Happy Warriors

Dec 18

Is politics a noble calling? When it’s done right, is it good work in the old sense – the kind of work that’s good for both the worker and the world? Or is politics more like the oldest profession – a dirty job, and no one ought to do it?

Max Weber thought politics could be a vocation. But he also thought it was not one to which many were called. “Politics,” he said, “is the strong slow boring of hard boards. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say 'In spite of all!' has the calling for politics.”

Not many people have the heart for “in spite of it all.” I certainly don’t. I’m missing that special combination of “passion and perspective” that Weber thinks a true politician requires. But from my layman’s point of view it seems clear that most of our politicians are missing it too. Are any of them really interested in “slowly boring hard boards”?

The wrecking ball populism wreaking holy havoc on the Potomac has plenty of passion. Trump’s crew doesn’t see why you’d spend time drilling holes here and there when you could cut the damned thing in half with a chainsaw and be done with it. You might say they’re missing the “perspective” that would make distinctions between what’s worth keeping and what’s not. But I guess from their perspective such niceties are impractical, because the rot is too advanced. Sure, you’ll waste some good wood, but it’d be even more wasteful to try and salvage it. It’s like trying to sort through a hoarder’s house. Better to take it all to the dump, even though you might throw out a few jewels. Worrying over those “jewels” is exactly what got the hoarder into this mess.

The Serious Adults are still clutching their pearls in response to all this “passion,” though one senses that their hearts aren’t quite as into the performance as they were during the glory days of la resistance. The difficulty of our situation is that the Serious Adults seem to be every bit as corrupt and incompetent as the wrecking crew says they are. Those with the properly credentialed “perspective” are stuck defending indefensibly rotten institutions because the people passionately hacking away at them are so obnoxiously childish, and Serious Adults can’t accept that unserious children might have their number. It’s just not fair that someone so obviously full of bullshit as Donald Trump could end up being the one who tells the truth.

That, at least, is something like my own perspective, which involves a limited sympathy with the populist impulse. I think the Serious Adults who play the real politicians on TV have not been boring the hard boards, and the boards have gone rotten in the meantime, and now the reality TV star is here to smash them, which makes for great TV, if not for good government. What’s especially difficult about our situation is that it makes the emergence of a real politician, in Weber’s sense, even more unlikely than it always is. In current circumstances, the combination of real passion with real perspective often satisfies no one. Citizens looking for someone with perspective will blanch at a passion for clearing out the rot, because “passion” is what the mob has, and they fear the mob. But citizens looking for someone with passion will blanch at the perspective that draws careful distinctions between what’s rotten and what’s healthy, because “perspective” is what the Serious Adults have, and what’s “healthy” somehow seems to regularly coincide with what’s healthy for the pocketbooks of the Serious Adults. Unfortunately for us, the same is true of our “healthiest president in history,” whose passion for rooting out corruption is rivaled only by passion for getting richer in the process.

This circumstance is an especially hard board to bore through. “Tougher than a pine knot,” as they say where I’m from, but not in a good way. Mass retreat to rival corners makes true politics all the more necessary, while making all the more difficult. The true politician will be easily and understandably mistaken by both tribes for the false kind. This is part of Weber’s point: the true politician is the one who is willing to be misunderstood for the sake of the greater good. But “I’ve been misunderstood!” is also exactly how a fake politician often apologizes for himself. And so, tired of the run-around, some of us get drawn like moths to the loudmouth who seems real because he never apologizes for anything, while others rally to the righteous indignation of the defenestrated hall monitors. Round and round the tribal dance must go. It feels like we’re circling the drain, playing the blame game on infinite repeat, struggling in quicksand. What is to be done?

I don’t know. It’s worth noting that What is to be done? is the title of a pamphlet written by Vladimir Lenin, a man whose love for omelettes I don’t share. The red team is breaking a lot of eggs right now, and while I can’t say I care too much about the survival of the department of education, I do care about the survival of Joe Schmo who spent his life working for the department of education. Not that Joe Schmo is a friend of mine; I run in different circles. But I think back to a few years ago when Facebook, a company that unites “stupid” and “evil” more tightly than any two-party duopoly ever could, announced a big layoff. I read this news and thought “good,” and I’m afraid I then waxed a little gleeful about it on a group text, forgetting that one friend in that group worked for Facebook. It turned out that his job was one of those on the chopping block, and that he’d only kept it by a hair. That was a lesson. I’d forgotten how wickedly personal the problem of dirty hands really is.

Now, the tribal part of my brain – yes, it’s in me too – immediately raises its hand and asks whether any of these recently downsized Serious Adults ever cared as much about the survival of people who spent their lives working for the factories that other Serious Adults in other government departments decided to ship off to China and Mexico so that all the Serious Adults can live together in the style to which they’ve grown accustomed. Maybe “what is to be done” is to give this whole class what’s coming to them. And any of these newly minted right-Leninists will tell you that it is most definitely a class that we’re talking about here. In their view, sob stories about USAID workers who used to deliver food to starving orphans distract you from seeing how power actually works. Facebook delenda est: if you believe that, you have to accept that people will be out of work. In other words: you have to be willing to bore the hard boards! But you have to do it quickly, not slowly – the next election always looms, and this might be your only chance.

So say the omelette chefs and the part of me that applauds them. But the other part of me protests. You do have to break some eggs to make an omelette, but if all you do is break eggs, you don’t get an omelette, you get a mess, and the whole point of this is to get us out of a mess. It’s like they’re going into that hoarder’s house and throwing a bunch of junk out into the yard and calling it progress. This part of me suspects it won’t end well, even if some of the collateral benefits tickle my fancy.

And this is why I can’t be a politician. I’ve got some passions, and I’ve got some perspective on those passions, but I don’t have that extra passion for bringing my perspective into the arena, where it would probably be mistaken for a lack of passion, which would probably cause me to lose perspective. I can’t balance my passions and my perspectives in the special way that a true politician must, if he’s going to get through those hard boards. Few can.

I like to think the clearest sign that a politician is one of those happy few is that he or she is a “happy warrior.” If any personal quality can punch through the spectacle and cynicism to reveal a stuffed suit as the real deal, maybe it’s this. FDR’s famous moniker for Al Smith (and later Karl Rolvaag’s for Hubert Humphrey) comes from Wordsworth’s paean to Lord Nelson – “he that every man in arms should wish to be.” The happy warrior – as opposed to the simply warlike, or the simply happy – is “the generous Spirit, who, when brought among the tasks of real life, hath wrought upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought.”

In other words, he’s the guy who actually believes all this stuff. He believes in nobility and duty and other romantic claptrap. He reads Wordsworth and doesn’t laugh. But he’s also the guy who knows how to do his duty. He knows how to use the tools that bore through the hard boards. “Whence, in a state where men are tempted still / To evil for a guard against worse ill, / And what in quality or act is best / Doth seldom on a right foundation rest, / He labours good on good to fix . . .”

And now the reader might expect me to close by naming those happy few, the exceptions to the rule, the signs of hope, the ones with the calling. But I have no names to suggest. Maybe you do. Maybe they exist. Or maybe they’re just the Godots we all await. Either way, they’ll probably be hard to distinguish from the various yet uniformly bland flavors of the average American politician. Maybe some of the people I castigate or dismiss are in fact the very droids I’m looking for. They’re out there doing what is to be done, and suffering the slings and arrows of those who outrageously condemn them, their eyes on the prize of the hard board bored through at last.