Even though Democratic elites have known since at least 2020 about this affair, they still chose to put Doug Emhoff out there talking up abortion.
If he’d lived as a private citizen rather than a political activist, his affair would receive less scrutiny. Also, Kamala Harris, knowing about her husband’s affair, has chosen to put abortion at the center of her political campaign, thus raising the salience of this story.
I suspect Jews are not thrilled that Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff has been talking up “Jewish values” for years.
The people who most practice Judaism, the Orthodox, are the least likely to talk about “Jewish values” while the Jews least likely to practice Judaism are the most likely to talk to the world about “Jewish values.”
Why in 2014 was Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, a reasonably good-looking 50-year-old guy who was making approaching a million dollars per year as a Century City lawyer, available to marry his 50-year old coeval Kamala Harris? (Doug and Kamala were born seven days apart in October 1964.)
Not surprisingly, it turns out that it was because Doug screwed up his first marriage to the mother of his two kids by knocking up his kids’ schoolteacher whom the Emhoffs occasionally hired as a nanny.
Of course, lots of guys have done much the same. Donald Trump, for example, is on his third wife.
Why is this relevant?
It’s relevant because of the abortion issue that Kamala has chosen to run on.
Not surprisingly, while the Daily Mail emphasizes the pregnancy, the New York Times ignores it. Pregnancy raises too many interesting questions for the NYT to tolerate. Pregnancies are interesting. The NYT’s 10 million paying subscribers don’t read the NYT because it’s interesting, but because it bores them into assuming that their worldview is unquestionable.
My impression is that the median American voter finds abortion grotesque, and would like the government to derogate other people being so sloppy as to be getting abortions. On the other hand, the median voter would, now that they think about it (which they’ve been thinking about it since the Republican Supreme Court overturned Roe), like abortion to be legal just in case, God forbid, their daughter happens to get impregnated by that loser boyfriend of hers.
As movie director Todd Phillips (Hangover) suggested, isn’t it likely that Trump has paid for a lot of abortions?
On the other hand, the legalization of abortion’s impact on male behavior is a little-discussed question that might be brought to the surface in discussion of the Second Gentleman’s conundrum.
I don’t know what happened to the Second Gentleman’s unborn child, but it’s obviously an intriguing question.
Say that the reason Emhoff was available to marry Kamala was because his kids’ schoolteacher/nanny, whom he impregnated, had an abortion, so he wasn’t under social pressure as a prominent attorney to marry her.
Well, you gotta admit that’s worth talking about.
Or did Emhoff’s mistress give the baby up for adoption?
Or did he pony up the money for her to raise it as a single mother?
Or did he not put up the money?
All of these possibilities are highly relevant to the abortion policy question that Kamala is emphasizing.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff acknowledged Saturday in a statement to CNN that he had an affair during his first marriage after the alleged details of the relationship were published by a British tabloid.
“During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side,” Emhoff said in a statement provided exclusively to CNN.
The statement comes after the Daily Mail reported that Emhoff had a relationship with one of his then-young daughter’s teachers, which resulted in the end of his first marriage.
The relationship and the circumstances around it were known four years ago to Joe Biden’s vetting committee as Harris was herself going through the running mate process before being picked for the ticket, a person familiar with the conversations told CNN. The person also said that Emhoff had told Harris about the affair well before they got married.
The relationship ended years before Emhoff began dating Harris.
The Daily Mail reported that the woman became pregnant and that, according to a close friend, she “did not keep the child.”
Did she have it aborted? If so, no wonder Doug Emhoff is so pro abortion. I wonder if he’s been carrying on affairs while married to Kamala.
@MarkHalperin says the @DailyMail’s story (https://dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13703933/Kamala-Harris-Doug-Emhoff-cheated-nanny-Najen-Nayler.html) has “really behind the scenes destabilized the Harris campaign …”
Emhoff boasts in press his goal is to “be there for Cole and Ella and her family. … ” Because one thing you can do for your children is have an affair with a popular teacher at their school that causes her to leave her job! Kids never talk or tease about things like that.
