Wealth & Money Quote by Charles Krauthammer

Purity politics sounds like moral progress until you notice who it selects for. Krauthammer’s line is engineered as a bracing reversal: the demand for “pristine” personal histories doesn’t elevate public life; it narrows the candidate pool to people uniquely insulated from consequence, uniquely uninteresting, or uniquely skilled at deception. The sentence works because it turns a civic ideal into a hiring algorithm with predictable outputs.

The subtext is less about forgiving sins than about how scrutiny functions as a class filter. “The very rich” can “contract out the messy things” is a crisp indictment of wealth as reputational armor: mistakes get cleaned up, problems get managed, lives get buffered by staff, lawyers, NDAs, and distance. “The very dull” is the quieter jab, implying that an absence of scandal can signal an absence of lived experience, risk, or texture - the kind of blandness that survives opposition research because it never generated a story. Then comes the sharpest turn: “the very devious,” the type modern politics often rewards, because relentless vetting incentivizes not virtue but concealment.

Context matters: Krauthammer was writing through the late-20th/early-21st-century shift toward scandal-driven media cycles and opposition research as routine governance. His intent is to puncture the comforting notion that more exposure automatically produces better leaders. The rhetoric is almost clinical: three categories, each worse than the premise that produced them. It’s not a plea for lowering standards so much as an argument that standards aimed at personal purity can be perversely anti-democratic, selecting for those best at avoiding accountability rather than those capable of earning it.