In 1973 an article was published by an academic named Michael Walzer. The piece was called, "Political Action: the Problem of Dirty Hands." This article is fascinating because it opens up a question about the nature of politics and the motivations of those who do politics. Walzer was interested in asking why we have such emotional views about politicians and the world of politics. Basically he suggests that politics is seen as a dirty game. Hard decisions need to be made and sometimes what is legal may not always be moral.
Politics is about power and it is also about the glory of that power. So we want someone who keeps the glory in check. The politician who holds office must recognize that there is a dilemma in "playing the game" and in holding power. The real question for us, as citizens, is "Who do we want playing the game?"
Or, more to the point, "Who do we want to be playing the game on our behalf?"
The answer, I think that Walzer wants to give is that this person must be someone who understands that they are participating in a dirty game. Difficult decisions should play on their conscious and their hearts. They should represent the common interest because that it what is right. But how do we know who this person is?
We cannot expect that every decision will be a decision we like or will be a decision in our favour. Yet, this appears to be a demand in contemporary politics. For example, there is a real sense that each decision does not impinge on another: don't raise taxes but give me shorter waiting times in hospitals. Most decisions are extremely complex and require careful adjudication of the pros and cons. The key to great leadership is that citizens need to trust the individual to whom they have given the extraordinary power to make decisions on their behalf; but trust is hard to come by these days.
Trust is like the glue that keeps a good democracy running. Trust shapes the way we treat each other. It shapes laws that are aimed at public goods. When trust is lost, we begin to see a very different type of politics emerge. Everywhere in the world and at home we can see the impacts of the decline in trust. We often see this manifested in a kind of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism. Both the left and the right wing in politics are guilty of this; both have stigmatized "elites" as somehow being undeserving of trust.
I should clarify here that when I use the term "elites" I am speaking of group of persons who have knowledge and therefore have authority or influence. The left-wing does this when they suggest that "the establishment" somehow works primarily against their interests and the right-wing does this when they denigrate science and research. What we need are statesmen and stateswomen who can rise above petty politics and tell us what can be done. We need honest and thoughtful appraisals of policies, ideas, and research that demonstrate that real solutions are complex and will not always come out in our individual favour.
I remember many years ago watching the television series, The West Wing. If you recall the series, the fictitious president, Jed Bartlett, was a Nobel Prize winning economist and he was, well, smart - really smart. I remember one episode in which the president's advisor, Toby, tells the president to stop pretending that he is "one of the folks." He wanted the president to show the world that he was really smart. He wanted him to stop pretending that smart is a bad thing.
I was struck by this primarily because I see this in everyday politics and society.
We send our children to school dreaming that they will achieve great ends. We hope they will graduate from a college or university and travel and see the world and contribute to its betterment. Yet when individuals achieve this we are suspicious. And when these people step forward to public service there is a sense that we cannot trust their motives or their education to guide them to make complex decisions.
In this context all opinion is equally authoritative and nothing is held up to scrutiny or honest debate. This is not good politics; this is just dirty politics.