I’m told the Harris campaign is telling journalists, off the record, that there is no kid. But they don’t respond to questions about whether there was a pregnancy or a financial settlement with the teacher–let alone, I assume, an NDA. That’s one way to try to control the story.
Pretty amazing that Harris’ campaign can get the press to NOT report something (the pregnancy) by simply refusing to admit it or respond. At this point the pregnancy shouldn’t be hard for journalists to confirm, even if they don’t trust the Daily Mail. (And did the NYT not report Watergate because they lacked Woodward’s sources?)
Weird that @NYTimes doesn’t mention that the woman was also the Emhoffs’ nanny, something @DailyMail reports.
More important, the @NYTimes also leaves out that the woman had to leave her teaching job. Whether she was pregnant or not, this seems a key detail. Did the Times rely *only* on what Kamala aide Brian Fallon told them? There are no other sources of info?
Just noticed — there’s a supportive statement from Emhoff’s first wife, Kerstin. But there is no supportive statement from Kamala. Hmm.
For whoever needs to hear this: Neither the Biden camp or the Trump camp “leaked” squat about Doug Emhoff’s affair where he knocked up the nanny/teacher. I’m one of a number of journos who’ve known about it since 2020, but we all knew just certain portions. Once Kamala became the de facto nominee I got more info from sources completely removed from either camp, as did a few others I’ve spoken to over the last week. I can only assume that Daily Mail did too, and decided to do the work – and it paid off.
Her main job was as a teacher at the private school [Willows in Culver City] Emhoff’s kids attended, and she moonlighted with the Emhoff family. But agree, it’s harassment. She lost her job at the school after the affair was discovered by Emhoff’s then-wife. So it’s terrible that the woman paid the price for everything, and not Emhoff.
NBC News reported May 8, 2024:
ATLANTA — Second gentleman Doug Emhoff is pushing for more men to become involved in advocating for abortion rights, telling NBC News in an exclusive interview that he sees a role for men in the ongoing battle over access.
Emhoff, who partnered with a group called Men4Choice to convene a panel in Atlanta, said men must see the fight over abortion access as both a women’s issue and a family issue that affects the fundamental freedoms of all Americans. Ahead of the November election, he plans to mobilize men across the country around the issue and to stress the importance of men being allies to women regarding reproductive health care.
“This is an issue of fairness to women. Women are dying,” Emhoff said. “It’s affecting man’s ability to plan their lives. And it’s also an issue of what’s next, what other freedoms are at risk. And these freedoms are affecting all Americans, not just women.”
… The second gentleman has also been discussing the topic with men in his personal life.
“I’m talking about this with my other dad friends,” he said. “I’m talking about it with my son. And it’s not just because I also have a daughter. I have a son and we talk about it, about how this is going to impact him and how he’s going to start a family or not.”
Opposing abortion had never been a big part of Christianity nor conservatism until the 1970s when it became a good organizing principle for American Republicans.
Christopher Caldwell writes Aug. 2, 2024:
The worldview Buchanan was espousing in 1992 was the one he had carried through the Nixon administration: the country was a republic, a republic required citizens of a certain character, and that character was eroded by paternalism of all kinds. But two historic changes had modified his outlook. First, the paternalism that had been introduced after 1964 to solve the American race problem had not just fallen short of expectations; it had given government a new power to censor. Progressive opinions were coming to have the force of law.
Second, while he continued to revere Ronald Reagan as a leader, Buchanan had reconsidered his free-market policies, concluding that they had gone too far. Buchanan’s 1992 speech in Houston is today remembered for its “culture war” notes—its allegation that on matters of race, sex, and religion the American government had become the adversary of the American people. True enough, but the real innovation in the speech was its dramatis personae: factory workers terrified of being laid off, a single mother who says, “I’ve lost my job; I don’t have any money, and they’re going to take away my little girl.” These were people certain Republicans brought up only to make fun of. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, would chuckle on air about the homeless with Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s rollicking “Ain’t Got No Home” running as a soundtrack.
“My friends, these people are our people,” Buchanan told the crowd. “They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from. . . . They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.”
