Delogu on accountability

What is Accountability and Why Does it Matter? C. Jon Delogu (Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3) In the past two or three years, a reader of newspapers and magazines in English, especially American ones such as The New York Times and The New Yorker, may have noticed a spike in the number of pieces containing the word “accountable” or “accountability.”1 The Trump presidency, social justice movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and misconduct by the media, especially social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, seem to be the three areas where calls for accountability (or laments about the lack of accountability) have cropped up most often.2 To understand these news items and perhaps explain why there is such a focus on accountability at the present time, it’s important to first recall what these terms mean, where they come from, and the social and political norms of accountability in America that held sway for two hundred years… but which have undergone major challenges during the Internet age and especially in the last ten years. What will become clear is that accountability is not a passing fad, but on the contrary a basic necessity for any democracy worthy of the name and arguably for all sustainable social and interpersonal relations. Enter these words in the newspaper’s search box and dozens of articles come up. For an account in the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, see Jess Row, “Why Is Being Held Accountable So Terrifying Under Patriarchy?” The New Yorker, November 30, 2018: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/why-is-being-held-accountable-so-terrifying-underpatriarchy?mbid=nl_Daily%20113018&CNDID=32038225&utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=D aily%20113018&utm_content=&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=Daily%20113018&hasha=ed8d6bf7b97638b9e9a4f a7e992ecdfa&hashb=606ade05e2824dd70d737008e3e9620db0c3d518&spMailingID=14712135&spUserID=MTMz MTgzNjMzOTI1S0&spJobID=1522369943&spReportId=MTUyMjM2OTk0MwS2 2 In New Yorker magazine pieces alone, see Jelani Cobb’s history of Black Lives Matter, the many articles published one year after Ronan Farrow broke open the Harvey Weinstein affair, and Evan Osnos’s in-depth investigation, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” September 17, 2018. 1 1 Accountability is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the quality of being accountable; liability to give account of, and answer for, discharge of duties or conduct; responsibility, amenableness = accountableness.” This definition is followed by a selection of occurrences: the earliest from a History of Vermont by Samuel Williams from 1794 speaks of “No mutual checks and balances, accountability and responsibility”; a second from George Grote’s History of Greece (1849) mentions “Individual magistrates exposed to annual accountability”; and a third, and arguably the most important, from John Stuart Mill’s Dissertations and Discussions (1859), talks of “pushing to its utmost extent the accountability of governments to the people.” It’s clear that one cannot understand accountability without also understanding the meaning of the adjective accountable which the OED defines as “liable to be called to account, or to answer for responsibilities and conduct; answerable, responsible. Chiefly of persons (to a person, for a thing).” Occurrences of this adjective date from 1583. Of particular note is an instance of the expression to be accountable for one’s actions which is dated 1873. One can see that the two terms relate to both public bookkeeping, in other words accounting, and also to storytelling, to giving an account, an explanation or reason for something or for a course of conduct, especially in relation to one’s responsibilities, to what one has been put in charge of, for example an annual report. The implication is that one may be punished if one’s account or report is considered flawed, lacking, or inadequate in some way. All of this is clear enough to a French native speaker so long as one remembers all the definitions of the noun responsabilité and the adjective responsable. In everyday usage, le responsable is simply the one in charge of something. However, being in charge comes with a 2 serious responsibility: the person in charge is one, “Qui doit accepter et subir les conséquences de ses actes, en répondre… Qui doit (de par la loi) réparer les dommages qu’il a causés par sa faute… Qui doit subir le châtiment prévu par la loi… Qui doit rendre compte de sa politique… Qui doit, en vertu de la morale admise, rendre compte de ses actes ou de ceux d’autrui.” All of these duties fall under the heading of responsabilité which the Robert dictionary dates to 1783 and, borrowing from the 1733 English use of responsibility in the area of constitutional law, defines as, “the obligation for ministers to surrender power [quitter le pouvoir] when the legislature withdraws its confidence” and “the obligation to repair the damage one has caused by one’s fault in cases determined by law” (my translation).3 Thus, in the French context the concept of answering for one’s behavior means being able to respond; in the English context it means being able to give an account. What’s the difference? In many cases perhaps nothing, however the English terms accountable and accountability do insist more on the empirical, quasi-mathematical, measurable character of the story that must be told. All accounts constitute responses, however every response may not be a solid or satisfactory account—and if accountability is to be enforced, if one is to be held accountable for one’s account, then one may be punished for an account that is not an adequate response or answer to the people or whatever authority is asking the questions in the course of its investigation. We shall return to this problem of inadequate reporting later on. Not surprisingly, accountability and accountable gained currency as mid-nineteenth century British, American, and English-speaking French theorists such as Alexis de Tocqueville 3 Fittingly, in a text read by his lawyer after he was convicted of embezzlement and misuse of public funds, former French president Jacques Chirac stated, “Le principe de responsabilité est au coeur de l’action politique.” Le Monde, December 16, 2011. President Chirac accepted to be held accountable and did not appeal the decision. 