Think about every class election you ever saw in school. Did anyone run because they wanted to represent the student body and make sure that their interests were served? Did they genuinely believe that they had a unique and crucial ability to perform this task better than any of their competitors? Of course not. They ran because they were ambitious. They wanted to be popular, or to improve their college application, or make sure the prom could be how they wanted it to be, or whatever other benefits they'd reap. So they said things that they thought people would want to hear.
National elections are the same way, except the ones running are the most ambitious from a group of 300,000,000 instead of a group of 300. By my math that makes them a million times more ambitious. And they aren't competing to see who gets to pick the time of the pep rally; they're trying be the general manager of the largest empire, equipped with the most lethal machinery, in the history of civilization. To even get anywhere close to a position where they have even the slightest shot at running for president, they had to have contorted, conspired, compromised, cheated, lied, backtracked, betrayed, bought off, threatened, punished, and perverted themselves in ways I can't even imagine. And then repeated all of that again after breakfast until lunch. And then again until dinner, and after dinner until bed. And then keep it up continually over several decades. These are the kinds of people I'm supposed to support with my vote?
Time magazine published this article by Michael Kinsley, which A Tiny Revolution highlighted, that draws attention to this problem.
[V]oters are also right to feel that something is phony about democratic politics and that it's getting worse. Even a candidate who agrees with you on all important issues and always has—no dreaded flip-flops—is forced by the conventions of politics to be disingenuous about at least one core issue: why he or she is running.Like most installments in this series, the ambition issue doesn't stand on its own as a make-or-break point in opposition of voting. It basically just falls into what will probably be a common category: why every candidate sucks. I'm extremely reluctant to support candidates who suck. The most viciously ambitious people usually suck a whole lot, and our system is designed to filter only the most supremely viciously ambitious people into contention for national office.Ladies and gentlemen, they are running because they are ambitious. No, really, they are. You probably suspected as much. And yet you would abandon any candidate who dared to admit this, or at least they all believe that you would...[T]he purest form of ambition is political ambition, because it represents a desire to rule over other people.
When you hear the presidential candidates carrying on about democracy and freedom, do you ever wonder what they would be saying if they had been born into societies with different values? What if Mitt Romney had come to adulthood in Nazi Germany? What if Hillary Clinton had gone to Moscow State University and married a promising young apparatchik? What if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, like his father, where even now people are slaughtering one another over a crooked election? Which of them would be the courageous dissidents, risking their lives for the values they talk about freely—in every sense—on the campaign trail? And which would be playing the universal human power game under the local rules, whatever they happened to be?
Without naming names, I believe that most of them would be playing the game. What motivates most politicians, especially those running for President, is closer to your classic will-to-power than to a deep desire to reform the health-care system.