There is your harbinger of the present time. The Republicans in the Astrodome may have been too swaddled in ideology to understand what they were hearing—Buchanan only took a quarter of the Republican vote that primary season. But the people who did understand it received the message like an electroshock. The Republican party would live on as a racket for its networkers. But it would not be taken seriously by its base again until it figured out what Buchanan was talking about. That process would take twenty-four years…
If we look at the popular discontents out of which Reaganism arose in the late 1970s, this makes a good deal of sense. There was a worry that civil rights agitation, strengthened by the full might of the federal government, was becoming a means to boss people around and grind the faces of the white poor. A worry was all it was—it was not yet a grievance. But for Francis the writing was on the wall. He believed that the damage had already been done, and that the yeomanry’s will to self-rule had been broken…
The first Bush era, by contrast, was a silence in which Americans could mull over what the country had actually become: a soft despotism (to use Tocqueville’s phrase), operating under a system that journalists baptized “political correctness” during the 1989–90 school year. This is the America of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing and the invention of sexual harassment. Momentum was building towards the Republican landslide of 1994, starting with the election of Republicans Christine Todd Whitman as governor of New Jersey and Rudolph Giuliani as mayor of New York City in 1993. It is the same America that saw the publication of Herrnstein and Murray’s book The Bell Curve in 1994, O. J. Simpson’s murder of Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994, and his acquittal in 1995. Without falsifying Ganz’s diagnosis of economic Reaganism, these episodes brought a hardening in the country’s cultural Reaganism. The mood Ganz picks up in 1991 lasted until mid-decade, seemingly burning itself out in a matter of weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. That was when two long-awaited and largely despaired-of transitions finally seemed to “take.” First, the draconian War on Drugs, a project of mass incarceration launched a decade before by Reagan and pursued with unflagging zeal by Bush and Clinton, at last brought an astonishing drop in crime. Second, primed by the post–Cold War “peace dividend,” the bet Clinton had placed on Silicon Valley’s innovation brought a new, post-industrial, pollution-free, and generalized prosperity—generalized, at least, among the opinion-forming classes.
The problems were solved and the era had ended. By the time similar problems rolled around again, a generation later, America would be a different country, operating under different rules, and with a different ruling class…
The cultural part of Reaganism was more important than the economic—and this is because it addressed, however tentatively, a considerably larger failure, a regime crisis, in fact, which was already of long standing in the early 1990s and which continues today. This is government’s glaring failure in the years since Lyndon Johnson’s reforms of 1964 and 1965—especially in civil rights and immigration law—to recover anything like the freedom, self-rule, and fellow-feeling of the America they overthrew…
But today’s sometimes majoritarian populism is not yesterday’s fringe discontent. The most arresting thing about the thinkers and demagogues Ganz so vividly brings back to life is not their extremism but their Reaganesque triumphalism, their cockiness. A much-consulted book of the time was the journalist Peter Brown’s Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond. Sam Francis, for all his disappointment with Republicans, didn’t think of himself as fringe or schismatic. He claimed to speak on behalf of “a profound social movement that reflects the dynamics of American society and promises to dominate not only politically, but also perhaps socially and culturally.” One seldom hears a Trumpian talk this way. Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot were tribunes of an angry people that nonetheless still had reason to think of itself as the best people. Unless it put up an energetic resistance to the drift of events, they warned, it would end up a radically diminished people. In this, at least, they proved right.
A key foundation of the trad worldview is that there is a social order (as opposed to the liberal view that you create meaning and morality within yourself). The right-winger likely has an ethos of do your duty while the liberal likely has an ethos of follow your bliss.