3 (1805-1859) were literally coming to terms with the meaning of the practical experiment in democracy—"government of the people, by the people, for the people”—that had been going on most daringly in the United States since 1789 and in more conservative forms in Great Britain since 1688 and in France since 1792 (with major backsliding under Napoleon and Napoleon III).4 The principal defender of the importance of accountability is John Stuart Mill (18061873), who, along with Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), is considered the leading proponent of the philosophy of utilitarianism. This school of thought underpins Mill’s most famous treatise, On Liberty, published in 1859 (coincidentally the same year Tocqueville died, the American philosopher John Dewey was born, and Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species). Utilitarianism is “an ethical and philosophical theory that states that the best action is the one that maximizes utility, which is usually defined as that which produces the greatest well-being of the greatest number of people, and in some cases, sentient animals” (Wikipedia). One can clearly see from this definition the theory’s dependence on the measurable, numbers, and counting; therefore, it’s unsurprising that the notion of accountability is central to its practical implementation. A Brazilian researcher, Professor Átila Amaral Brilhante, is perhaps the leading contemporary expert on the importance of accountability to Mill’s thinking. His Ph.D. dissertation completed at the School of Public Policy of University College London in 2007 is 1789 is the year of George Washington’s inauguration as the first American president, the Declaration of Independence, more a promise than a fact, occurred in 1776; 1688 is the year of Great Britain’s so-called Glorious Revolution; 1792 is the year of the founding of France’s First Republic. 4 4 entitled, “The Centrality of Accountability in John Stuart Mill’s Liberal-Utilitarian Conception of Democracy.”5 For purposes of understanding the contemporary urgency surrounding accountability, we can underscore these two central points that derive from utilitarianism. The first has to do with private versus public actions, and the presence or absence of harm. At the beginning of chapter five of On Liberty, Mill states his view of when accountability applies: [F]irst, that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. Advice, instruction, persuasion, and avoidance by other people if thought necessary by them for their own good, are the only measures by which society can justifiably express its dislike or disapprobation of his conduct. Secondly, that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishments, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection.6 In other words, one is under no obligation to give an account of one’s actions if they are of concern only to oneself; however, if one’s actions are considered harmful (“prejudicial”) to others, then one is accountable and may even be punished for improper or inexplicable (unaccountable) behavior; and how much harm is done influences the size of the punishment. 5 6 This dissertation is free and downloadable here: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1444009/ On Liberty full-text online: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm 5 The second point has to do with the observation already made by Bentham in his Plan for Parliamentary Reform (1817) and elaborated by Mill in his Essay on Government (1840). It is conveniently summarized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy7 as follows: 1. Each person acts only (or predominantly) to promote his own interests. 2. The proper object of government is the interest of the governed. 3. Hence, rulers will pursue the proper object of government if and only if their interests coincide with those of the governed. 4. A ruler’s interest will coincide with those of the governed if and only if he is politically accountable to the governed. 5. Hence, rulers must be democratically accountable. How to enforce that accountability has always been the sticking point for every democracy. When Mill insists at the beginning of On Liberty that the “the holders of power” must be “regularly accountable to the community,” he is repeating the same wish and worry that was the leading obsession of those who drafted and defended the American Constitution. The central challenge is memorably stated in Federalist Paper #51 (1787), namely that “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.” In aristocratic times, the levers for obliging the central government to control itself were the regional power centers of quasi-independent dukes, counts, princes, and 7 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill-moral-political/ 6 other local authorities who could extend or withdraw their cooperation when it came to the royal administration of government policies. Those regional powers could demand accountability and inflict punishments