Ambition, the hidden trait

One of the things we as Americans pride ourselves on is that we have the ability to elect our leaders. We read up and study up on them and make our choices after due deliberation. We study who they are, what they think, and what they want to do. Largely what we study, especially for candidates seeking state or national office, comes indirectly and is influenced by what the politicians themselves want us to see and hear.

And one of the myths those who want to be our leaders have is that they are in politics for reasons other than their own personal ambition.

Michael Kinsey in Time [1/14/08] covers this in his back page essay.

Ambition can take many forms. Four decades ago, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, created a sensation with a book called Making It that revealed how even intellectuals are ambitious. But the 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. Alpha males are alpha males (and alpha females, ditto): it's true among apes, and it's true among humans. This doesn't make them bad people. It makes them people. It also doesn't make democracy a farce; there will always be more than enough alpha types to go around, and our right to choose among them still gives us plenty of leverage about the kind of society we live in.

I am not sure that political ambition is a more pure form of ambition than business ambition and I don’t pretend to know what Hillary would have done had she matured in the Soviet Union or what Mitt would have done in Germany or what Norm would have done during the Spanish Inquisition or what Boschwitz would have done if his family had fled to Mexico instead of the United States. You could waste a lot of time musing on this, but you could also find yourself getting some ideas of what you might do yourself in different circumstances.

Courts are full of divorce proceedings and business disputes that arose from problems developing between people who thought they knew each other well. Since we know all of our politicians much less well, I am not certain that we would have any better perspective on those who would be our leaders.

But it is something to think about.