In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:
* Amy Wax observes that rationalistic liberals are unmoved and unimpressed by social conservatives’ “[v]ague premonitions of erosion or unraveling” of the social order, which they dismiss as “an inadequate basis for resisting changes that satisfy immediate needs and urgent desires.” And this is because they understand these vague premonitions as symptoms of a lingering pre-modern sensibility, which cannot be allowed interfere with modern “fulfillment.” Hence Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, where he argued that homosexuality in and of itself “involves no real interference with the rights of others, for the mere knowledge that other individuals do not adhere to one’s value system cannot be a legally cognizable interest.” This is how moral opposition to homosexuality must be conceived within a strategic perspective—as mere Hobbesian “annoyance” rather than some disequilibrium in the order of things. Thus understood, the desire to regulate others’ unobtrusive personal conduct out of concern for the “moral fiber of society” is a disingenuous gambit to arrogate state power in the service of merely personal preferences.
Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that the original bohemians regarded their way of life as “appropriate for only a select few, those superior souls capable of throwing off the shackles of bourgeois convention.” Far from attempting to proselytize the world to their free-spiritedness, they viewed themselves as exceptional people whose singular spiritual independence was beyond the reach of the many. But with the democratization of bohemia, what was once a subculture and curiosity has become the dominant culture and orthodoxy. The immoralism that was previously a hobby of academicians and bohemians has mutated into a corrosive social nihilism that attacks the very foundations of the American spirit.
* The “kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and normal,” complains Himmelfarb, is “now seen as pathological, concealing behind the façade of respectability the new ‘original sin’ of child abuse.” In the same spirit of systematic inversion, “smoking has been elevated to the rank of vice and sin, while sexual promiscuity is tolerated as a matter of individual right and choice.” At the same time, rape has ironically been “defined up” to include “date rape”—sexual activity “which participants themselves at the time might not have perceived as rape.” The anointed reject the common sense of the benighted because its very commonness is an affront to their identity, which requires them to systematically invert every inherited norm and understanding. Their identity presupposes a world that resists their prescriptions, a world too benighted to recognize their superior wisdom and morality—and thus all the more in need of these. Whether the issue is the rights of criminals or the merits of avant-garde art, there is, writes Sowell, always a “pattern of seeking differentiation at virtually all costs.”
* As a dissident culture, conservatism is by definition in a position of weakness. The elites of the dissident culture “cannot begin to match, in numbers or influence, those who occupy the commanding heights of the dominant culture, such as professors, journalists, television and movie producers, and various cultural entrepreneurs.”38Even religion has fallen under the dominant culture’s sway. One might have expected it to be at the forefront of the resistance. But “priding themselves on being cosmopolitan and sophisticated, undogmatic and uncensorious,” the mainline churches have offered “little or no resistance” to the “prevailing culture.”
* Conservatives, bewails Himmelfarb, were at one time “convinced that ‘the people,’ as distinct from the ‘elites,’ were still ‘sound,’ still devoted to traditional values, and that only superficially and intermittently were they (or more often their children) seduced by the blandishments of the counterculture.” But this “confidence has eroded, as surely as the values themselves have.” Conservative claimants of cultural oppression understand themselves as representing, not the numerical majority, but what the numerical majority would be but for the mass indoctrination of ultra-liberalism., but for the “blandishments of the counterculture.”
* The dominant culture in fact “exhibits a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices.” The “elite culture,” which includes the media and academia, exists at one end of it. But that elite is “only a small if a most visible and influential part of this culture,” most of which consists “of people who are generally passive and acquiescent.” These people“ lead lives that, in most respects, most of the time, conform to traditional ideals of morality and propriety.” However, they do so “with no firm confidence in the principles underlying their behavior” and are for this reason “vulnerable to weaknesses and stresses in their own lives, and undermined by the example of their less conventional peers or those whom they might think of as their superiors.”
* What culture wars skeptics uphold as all-American centrism is in fact the demoralization of one belligerent by another, the oppression of conservatives by liberals.
* “If Europeans do not share our ‘obsession,’ as they say, with morality, dismissing it disparagingly as ‘moralistic,’ it is perhaps because their ethos still has lingering traces of their monarchic and aristocratic heritage—those vestiges of class, birth, and privilege that are congenial to a ‘loose’ system of morality.” By contrast, “Americans, having been spared that legacy and having relied from the beginning upon character as a test of merit and self-discipline as the precondition of self-government, still pay homage to ‘republican virtue.’”