when necessary, typically through non-cooperation of various kinds. In democratic times those independent instruments of control and pressure are, by definition, lacking, but substitute “democratic procedures” can replace them, observed both Tocqueville and Mill (who were in fact acquainted with each other’s writings), and thus serve the same purpose of enforcing accountability. These procedures are carried out in multiple ways at many locations in a democratic society. Some of the most important guarantees of accountability are free and fair elections on a regular basis, an independent judiciary, the separate but overlapping powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, a vigorous free press, and other independent institutions within civil society such as public and private libraries, publishers, scientific academies, and of course public and private schools and universities. Public entities can be watchdogs over private ones, and vice versa; just as the junior senator from each state can keep an eye on his or her senior colleague, and vice versa. This “team of rivals” arrangement, as Doris Kearns Goodwin called it in her analysis of the “political genius of Abraham Lincoln,” enhances accountability and thereby increases the chances that everyone is responsibly doing their job in the service of the community. 8 So what’s the problem? Why this obsession with accountability lately? The answer could be framed in terms of an inverse relationship of good news and bad news. The good news is that social justice movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have leveraged the 8 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. 7 communication capabilities of both traditional and new media in ways that have shed light on the harm being caused by routine practices in formerly closed enclaves of private (typically white, male, cisgender) power, notably sexual assault and other worker abuse in Hollywood, in other entertainment sectors, and in the media; police brutality and abusive law enforcement in heavily black neighborhoods and in prisons; and other discriminatory behavior in schools, communities, and the criminal justice system. In all these places, accountability, via first exposure; i.e., storytelling, and then punishment, is on the rise. Great, right? The bad news is that starting with the Great Recession of 2008 and in the ten years since, there has been a steady decline of accountability when it comes to the misbehavior of large banks and other corporate entities, and, most disappointingly, in response to the corruption and dereliction of duty by politicians, judges, and lawyers who are entrusted with defending and serving the public interest. Too many foxes have been put in charge of the henhouse—and the hens are getting slaughtered! The most egregious case of this lack of accountability is without a doubt the American president, Donald J. Trump, who positively bragged on the campaign trail in 2016 that he could literally get away with murder, in other words suffer no adverse consequences if he went out and shot someone in the street.9 After becoming president and for the next two years, Donald Trump was criticized but hardly ever held accountable with any punishment or political setback for his many lies, contempt for long- 9 The Guardian, 24 January 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/24/donald-trump-says-hecould-shoot-somebody-and-still-not-lose-voters 8 standing presidential norms, and outright violation of the Constitution such as his disregard for the emoluments clause that forbids a president from using his office for personal enrichment.10 In the wake of the “subprime” financial crisis that engulfed first the United States and then Europe and other markets starting in 2008, everyone heard repeatedly about banks that were “too big to fail” (hence the government bailouts funded by taxpayers) and about corporate executives who were “too big to jail.”11 It was as though the American people were being told that the old rules didn’t apply anymore and accountability was now impossible or a waste of time. This defeatist message (which also conveniently underreported the ruthless accounting that was being imposed on individual borrowers who were foreclosed on and lost all their assets) could not have gained traction without the cooperation of major media outlets. This is the other alarming piece of bad news that came into clear focus following the electoral college victory of Donald Trump, an unaccountable result to those unfamiliar with that arcane voting system. All most people understood was that America’s odd democracy rules somehow allowed a reality TV host to become president of the world’s most powerful country despite receiving three million fewer votes than the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Immediately after the election the hand-wringing and self-flagellating mea culpa statements came pouring in.12 For months, journalists either confessed their complicity or The lack of accountability on this last point may yet come to an end. See Katie Benner, “Judge Denies Trump’s Request to Dismiss Emoluments Lawsuit,” The New York Times, September 28, 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/us/politics/trump-emoluments-democrats-lawsuit.html 11 See Jesse Eisinger, “Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis,” The New York Times, April 30, 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html; see also, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves, New York: Penguin, 2009; and Brandon L. Garrett, Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 12 New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. led the way on November 13, 2016, “To Our