Wanted: Politicians
America’s political system is broken, and to repair it we need people who know how to operate it
America needs more politicians.
That may sound positively mad, but it’s true. The U.S. political system is broken, and to repair it we need people who know how to operate it.
Few words in the English language provoke as negative a reaction as “politician.” For generations, it’s been the ultimate epithet, emblematic of dishonesty and opportunism.
But the hostility is misguided. Politics is how things get done — specifically, within an arena that is structurally hostile to the qualities and virtues we find most impressive. The presence of competing interests ensures that politics, and the politicians who practice it, will continue to require trade-offs and compromises that those on the outside have the luxury of being able to ignore.
But inside the system, you either play politics or you fail to represent the interests of your constituents. It’s as simple as that.
It’s always amusing when people write off events in Washington as “just politics,” as if they’re somehow surprised to see politicians practicing politics. It’s like walking into an accountant’s office and being disgusted by all the adding and subtracting going on. All those spreadsheets — my word!
In the American ideal, politicians are citizen-legislators whose capacity to represent the popular interest is magically achieved by them not dedicating too much of their time to honing the craft that voters have elected them to pursue. Americans idolize the founding generation as being above politics, as if the Constitutional Convention wasn’t actually the essence of it.
The mythos of the disinterested statesman is well-entrenched, which is unfortunate, since it is ahistorical and fanciful. This country wasn’t the product of citizen philosophers collectively embracing abstract principles out of pure hearts and principled stands; the Constitution grew out of a philosophical framework upon which the manifestly political elements of compromises, concessions, and accommodations took center stage.
In fact, the system of checks and balances fully anticipates the practice of politics. You don’t design your government to diffuse power in this way unless you envision political struggle to be a necessary component within the machinery of state.
People look to heroes like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison as demigods who somehow worked above the realm of mere politics. But Jefferson schemed against Hamilton (and vice versa), and Washington refereed between the two, actively pitting their competing political visions against each other in order to figure out the best way forward.
Abraham Lincoln, the most revered of the presidents alongside Washington, was nothing if not a political operator. As historian Richard Hofstadter noted, “His life was one of caucuses and conventions, party circulars and speeches, requests, recommendations, strategies, schemes, and ambitions.” He was a loyal Whig, and then a loyal Republican, a faithful follower of the party line. His admirable preference for “malice toward none and charity for all” notwithstanding, Honest Abe was a party man.
That’s not what people mean when they use “politician” pejoratively, of course. They object to slippery wheeler-dealers who say one thing to get elected and then do another once they get into office. But while scheming is hardly admirable, pragmatism is.
Every politician should be guided by some measure of principle. A candidate in their initial run for office usually has at least one issue that prompted them to run. But once elected — whether to Congress, the statehouse, the county board, or the city council — they quickly find that their colleagues have their own priorities. They may have to bide their time, or make political concessions, to get their priority on the agenda.
Clichés like “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” or “politics is the art of the possible” have the same shortcomings all clichés do, but they’re also apt descriptions of the particular arena that politics simply has to work in. The reality is that “the possible” is harder to make happen than purists believe, and because of that, “the art” of it necessarily becomes a process.
The deals and concessions, the machinations that supposedly signal political betrayal, almost always come behind closed doors. The “smoke-filled room” is supposed to be the den of iniquity, the center of political depravity. It’s where conviction-less dealmakers and power-hungry political bosses shape American society. So we’re expected to believe.
In 1968, Hubert Humphrey got the Democratic nomination without entering a single primary. Traumatized by the process and the chaos around that year’s Chicago convention, activists in the party forced the creation of the McGovern Commission, which largely took nominating power away from Democratic party elites. But while the change improved the small-d democratic process, it is possible that the more considered political judgment of those elites would have helped choose a candidate who performed better than McGovern, who got crushed by Nixon in 1972 in one of the great presidential washouts in American history.
There’s great need for transparency in politics, of course. But not at the expense of politics itself. Not all horse trading and negotiating is nefarious. Compromise is baked into the reality of social and cultural pluralism. When we increase the costs of political compromise, we make it harder for politicians to legislate and govern. That doesn’t mean ceasing to expect much from them, but there’s a reason increased polarization leads to further congressional sclerosis. Here’s what I mean.
In today’s zero-sum political environment, an interest group’s very conception of what it means to attain victory has shifted from getting some of what we want, which is what enables normal deliberative and legislative activity, to not letting them get what they want. It’s become more important to deny the other side a victory than to gain one yourself.
Winning both political and fundraising support means playing to the people who are paying the most attention, which are usually the activists and True Believers in the wings. Calls for common sense deal-making just don’t generate the same passion. It’s hard to drive people to the barricades with cries of, “The other side is wrong, but they can be reasoned with!”
Today’s viral soundbite culture allows little room for nuance. Absolutism is simple. Pragmatism and compromise, explaining who got what and how, are complicated. Today’s political deals have to be able to be broken down into talking points for interviews in the halls of Congress, and to be easily chopped into bite-sized portions to set up Tucker Carlson’s or Rachel Maddow’s latest commentary. There’s no room for nuance when you’re trying to maintain message discipline.
But there needs to be a role for a hard, realistic perspective in politics. Politicians who actually try to get things done by working across the aisle can get accused of inconsistency, attacked by the Twitter hordes who prize ideological purity over accomplishment. There were multiple reports this year about high-level presidential campaigns being self-consciously shaped — and ultimately doomed — by the interests of the Twitter class. This is absurd.
The log jam in American politics has been caused by too much ideological consistency, not too little. America desperately needs not just to be hospitable toward, but to actively roll out the red carpet for, politicians who prize pragmatism as a democratic virtue.
America needs more politicians who understand the importance of pragmatic politics, and who know how to work the levers of power.
America needs people who know how to turn the possible into the realized.