* Himmelfarb observes that a level of delinquency which a white suburban teenager can indulge with relative impunity may be “literally fatal to a black inner city teenager.”67And Goldberg charges that, not content to just personally indulge in Dionysian excess, “today’s secular royalty” of Hollywood liberals “feel compelled to export values only the very rich and very admired can afford.” Madonna could urge her followers to cast off their bourgeois sexual hang-ups. But whereas she could simply settle down with a husband and kids once she outgrew her hedonism, the “lower-middle-class girls from Jersey City who took her advice” were not so lucky.
* Himmelfarb’s contraposition of an egalitarian conservatism humbly embodying austere republican virtue against a liberalism of the socially privileged drawn to aristocratic vice is advanced as a thesis about the social determinants of poverty.
* Gertrude Himmelfarb charges that the “New Victorians” of the politically correct Left have abandoned the traditional sexual morality of the old Victorians while promoting “a new moral code that is more intrusive and repressive than the old because it is based not on familiar, accepted principles but on new and recondite ones, as if designed for another culture or tribe.” …Christopher Lasch complains that upper middle-class liberals have, in the name of a “hygienic conception of life” mounted “a crusade to sanitize American society: to create a ‘smoke-free environment,’ to censor everything from pornography to ‘hate speech,’ and at the same time, incongruously, to extend the range of personal choice in matters where most people feel the need of solid moral guidelines.”
* Himmelfarb objects that whereas the old Victorians espoused a set of clear, consistent, and commonsensical moral prohibitions, the “New Victorians” of the Left have adopted a convoluted and often contradictory moral code, a “curious combination of promiscuity and prudery.” The New Victorians do not denounce drunkenness but only “those who take ‘advantage’ of their partners’ drunkenness.” They also trivialize rape by “associating it with ‘date rape,’ defined so loosely as to include consensual intercourse that is belatedly regretted by the woman.”15These currents, argues Himmelfarb, have engendered a new and unprecedented repressiveness. Being straightforward and commonsensical, the old code was “deeply embedded in tradition and convention” and so “largely internalized.”16By contrast, the morality of the New Victorians is “novel and contrived, officially legislated and coercively enforced.”17Though the old Victorians have an undeserved reputation as meddlesome moralists and officious busybodies, they would in reality “have been as distressed by the overtness and formality of college regulations governing sexual conduct (with explicit consent required at every stage of the sexual relation) as by the kind of conduct—promiscuity, they would have called it—implicitly sanctioned by those regulations.”
* The buffered self is the self that is defined ontologically by the possibility of disengagement and, normatively, by the demand for disengagement, by the imperative to “take a distance” from “everything outside the mind,” as Taylor says, and thereby establish an “inner base area” through which to distinguish how things are from how they feel. And it is this civilizational imperative that drives the seemingly convoluted morality of the New Victorians. The purpose of communicative sexuality is to advance that imperative and thereby ensure the self-possession required to distinguish authentic, inwardly generated desire from externally induced “pressure.” The requirement that consent be somehow re-elicited and re-issued at every stage of asexual encounter is intended to promote the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, without which a woman’s true feelings cannot be distinguished from whatever fleeing, merely animal impulses her seducer may have succeeded in stimulating. The sense that “consensual intercourse that is belatedly regretted by the woman” can constitute rape reflects the retrospective insight that the seducer was indifferent to fostering this inner base area and thus bears responsibility for the consequences.
Many middle class kids can watch porn, enjoy promiscuous sex and listen to rap and still pull straight As before marrying and having kids, but these same vices of porn and promiscuity and rap may well unbalance those with less discipline and fewer resources. Just because you can watch Game of Thrones and enjoy it without any discernible harm does not mean others will lose their bearings from its blandishments.
Civilization is a particular hero system. To maintain civilization, you need walls against competing hero systems.
While I was enjoying promiscuity, at times I would be called up on to exercise super-human restraint such as when a woman changed her mind in the middle of intercourse and I forced myself to withdraw. This only happened to me a handful of times, and only with women with whom I was not in an exclusive long-running relationship, but it took all of my will to do this.