Readers from the Publisher and Executive Editor”: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-readers-from-thepublisher-and-executive-editor.html 10 9 denounced the blindness and immorality of their peers at rival news outlets. If an evidencebased free press was supposed to be the watchdog, who would be watching the watchdogs in the new so-called “post-truth” age of “fake news” and “alternative facts”? Readers also joined in the ranting and chanting with thousands and thousands of comments that digital media now welcome. Whether this is participatory democracy or mere venting is, of course, open to interpretation, but it certainly falls short of genuine accountability.13 So would accountability be forever mired now in an infinite regress of radical doubt and distrust?14 From January 2016 to January 2019, many professional observers as well as ordinary citizens marveled at what, first, America’s Republican Party was able to get away with and, then, how easily Trump was able to hijack that 150-year-old conservative party and get away with even more outrageous behavior, as well as weekly sometimes daily political scandals, without paying any price! With each new violation of rules or norms an optimist could believe “This aggression will not stand,” “This will not go unpunished”—and yet that is exactly what happened. The Republican Party refused to even interview much less hold a vote on President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court; the Republican party then allowed a man with no political experience whatsoever to trash-talk GOP senators and governors who had dedicated years to public service and to usurp control of the party with a See, Letters, “The Media’s Mea Culpa After the Election,” The New York Times, January 3, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/opinion/the-medias-mea-culpa-after-the-election.html 14 On Kellyanne Conway’s introduction of the term “alternative facts” and the problem of “misinformation,” see Jennifer Szalai’s book review of works by B. Latour, C. O’Connor, and J. O. Weatherall, “Why Fighting Fake News With the Facts May Not Be Enough,” The New York Times, January 9, 2019; see also, Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, Sommerville, MA: MIT Press, 2018; Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018; on the fundamentally corrosive effect of lying on democracy, see Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008, Chapter 13, especially pages 259266; on the corrosive effect of distrust, see Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc, La société de defiance: comment le modèle social français s’autodétruit, Paris: Presses de la Rue d’Ulm, 2007. Note also that Dictionary.com named “misinformation” the word-of-the-year in 2018. 13 10 combination of bullying and swagger that he amplified via his Twitter connection to his weaponized “base.” For reasons that historians may puzzle over for years, the American people did not hold the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell accountable for his mistreatment of Merrick Garland and the year-long cancellation of the whole Supreme Court nomination process; nor did the American people insist that Donald Trump release his tax returns as every other presidential candidate had accepted to do in recent decades; nor did they balk at the Hollywood Access tape in which Trump bragged about sexual assault; nor was he disqualified for having zero political experience and little knowledge of government, American history, or the United States Constitution. Norms of accountability, including a rule-governed vetting process for filling any vacant post, were completely thrown overboard in 2016. Of course, not when hiring doctors, pilots, or teachers—just high-ranking politicians and cabinet appointees! Except for pockets of right-wing populism here and there that viewed Trump’s victory as a triumph and vindication of their own struggles (in authoritarian states such as Serbia, Russia, Turkey, and Hungary but also in France, Italy, and many at least nominally democratic regimes), much of the world, European leaders first among them (Merkel, Macron, May), looked on aghast, similarly wondering what had happened to accountability? What had happened to journalistic standards and political norms, not to mention basic decency and politeness? For accountability and democracy sympathizers, Trump’s election was definitely bad news. Were, then, the accountability gains recorded by #MeToo (since 2017) and Black Lives Matter (since 2013) mere blips? Were they maybe even benefiting from exaggerated positive coverage in 2017 as the media one year later tried to perhaps subtly compensate and atone for 11 its botched presidential election coverage in 2016? Was Harvey Weinstein and all he stood for the substitute culprit that the American people needed to see held to account in exchange for the one that got away; i.e., the years of sketchy behavior in plain sight of a man who, instead of being fired or imprisoned for his misdeeds, had been promoted to the most powerful position on the planet? Perhaps there was some exaggerated zeal, duplicity, and wishful thinking about “the people’s court” of public opinion being able to go after Weinstein and his ilk as a belated substitute payback for a major media and political screw up. However, it could also be that repairing mistakes takes time and the wheels of accountability, after years of neglect, also take time to be remembered, relearned, and exercised properly again. For followers of Mill who believe in the centrality of accountability and of Tocqueville who believe that one of the real advantages of democracy is that it makes repairable mistakes, three events that have taken place since Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017 offer some hope and reason to be optimistic about the future. The first was the Women’s March, an event that took place the very next day on Saturday January 21, mobilizing millions of people around the world (and not just women) to defend democracy and combat ignorance, injustice, and hate. The second event was the appointment by United States Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein of special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate possible wrong-doing by President Trump and his associates.15 This appointment, which was made explicitly to defend “the public interest,” occurred shortly after Trump fired FBI director James Comey; and 15 The appointment was made on May 17, 2017. Mueller is a decorated Marine corps officer who served in Vietnam and a former FBI director who supervised the investigation of Enron in 2001 that concluded with actual convictions of wrong-doers, punishments, and anti-corruption legislation. See Jesse Eisinger, “What Robert Mueller Learned from Enron,” The New York Times, July 13, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/opinion/robertmueller-enron-russia-investigation.html 12 what’s more, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former Republican senator from Alabama and Trump loyalist, did not block Mueller’s appointment but instead went along with it while also recusing himself from all matters dealing with the special counsel’s investigation. The third event was the outcome of the mid-term elections on November 6, 2018 that resulted in the Democrats regaining majority control of the House of Representatives and with that the power to chair all House committees, subpoena witnesses, and set the agenda for investigations, budget talks, and the drafting of legislation the Democrats wish to see become law.16 As of this writing, no one yet knows what the full account of the Mueller investigation will be, nor the breadth or depth of the accountability that might follow. It is also uncertain whether the Democratic party, which has a shameful record of often behaving only slightly less cravenly than their Republican colleagues, is committed to the task of actually “draining the swamp,” restoring accountability, and working in the service of the majority instead of for special interest groups and the donor class that finances most of their reelection campaigns. A fourth event, for now more a wish or half-promise, occurred with a January 11, 2019 editorial by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, and came in the form of a question: “Will the Media be Trump’s Accomplice Again in 2020?” The subtitle then expressed Bruni’s plea: “We have a second chance. Let’s not blow it.” And the body of the piece contained the A-word as part of Bruni’s cautionary pep talk (with echoes of “Yes, we can!”) to his fellow journalists, but also to each of us as readers, citizens, sentient animals: 16 For a summary of the mid-term results and the revival of accountability that may or may not follow, see Paul Krugman, “Real America Versus Senate America,” The New York Times, November 8, 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/midterms-senate-rural-urban.html 13 And when journalists gawp at each of Trump’s tirades, taunts and selfcongratulatory hallucinations, these heresies blur together and he evades accountability for the ones that should stick. I asked Rather what he was most struck by in the 2016 campaign, and he instantly mentioned Trump’s horrific implication, in public remarks in August, that gun enthusiasts could rid themselves of a Clinton presidency by assassinating her. I’d almost forgotten it. So many lesser shocks so quickly overwrote it. [Dan] Rather17 wasn’t surprised. “It got to the point where it was one outrage after another, and we just moved on each time,” he said. Instead, we should hold on to the most outrageous, unconscionable moments. We should pause there awhile. We can’t privilege the incremental over what should be the enduring. It lets Trump off the hook. 18 Not letting anyone off the hook, not letting anyone duck their personal responsibility, not letting anyone evade accountability, least of all the president of the United States, must be job #1 if we humans are to endure as a species and save this planet from being destroyed by our own mistaken policies and harmful practices.19 Dan Rather is a veteran journalist and served twenty-four years as the news anchor of the “CBS Evening News.” Frank Bruni, “Will the Media Be Trump’s Accomplice Again in 2020?” The New York Times, January 11, 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/trump-2020-media.html 19 There are many self-help and workplace management books on accountability. See, for example, K. Patterson and J. Grenny, Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2nd edition 2013; Greg Bustin, Accountability: The Keys to Driving a HighPerformance Culture, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014; Sylvia Melena, Supportive Accountability: How to Inspire People and Improve Performance, La Mesa, CA: Melana Consulting Group, 2018. 17 18 14 Postscript: Since writing this piece in the winter of 2019 and then presenting it as a talk on October 24 within my university research group, the IETT (Institut d'Études Transtextuelles et Transculturelles), I was hopeful that “accountability” would be chosen as the word of the year by Dictionary.com. (In 2018, the winner was “misinformation.”) Instead, “existential” as an adjective was chosen. However, since Donald J. Trump represents an existential threat to both democracy and arguably all life on the planet, I remain hopeful that “accountability” will be victorious in 2020. 15