Screeds
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Ambivalences
March 19, 2002
Sometimes, one simply doesn’t know what to hope for.
On March 17, Tipper Gore, wife to former United States Senator and Vice President Albert Gore, announced that she would not run for the Senate from Tennessee. I was relieved, for a little while, and then I began to reflect on what sort of news of this kind would make me feel genuinely elated.
Government, in the original American conception, was a grimy but simple thing, a matter of waiting for the phone to ring. Someone calls to complain that his rights have been violated; you take his name and number, touch off an inquiry, and proceed according to what it finds. The modern notion of activist government—a government of unbounded authority that goes out looking for things to involve itself in, rather than attending strictly to the defense of its citizens’ rights when and as necessary—is a sharp contrast to the vision of the Founders. It’s given rise to some ambivalent sociodynamics as regards the quest for what John C. Calhoun called "the honors and emoluments of office."
Given the current state of affairs, what sort of person ought we to want to seek office? Should character take precedence over intellect? Should one’s adherence to Constitutional principles be paramount? To qualify for "high" office, should one first "build one’s resume" in lesser offices? Is it better that a candidate be an "insider" or an "outsider"? Does a record of commercial success count for or against a candidate? What about a record of commercial failure?
It’s possible to argue plausibly on either side of every one of those questions.
I won’t elaborate here about the arguments I could make. The typical reader of this column would find them himself. The noteworthy thing is that the questions themselves arise from the intricacy and omnipresence of government in our lives. We are, quite literally, never free from it, and its powers are, for practical purposes, unbounded.
Even the supposedly sacred right to freedom of speech is no longer regarded as inviolable. A gentleman was recently arrested as the result of a physical altercation between his wife and another man. All the blows were struck by the other man; the arrestee’s crime was to call his wife’s assailant a nigger.
(Don’t like that word? It has an unpleasant cast, I agree. But should the utterance be illegal? Why? Always, or under particular circumstances? On the floor of a gym? On the floor of the Senate? What about penalties? What about mitigating factors? Should the place of incarceration be one where foul language is accepted, or severely penalized?)
So: government, being everywhere and involved in everything, poised to make innumerable decisions and second-guess all the rest, would appear to demand the talents of the best and the brightest. (What if they won’t step forward? Conscript them? For how long?) Campaign strategists think that the general public agrees. One of the Democrats’ tactical strokes in the 2000 Presidential election was to paint the Republican candidate, of whom you may have heard recently, as a dimbulb. They suffered a minor blow to their confidence about the
public’s priorities when the object of their derision was elected anyway, but analysis continues.
So do the questions. If you believe that government has gotten way beyond its proper sphere and must be cut back severely for the health of the Republic, do you want smart people at the helm, or men of ordinary intellect? Is it any sort of priority that the current Engine of State, with its thousands of functions and millions of moving parts, be steered and maintained by the mentally gifted? Or are these precisely the men most likely to expand its reach still further, negating your longer-term aims?
For conservatives and libertarians, the dilemma is sharp and endless.
Historian Forrest McDonald has come down squarely on the side of the man of modest mind, on the grounds that the job is bounded by clear principles and therefore ought to be simple, and that the vaulting ambition of the savant is unsuited to a field characterized by restraint. British thinker Gerald Abrahams opines that the "simple" political arguments of the 19th Century, all of which were resolved in favor of freedom, are being met by ever-more-complex challenges that require the vision and penetration of imaginative genius to withstand and refute.
Thomas Sowell posits that the gifted man, capable of making his mark in commerce, is unlikely to seek political office, because the rewards of the commercial world are so much less arguable and more tangible. He believes this to be one of the reasons for the Left’s enduring polemic and electoral edge over the pro-freedom Right, as the leftist of ability gravitates naturally to political activism. It’s always "their" A-team against "our" B-team. What Dr. Sowell has to say about Steve Forbes and Michael Bloomberg, I wait to learn.
For myself, I rejoice whenever I learn that some prominent figure has decided not to seek office. I’m not always sure I should, but the emotion is definite. When it’s someone like Tipper Gore, a would-be cultural dictator who’d like the authority to forbid various kinds of music, movies, and games, my joy at her departure is unclouded. But I don’t know how I’d react if I were to learn of the departure of Antonin Scalia or Richard Posner from the bench. I’d be badly torn if I were to learn that Richard Epstein, John Lott or David Kopel wanted public office. And if Joseph Sobran allows his name to appear on an electoral ticket ever again, I might enter a monastery. Not from shame or grief,
mind you; just to have some peace and quiet in which to think it all out.
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