I’d meet a woman at a party, start dating her, and just as filled up with desire and began making a move on her, she’d tell me she was married, and I had to exercise all of my will to stop, which I always did. I would never have been in these challenging circumstances if I abided by traditional morality.
if everybody had my sex life of 1994-1995 when I slept with about 20 women, civilization would be in trouble.
JD Vance writes about the dissolution of America’s morals in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis:
Nobel – winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites. What they mean is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle – class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees. Fair enough — I worry about those things, too. But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.
The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man with every reason to work — a wife – to – be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him . There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.
Different groups tend to evolve different hero systems. Upholding moral standards is harder in a multi-cultural society where you live surrounded by competing hero systems. Fights over abortion are usually a proxy war for competing hero systems. Racial conflict is often a proxy for competing hero systems. For example, East-Asian-Americans will often seek more rigorous public schools than other groups.
Thomas B. Edsall writes for the New York Times Sep. 15, 2021:
[Political scientist Alan] Abramowitz pointed out, opinions on abortion are also closely connected with racial attitudes:
“Whites who score high on measures of racial resentment and racial grievance are far more likely to support strict limits on abortion than whites who score low on these measures. This is part of a larger picture in which racial attitudes are increasingly linked with opinions on a wide range of disparate issues including social welfare issues, gun control, immigration and even climate change. The fact that opinions on all of these issues are now closely interconnected and connected with racial attitudes is a key factor in the deep polarization within the electorate that contributes to high levels of straight ticket voting and a declining proportion of swing voters.”
Some of the scholars and journalists studying the evolving role of abortion in American politics make the case that key leaders of the conservative movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s — among them Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell Sr. — were seeking to expand their base beyond those opposed to the civil rights movement. According to this argument, conservative strategists settled on a concerted effort to politicize abortion in part because it dodged the race issue and offered the opportunity to unify conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.
“The anti-abortion movement has been remarkably successful at convincing observers that the positions individuals take on the abortion issue always follow in a deductive way from their supposed moral principles. They don’t,” Katherine Stewart, the author of the 2019 book “The Power Worshipers,” wrote in an email.
In 1978, the hostile reaction to an I.R.S. proposal to impose taxes on churches running segregated private schools (“seg academies” for the children of white Southerners seeking to avoid federally mandated school integration orders) provided the opportunity to mobilize born again and evangelical parishioners through the creation of the Moral Majority. As Stewart argues, Viguerie, Weyrich and others on the right were determined to find an issue that could bring together a much larger constituency:
As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisioned.
After long and contentious debate, conservative strategists came to a consensus, Stewart writes: “They landed upon the one surprising word that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: ‘abortion.’”
In an email, Stewart expanded on her argument. Abortion opponents:
“are more likely to be committed to a patriarchal worldview in which the control of reproduction, and female sexuality in particular, is thought to be central in maintaining a gender hierarchy that (as they see it) sustains the family, which they claim is under threat from secular, modern forces.”
Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2001 book One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution:
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith described the “two different schemes or systems of morality” that prevail in all civilized societies.
“In every civilized society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have been always two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the strict or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people: the latter is commonly more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion.”
The liberal or loose system is prone to the “vices of levity” — “luxury, wanton and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc.” Among the “people of fashion,” these vices are treated indulgently. The “common people,” on the other hand, committed to the strict or austere system, regard such vices, for themselves at any rate, with “the utmost abhorrence and detestation,” because they — or at least “the wiser and better sort” of them — know that these vices are almost always ruinous to them. Whereas the rich can sustain years of disorder and extravagance — indeed, regard the liberty to do so without incurring any censure or reproach as one of the privileges of their rank — the people know that a single week’s dissipation can undo a poor workman forever. This is why, Smith explained, religious sects generally arise and flourish among the common people, for these sects preach that system of morality upon which their welfare depends.
