Can a politician be ethical or moral?
This post is dedicated to the simple question of whether or not morality and ethics are possible in the realm of the political.Personally, I do not think that it is either possible or probable for genuine morality or ethics, with consistent definitions of either to exist for any length of time in the political sphere. Politics is ultimately a form of social interaction where behavior that in other contexts might be called either corruption or its milder and softer form the good ol' boy network has a greater tendency to predominate in a more obvious fashion than it might do otherwise. In dictatorships or monarchies, corruption and unethical and immoral actions arise for what to me is a very simple reason: the nature of a system where all power is in the hands of one individual, empowered with supreme power to decide things such as the nature of political rises and falls and of distribution of wealth/favors naturally tends to lead to systems reliant on that single person and the network that person creates.
Democracy, however, involves rule by the people and at least ideally tries to create checks and balances that limit corruption. Yet in the United States it's a rare politician that doesn't have some kind of sordid scandal dogging them, not to mention the concepts of gerrymandering, which removes any kind of democratic choice but is too viable a prospect for both parties for either to forfeit it. Then there's the nature and the concept and the practice of donations by the wealthy and corporations, which in reality are made to both parties. Each has issues from these ties, as each becomes beholden to its donors. This can compromise and does compromise the idealistic, zealous, even extremist edge of some political movements while accelerating the power of others. Scandals in parliamentary systems of government I am not as familiar with, but I'd imagine that they do not work entirely in a dissimilar fashion.
But then this leads to the question of why corruption keeps appearing and reappearing in different guises in systems that change as all things do in a historical and chronological sense. To me the answer to this one, like all genuine answers to a difficult question, would be multi-faceted. Corruption has only so many similarities across governments and governmental systems, and its differences reflect the prospect that while human nature and institutions create some things that are similar, practical realities and a more cumbersome, mundane set of factors lead to differences. While dictatorships as a rule tend to glandhanding and clientship, two things that in practice are rife with corruption, the nature of the dictatorship means these things differ. Totalitarianism produces as a rule mini-empires that either grow or are culled, but either way these empires are the direct results of corruption. Military dictatorships tend to produce more limited types of unethical behavior that favor only a privileged few within the regime, a few who were already disproportionately wealthy beforehand in one kind of such regime, or a new, more aggressive caste that outdoes the older bunch in another type.
Corruption in democracies reflects, however, at least four factors that to me are major reasons why 1) it exists, and 2) it is so difficult to eradicate.
The first premise is this: democracies in the real world function with a disproportionately powerful elite, whether de jure or de facto. People in these elites are accustomed to a great deal of money, and to the desire to throw that money around and to try to make friends and influence people in a fashion purely arbitrated and dictated by them. There is nothing necessarily wrong with the goal, except that they have a much easier time doing this than Joe Doakes from Bumfuck, Idaho. If Joe Doakes wants something, he would be approaching someone either in the Idaho state capital or Washington asking his Congressman to handle something, but would be some random guy from some random county. If Generic Fortune 500 CEO asks Joe Doake's Congressman to do something for him, the Generic Fortune 500 CEO has a much easier chance being listened to. Why? He has the wealth to make or break the politicians, and like everyone else with a job they don't get it with intent to enter the unemployment line.
The second premise is this: all forms of government in the real world tend to have a degree of friction between concept and implementation. When things go wrong, it becomes easier to lie about them doing so and pretend everything's fine than it is to admit a mistake. This leads to corruption for what seems to be a fairly straightforward reason. If a program either doesn't work or goes into a kind of failed state, it's much easier for people invested in it to pretend the Emperor prancing around in his birthday suit is wearing clothes of finest silk than to address a problem, admit failure, and to solve that problem. Correlated to this is a quest for blame that seeks to find a scapegoat who makes a convenient lightning rod which neither abolishes the failed program nor really leads to any solution. Programs like this become a center of the kind of pork barrel spending that's a favored lightning rod in its own right, butt one that like the disproportionate influence of the overly wealthy minority is much easier spoken against than solved. No politician wants to explain to his constituents that he cannot achieve jobs for them, or perks for them. Even if this means that a government bloats with inefficient and unnecessary programs, as what this leads to is partisan bickering really aimed at cutting under the other party, not any kind of genuine solution.
The third premise is this: The unethical influence of movements and lobbyists in politics is not a bug, but a feature of the system. Nowadays, with campaigns that are increasingly more expensive for institutional reasons, namely involving millions more people and involving much longer, more intensive campaigning 'seasons', so to speak, it is very easy for the disproportionately wealthy to hire professional lobbyists. It is also an extremely easy and straightforward career move for 'elder statesmen' who are incapable of getting or wanting a real job. These people, of course, know the system and know how to work it like a fine violin. Their very existence benefits multiple factions and means that much as people hate them, it is unlikely that they will have a better, or any, alternative to propose that leads to any kind of different result.
The fourth premise is this: As a wise man whose name I can't remember once said, All Politics is Local. Thus what in practice is systemic unethical, corrupt, immoral behavior is good insofar as the locals benefit from it. If some other locality does, that's considered a bad thing and a major failure of the system. In this sense, it is not the deed that is the offense in political terms, it's the perpetrators. If the people perpetrating the abuse benefit a rival political movement or a neighboring city with a not-so-thinly-veiled rivalry, that offends the group that's advocating these benefits for themselves. It is to be certain itself a hypocritical and immoral approach. Which is precisely the point: hypocrisy is the seed of politics in practice. Seldom, if ever, is there any kind of consistent advocacy of principle, because principle seldom makes good copy, let alone pays a politician the bills.
