Why Don't More Good People Run for Office?
To be successful, it requires a degree of "flexibility" many good people cannot accept.
In F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom there is a chapter titled “Why the Worst Get on Top”, a chapter dealing with why it is always a feature of authoritarian socialism an communism that it produces the worst (in terms of performance and moral grounding) leadership from top to bottom. Hayek noted:
“Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own. They must, above all, be unreservedly committed to the person of the leader; but next to this the most important thing is that they should be completely unprincipled and literally capable of everything. They must have no ideals of their own which they want to realize; no ideas about right or wrong which might interfere with the intentions of the leader.
There is thus in the positions of power little to attract those who hold moral beliefs of the kind which in the past have guided the European peoples, little which could compensate for the distastefulness of many of the particular tasks, and little opportunity to gratify any more idealistic desires, to recompense for the undeniable risk, the sacrifice of most of the pleasures of private life and of personal independence which the posts of great responsibility involve.
The only tastes which are satisfied are the taste for power as such and the pleasure of being obeyed and of being part of a well-functioning and immensely powerful machine to which everything else must give way.”
It isn’t unusual for citizens in a representative republic like ours to take the temperature of our leadership, find them lacking, and ask, “How did these people get elected (or appointed, nominated, confirmed, etc.)?
I’ve personally looked at dipping my toes into elective politics and I have decided that the people who get elected, good and bad, must be prepared to do things many of us find distasteful or are not willing to do.
I’m struggling with what I feel is a strong call to public service and the things one must do to get there.
Some things I found candidates must do:
Beg for money – it can cost up to $30 grand to win a city council seat in a small town, up to $250K for a state level office, $500-$600K for a seat in the US House of Representatives, and because national money pours into US Senate races, you need to raise $20-25 million to run a competitive race. Unless you are independently wealthy, you are going to have to raise cash to fund your campaign.
Make deals – as they say, politics ain’t beanbag and it isn’t for the squeamish. Harry Truman said if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Lobbyists, interest, and grievance groups are real things with which candidates must deal, and they all want something in exchange for their votes. If you want to win, you better be ready to make a deal.
Modify certain beliefs to appeal to a varied constituency – you can’t just be you all the time. Segments of the voting public have specific interests that they need addressed or they won’t cast a vote for you. While you may not change your principles, you must create at least an image that is acceptable to that voting segment.
Weather personal attacks – Expect it. You need to understand and anticipate that your opposition will perform a colonoscopy on you, your family, your finances, your career, your social media accounts, and your friendships and associations. They will know more about you than your gastroenterologist. If you were ever abducted by aliens, you wouldn’t get an anal probing like this.
Certainly not an exhaustive list and not 100% accurate, but you get the idea.
And this is all BEFORE you win (if you do). If you do win, you enter a system that features the same gauntlet you ran during the election, but this one features systemically institutionalized corruption.
My granddaddy generally had no use for politicians and “revenuers”. He used to tell me that if you send someone to Washington and they get rich, they are corrupt. If they don’t get rich, they are too stupid to be there in the first place.
We have all seen good people go into elective office only to have the system grind them up and spit them out as compromised and corrupt – because that is the way things work. The good ones tend to either not run or quit once they understand the pressure brought to bear by party leadership on both sides. Very few who stay in office more than two or three terms retain all their integrity.
Now, if you accept my premise as true, why would any good, common-sense person (who would literally be the Mr. Smith goes to Washington type) want to subject themselves, their family, and their friends to such a process?
Sound cynical?
You bet – but this is a case where cynicism is entirely appropriate.
I’ve talked to people who have encouraged me to run, and I have explored with several connected people about what that would look like.
My biggest issues are the begging for money and making deals. I just can’t bring myself to debase my principles in the pay for play, tit for tat, process these two aspects require. In politics, as in economics, the TINSTAAFL principle applies – there is no such thing as a free lunch.
While small, ideologically or popularity driven donors may not expect a return on investment, the big money people do.
I struggle to bring myself to agree to such a Faustian bargain.
But many can. It certainly seems those who win the seats do, not all of course, but those with the greatest longevity tend to have a money machine designed to keep them flush in cash.
You must ask yourself, does this system promote the best or does it encourage a somewhat more flexible person to enter the races?
I can’t answer that question for you, that is one specific to your area and your candidate. What I will say is that no matter how much we would wish it did, human nature does not change.
James Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that:
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. 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. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
The minute Madison Avenue entered the election racket, the corruption of the systems by which citizens become candidates, then officeholders and then leaders, corrupts the government to the point it cannot control itself even as it presumes to control the governed. It makes the government more important and powerful than the governed by exempting those in government from the laws they pass for the governed.
That kind of power attracts the worst.
And we return to Hayek’s answer to why the worst get on top.
This won’t change until professional politics is returned to amateur status and your principled, God-fearing next door neighbor can become a representative, a senator or even a president without needing a multi-million dollar advertising budget.