Much of the social history of modern times can be written in terms of the rise and fall, the permutations and combinations, of these two systems. Smith knew, of course, that these “systems” are just that — prescriptive or normative standards against which people are judged but which they often violate in practice. He had no illusions about the actual behavior of either class; he did not think that all “people of fashion” indulged in these “vices of levity,” nor that all the “common people,” even the “wiser and better” of them, were paragons of virtue. But he did assume that different social conditions found their reflection in different moral principles and religious institutions. Thus the upper classes were well served by a lenient established church, while the lower classes were drawn to the austere dissenting sects.
There are vices such as sexual affairs that rich people such as Doug Emhoff can engage in with relatively little damage to himself but that would end all prospects for a person in a lower class with fewer resources.
The pattern of selective enforcement of laws continued during her tenure as attorney general. Beyond the move to Sacramento and the new job, Harris also became romantically involved with Los Angeles attorney Douglas Emhoff. The two met on a blind date set up by a close friend of Harris. They were engaged in March 2014. By August, they were married. It was a private ceremony presided over by her sister, Maya. Guests were sworn to secrecy.
Emhoff has practiced corporate law most of his career and specializes in defending corporations facing charges of unfair business practices and entertainment and intellectual property law matters. He established his own boutique firm in Los Angeles, but was later tapped to become the partner – in – charge at the Los Angeles office of Venable LLP, an international law firm with offices around the country. As partner – in – charge, Emhoff was involved in all cases coming out of the office. Venable’s clients included a parade of corporations who had matters sitting on Kamala Harris’s desk. The fate of many of those cases is further evidence of the selective nature of the way she has exercised power, often for the benefit of friends, family, and those with whom they have financial ties.
Nutritional supplement companies have faced a myriad of legal actions over the years about what critics claim are exaggerated statements about the effectiveness of their products. This would seem to be a natural area for Harris to use her powers as attorney general and as a self – professed consumer advocate.
Indeed, in 2015 the attorneys general from fourteen other states, including New York, launched an effort to investigate nutrition companies on the grounds of false advertising and mislabeling. They claimed, “Many products contained ingredients that were not listed on their labels and that could pose serious health risks.” Harris, who had a history of working with these AGs on other issues, did not participate. 117
At the same time that these states were pursuing the nutritional supplement issue, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) was also going after dietary supplement producers, charging them with exaggerated claims about their products “that are unsupported by adequate scientific evidence.” 118 Their targets included General Nutrition Corporation (GNC), Herbalife, AdvoCare International, Vitamin Shoppe, Walgreens, and others.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation into Herbalife in March 2014. 119 In California, Harris’s attorney general’s office had received more than seven hundred complaints about Herbalife. 120 In July 2016, the FTC won a $200 million settlement against Herbalife. 121 But Harris never even investigated the company.
Something very strange occurred in this instance when it came to Harris’s handling of the matter. The Los Angeles Times noted her conspicuous failure to participate in the action. 122
It is worth noting that those corporations in question all happened to be clients of her husband’s law firm, Venable LLP. GNC, Herbalife, AdvoCare International, Vitamin Shoppe, and others were represented by Venable. 123 Indeed, her husband’s office had only months earlier, in January, represented Walgreens in a case involving false advertising claims. Though the lawsuit was dismissed, the possibility of another class action case remained. 124
Herbalife was one of Venable’s large clients, paying the firm for thousands of hours of legal work. 125 Herbalife had been the subject of a standing court order since 1986 concerning its advertising claims and practices. 126 Critics point out that Harris declined to enforce those standing court orders. 127
As Harris was deciding on how to deal with the Herbalife matter, the company’s lobbying firm threw her a fund – raiser. On February 26, 2015, the Podesta Group, which specifically represented Herbalife, held a luncheon fund – raiser for Harris in Washington, D.C. 128
In 2015, prosecutors from Harris’s own attorney general’s office based out of San Diego sent her a long memorandum arguing that Herbalife needed to be investigated. They also requested additional resources to probe further into the company and its practices. Harris declined to investigate or provide the resources — and never offered a reason. 129
By August 2015, Venable LLP promoted Emhoff to managing director of the West Coast operations.
