Devil’s Advocate: Why (so many) Politicians Are Hacks

Words: 693; reading time: 5 mins.

• Here, kicking off the new recurring format of Devil’s Advocate, I take on an easy target: politicians.
• In a following post, I will properly introduce the new recurring format as part of a recurring pair of formats, namely, Devil’s Advocates & Better Angels.
• But, for now, let’s dive into this maiden voyage of the Devil’s Advocate.
• To get you in the mood, here are two entries from one of the Advocate’s inspirations, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary:
  1. Politics. -n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
  2. Politician. -n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

Making this a representation of Congress?

1. THESIS: Politicians are typically hacks.
   1. Some are so due to their true nature or inner character.
   2. Others learn that they must project a hack persona to survive in democratic elections.
2. Democratic government is government by amateurs because most voters are absorbed in their private affairs and the preferential care of their own families.
   1. This translates into placing particular economic interests and particular cultural identities above the duty of citizens to seek the common good.
      1. While marginalized groups within a society, to pursue their own political interests, must pursue transparent identity politics, dominant groups can disguise their pursuit of their own interests as adherence to general standards.
         1. When that tactic fails, usually due to shifts in underlying demographics or economics, dominant groups abandon this disguised tactic for overt identity politics, i.e., nativism.
         2. This is the chief observation about which postmodernist thought revolves.
      2. Politicians in democracies are thus primarily hacks because voters — being passively motivated by their own particular interests and social identities — are more objects of manipulation than subjects of rational deliberation.
      3. And manipulating passive objects is what hacks do.
      4. Statesmen, by contrast, engage in dialogue with citizens capable of rational deliberation, addressing “the better angels of our nature” (Lincoln’s 1st Inaugural Address).
3. Elections are a cross between auctions of promises and sloganeering contests, all presented to voters whose attention is mostly elsewhere.
   1. Thus elective, democratic government is government guided by those tempted by promises and captured by slogans, while they attend mostly to other things.
   2. In a word, elective governments are government by amateurs.
4. Am I then arguing that there are better alternatives to democratic government? No, I am not.
5. Despite all of the above, authoritarian governments are worse yet.
   1. Authoritarian governments do answer to ‘professional’ followers — in the sense that their power base is the membership of the ruling Party in a one-party state.
   2. But such parties are top-down hierarchies, not bottom-up member-run organizations.
   3. The net effect is that the combined party of leaders and followers is a self-appointed ruling class, whose very purpose (it’s raison d’etre) is to rule in its own interest, that is, to maintain permanently its monopoly of political power, which allows it to satisfy its distinct economic interests (minimally, estates for the leaders, job preference for the followers) and to parade its social identity as the ruling Party of state and society.
   4. One-party states, however they begin, end up being run by one of two types of leader:
      1. The most ruthless solitary power monopolist (e.g., Lenin, Stalin, Mao), and these come in two kinds:
         1. Charismatic leaders , Machiavelli’s lions, such as Mussolini or Mao,
         2. Cunning behind-the-scenes manipulators, Machiavelli’s foxes, such as Stalin
      2. A cross-faction consensus candidate, often a bureaucratic technocrat who does not have a personal following (and thus does not tip the balance of powers between factions).
         1. Consensus candidates usually appear as interim placeholders until a power monopolist emerges, because, with power so heavily centralized, the most ruthless power monopolists are the fittest survivors of the competition for power among the elite.
6. If politics is destined to be run by hacks, better the hacks we control than the ones we don’t.
7. And that’s the difference between experienced realism and youthful idealism, youth preferring the devils they do not yet know, their elders preferring the devils they know.