.
It does not require us to hate those with whom we disagree.
It asks something more difficult.
That we refuse to surrender our standards merely because enforcing them has become politically inconvenient.
That we remember the presidency is an office held in trust, not a personal possession.
That we understand public power belongs neither to the president nor to the people fortunate enough to know him.
It belongs to the American people.
And the people have every right to demand that it be exercised in their interest.
There comes a moment when a nation must decide whether the standards it professes are merely words it recites or principles it intends to defend.
A moment when it must ask itself how many exceptions are too many.
How much private advantage is too much.
How much silence is too much.
And whether the time has finally come to say that enough is enough.
The Greeks gave that moment a name.
Oxi.
No.
It is a small word.
But democracy depends, in no small part, on our willingness to use it.
