There is a kind of baby-boomer Pharisaism in Clinton\u2019s outlook. It\u2019s an outlook that recognizes the existence of evil, yes, but the evil is always located in other people, never in oneself; it\u2019s always out there somewhere\u201d\u201din society, in discriminatory practices, in \u201cbackward-looking policies,\u201d\u009d in partisan climates, in \u201can interlocking network of groups and individuals who want to turn the clock back on many of the advances our country has made\u201d\u009d (this last an explanation, in Living History, of her notorious reference to a \u201cvast right-wing conspiracy\u201d\u009d in 1998).<\/p>\n
Clinton is the product, first, of the midcentury Protestant liberalism of her upbringing\u201d\u201dshe was raised in a solidly mainline Methodist church outside Chicago\u201d\u201dand, second, the countercultural protests of the 1960s. These are very different cultural phenomena in many respects, but both tended to locate human wickedness in institutions, social trends, historical processes. War, consumerism, social injustice, poverty, the \u201cmilitary\u201d\u201cindustrial complex\u201d\u009d: the problem was always some kind of social or political circumstance, never man himself and certainly not one\u2019s own heart. For Clinton, an honest admission of wrongdoing isn\u2019t something to avoid doing; it isn\u2019t a thing at all. Except in some extreme case in which the individual admits his part in an institutional or political sin (Lee Atwater\u2019s late confession of cruelty to political opponents, perhaps), decent, right-thinking people can\u2019t admit to wrongdoing because wrongdoing isn\u2019t really the result of individual decisions.<\/p>\n