Login | April 05, 2025
In praise of professional politicians
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: November 13, 2015
The most compelling narrative in the Republican primary contest thus far is the enduring strength of two candidates, Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson. One narrative has it that their popularity comes because they are the anti-establishment candidates, but other anti-establishment candidates like Texas senator Ted Cruz and Kentucky senator Rand Paul languishing in the second tier or worse. Instead, it appears that much of their strength comes from not being professional politicians.
Carson has gone so far as to argue that his inexperience in government is a virtue, claiming that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were similarly innocent of government work (which turns out to be untrue) and also drawing a contrast between Noah’s Ark and the Titanic that could only be persuasive to the sort of person who would be inclined to support a candidate like Ben Carson in the first place.
The recent fight over the House speakership, in which Speaker John Boehner decided he had enough and resigned, only to see more infighting over his successor, underscored the dynamic at work. People are fed up with Washington and professional politics.
Well, really a significant segment of the Republican electorate is fed up. While Vermont senator Bernie Sanders appears to be mounting a legitimate challenge to Hillary Clinton, he is hardly a political newbie.
I have taken some risky positions in this column, but this may be my least popular position yet. I like professional politicians. I can get as irate as anyone about spin and truthiness and mudslinging, but by and large I am happy to elect people who have made a career of governing.
I come to this position first because government work involves a distinct body of knowledge. From knowing the rules of legislatures, to understanding the unique principles of government budgeting to spotting drafting errors in a bill, knowing how to govern is different from knowing how to run other sorts of organizations.
Beyond that, we should have concerns about the motivations behind the popularity of the “not a career politician” candidate. The Tea Party conservatives who love Trump and Carson while they hate professional politicians like Boehner hate the latter in large part because they are willing to negotiate compromises both within and without the party. In other words, compromise is seen as the great sin of professional politics.
In fact, that is a chief virtue. Part of the civic virtue necessary for living in a democracy (or to be excruciatingly accurate, a democratic republic) is having patience with compromise. The nation, and therefore the legislature, is made up of different people with different interests and points of view. Politics and government are our forums for mediating those differences. We have set up the rules to avoid becoming a winner-take-all state, where a single election result puts the entirety of government power in the hands of one small cabal. As the libertarian author James Bovard once put it, “Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
I have no delusion that the foregoing would be persuasive to the average Trump or Carson supporter. First off, it’s a hard case to make generally. Ideally, the outcome of truly democratic decision making in anything more complicated than an up or down referendum is that each side should feel that it had been heard and each side should be vaguely dissatisfied with the outcome. As a political slogan, “I promise you will be vaguely dissatisfied” lacks some zest.
But more that, the “no politicians/no compromisers” faction of the electorate also stands fundamentally opposed to government generally. They understand government itself to be a hated Other – something that exists only to perpetuate and strengthen itself. According to this view, any government proposal is nothing more or less than an attempt to assert more power. The other side is seen as abetting this growth in power solely for the sake expanding government’s reach.
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of liberalism. Liberals are as skeptical of government power as conservatives (thought the areas of government exercise of power that they are most concerned about are different: less concerned about economic regulation and more concerned about civil liberties.) But liberals also see government as a frequently useful means for getting things done.
The conservative shibboleth that government is incapable of accomplishing anything positive is demonstrably false, but neither can it be said that government always works well. Government is made of people, and how well it works depends on how talented those people are and how dedicated they are to the work of statecraft.
In other words, good government needs professionals.