Illusions of equivalence

Any time a journalist or “media” person opens his mouth on a historical subject, you can be pretty sure that what comes out of it will be some version of the popular Whiggish consensus that is on display at the “Newseum” run by the Gannett Corporation near its USA Today headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. But one does not have to go so far down the journalistic food chain as USA Today in order to find it. Margaret Talbot, for example, writing about the Clinton scandals in The New Republic, claimed that, thirty years ago,

few Americans of either sex would have thought there was anything objectionable about a one-sided sexual relationship between an immensely powerful man and a swoony, self-deluding twenty-two-year-old subordinate. But fathers do commit themselves to more egalitarian arrangements now, and people do think there...