Scorn the ‘Public Servant’

Kevin McCarthy’s pyrrhic bid for the House speakership has consumed much of the oxygen this past week, and for good reason. As the Editors noted, it was a historically rare campaign — replete with Shakespearean drama and imagery. 

What I didn’t appreciate was the hero worship of the actors and the treatment of the C-SPAN feed as some Bravo network production. The sensation of being seated alongside worshipful viewers cheering on a particular boob among the multitude of bimbos cutting each other’s throats for our entertainment was gross. 

On the right, we saw this with the adoration of the Gaetz Gang holdouts — as if they were anything other than fundraising morons (with a few exceptions). On the left, it was much the same, with the performative reading of pop psychology for “slay queen” points — doubly dumb, as we know politicians can’t read; evinced by their constant expansion of the uninspected omnibus fleet.

Respectfully, anything a politician does should be met with scorn. If he does well? A dollop of contempt. Poorly? A lunch lady’s ladleful. 

William F. Buckley said it better in his 1993 column, “The Call of Public Service.”

Buckley writes:

As the crowds move into Washington and the crowds move out of Washington, there are sounds of weeping and of laughing. It is one thing to weep because you no longer have access to the rampart o’er which you watched, and indeed there is no reason to do so because the enemy overcame. To wish to remain in Washington for the purpose of keeping the barbarians at bay is one thing. To wish to be there in order to govern is another. The differences are worth reflecting upon.

I know people (not a lot) who go around saying things like, “Public service is the great opportunity in life.” Those who feel this are of two kinds, and the distinction is critical. The person who devotes himself to public service defined as missionary work in Burma, or Red Cross work in Somalia, or any of the hundred different activities that can be done in a community to help those who need help, is the public servant who is truly admirable.

It is a pity that one so seldom hears about this type of person. Oh, maybe the woman who founded the Red Cross (what was her name?), or the man who began the Jesuit order. Mostly they are anonymous men and women, and their gratification is in serving their fellow men and their God.

But “giving your life to public service” these days is generally intended to describe an ambition to serve in political office. Recently it was recalled that Tip O’Neill was asked what was it that, having left Washington, where he had served as speaker of the House, he missed most. He replied without hesitation: “Power.”

Power. That is the great aphrodisiac. Granted, our legislators get pretty fair pay these days. But back before the Reform Acts in Great Britain, there was no pay to speak of for members of the House of Commons. But there were long lines of men who wished to “serve” the public.

It is arresting to remind oneself that, as often as not, those men in public service are engaged in doing great disservice: Until 1807 the British continued to authorize the trade in slaves. The dissenter may think me too categorical in saying so, but I nonetheless say that I deeply wish that Lyndon Johnson had gone in for real estate instead of government.

At the extreme, of course, there are the forthright tyrannies. These are, except in situations of anarchy-such as Somalia’s-brief in duration. Usually there is organized government behind the concentrated ugliness of power. I note that of the 220 million people killed during the twentieth century, 155 million of them were killed by their own governments. The Nazis killed more Germans than did the Allies. Ask how many Germans were killed by Hitler, Russians by Stalin, Chinese by Mao, and one quickly gets the idea.

That is the harsh end of government. At the softer end, you have the governor who attempts to do something beneficent for his subjects but ends by doing them a disservice. The national debt is the accumulated excess of government spending over government income. The deficit has risen in America to the point where, counting in all forms of taxes, Americans work full time for federal and state governments until May 5, when they begin to work for themselves. One hundred twenty-four days.

Enthusiasts for government will list the benefits of government: free schooling, health care, the lot. Well, the slavemasters also provided food, lodging, and medical care. Government is of course necessary, but in a season where the Religious Left (the happy designation of Fran Liebowitz, referring to the aggregations that surrounded Bill Clinton when he was inaugurated as president) is in a delirium of enthusiasm about what the new government is going to do for us, it pays to remind ourselves that we are in the hands of men and women who love power. They mainline on it.

What can we do today for the American citizen? (“The government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.”-T. Jefferson.) How can we get more taxes from him? What next can we forbid him to do? Require him to do?

The joy of the cadet entering West Point to do public service is a wholly understandable phenomenon. He is there to do as he is told, in defense of the policies his country devises. But it pays to remember that the “defense policies” of many countries in many centuries have made of a nation’s armies primarily shooting squads, because the men who command those armies are mostly predators.

Our governors are, for the most part, the enemy. The government, John Adams wrote, “turns every contingency into an excuse for enhancing power in itself.” That was almost two hundred years ago. How right he was. Our enemy, the state.

-January 28, 1993

Indeed.