Is this to say that corruption cannot be fixed? Arguably, actually, yes. Corruption and unethical behavior on the part of political elites has been here since Sumer and the Pyramids, and is not going anywhere any time soon. This is, however, not to say that efforts should not be made to mitigate them. Refusal to mitigate it, in fact, leads to it running unchecked and that's how political systems and states go from strong to a whitewashed tomb to fallen statues in the desert of Oyzmandiae whom nobody remembers. The refusal to recognize that it will always be here, however, leads to attempts to eradicate it that are based on the unsound concepts of utopian politics. In real life, a utopia tends to become an uncompromising and dystopian system, because in attempts to blaze away the failures of the past, the people who do so are shaped by the failures of the existing system, and to replicate that system they are most familiar with, creating the pattern of the revolution that leads to a system much the same as what it succeeded. Reality, unfortunately, is rife with injustice and a system where the voice of the few outweighs the voice of the many. This is far from an ideal system, but then again, unfortunately, reality has never been under any obligation to conform to human ideals to begin with.
So in answer to the question of can a politician be ethical or moral, the answer is yes, they can be. But it is vanishingly unlikely in a real-world scenario that they will be. Accepting this, however, is difficult even for people who while criticizing the existing system accept it to a point that there is in a very real sense no genuine alternative to the system in question, for all its grave flaws.
Democracy, however, involves rule by the people and at least ideally tries to create checks and balances that limit corruption. Yet in the United States it's a rare politician that doesn't have some kind of sordid scandal dogging them, not to mention the concepts of gerrymandering, which removes any kind of democratic choice but is too viable a prospect for both parties for either to forfeit it. Then there's the nature and the concept and the practice of donations by the wealthy and corporations, which in reality are made to both parties. Each has issues from these ties, as each becomes beholden to its donors. This can compromise and does compromise the idealistic, zealous, even extremist edge of some political movements while accelerating the power of others. Scandals in parliamentary systems of government I am not as familiar with, but I'd imagine that they do not work entirely in a dissimilar fashion.
But then this leads to the question of why corruption keeps appearing and reappearing in different guises in systems that change as all things do in a historical and chronological sense. To me the answer to this one, like all genuine answers to a difficult question, would be multi-faceted. Corruption has only so many similarities across governments and governmental systems, and its differences reflect the prospect that while human nature and institutions create some things that are similar, practical realities and a more cumbersome, mundane set of factors lead to differences. While dictatorships as a rule tend to glandhanding and clientship, two things that in practice are rife with corruption, the nature of the dictatorship means these things differ. Totalitarianism produces as a rule mini-empires that either grow or are culled, but either way these empires are the direct results of corruption. Military dictatorships tend to produce more limited types of unethical behavior that favor only a privileged few within the regime, a few who were already disproportionately wealthy beforehand in one kind of such regime, or a new, more aggressive caste that outdoes the older bunch in another type.
Corruption in democracies reflects, however, at least four factors that to me are major reasons why 1) it exists, and 2) it is so difficult to eradicate.
The first premise is this: democracies in the real world function with a disproportionately powerful elite, whether de jure or de facto. People in these elites are accustomed to a great deal of money, and to the desire to throw that money around and to try to make friends and influence people in a fashion purely arbitrated and dictated by them. There is nothing necessarily wrong with the goal, except that they have a much easier time doing this than Joe Doakes from Bumfuck, Idaho. If Joe Doakes wants something, he would be approaching someone either in the Idaho state capital or Washington asking his Congressman to handle something, but would be some random guy from some random county. If Generic Fortune 500 CEO asks Joe Doake's Congressman to do something for him, the Generic Fortune 500 CEO has a much easier chance being listened to. Why? He has the wealth to make or break the politicians, and like everyone else with a job they don't get it with intent to enter the unemployment line.
The second premise is this: all forms of government in the real world tend to have a degree of friction between concept and implementation. When things go wrong, it becomes easier to lie about them doing so and pretend everything's fine than it is to admit a mistake. This leads to corruption for what seems to be a fairly straightforward reason. If a program either doesn't work or goes into a kind of failed state, it's much easier for people invested in it to pretend the Emperor prancing around in his birthday suit is wearing clothes of finest silk than to address a problem, admit failure, and to solve that problem. Correlated to this is a quest for blame that seeks to find a scapegoat who makes a convenient lightning rod which neither abolishes the failed program nor really leads to any solution. Programs like this become a center of the kind of pork barrel spending that's a favored lightning rod in its own right, butt one that like the disproportionate influence of the overly wealthy minority is much easier spoken against than solved. No politician wants to explain to his constituents that he cannot achieve jobs for them, or perks for them. Even if this means that a government bloats with inefficient and unnecessary programs, as what this leads to is partisan bickering really aimed at cutting under the other party, not any kind of genuine solution.
The third premise is this: The unethical influence of movements and lobbyists in politics is not a bug, but a feature of the system. Nowadays, with campaigns that are increasingly more expensive for institutional reasons, namely involving millions more people and involving much longer, more intensive campaigning 'seasons', so to speak, it is very easy for the disproportionately wealthy to hire professional lobbyists. It is also an extremely easy and straightforward career move for 'elder statesmen' who are incapable of getting or wanting a real job. These people, of course, know the system and know how to work it like a fine violin. Their very existence benefits multiple factions and means that much as people hate them, it is unlikely that they will have a better, or any, alternative to propose that leads to any kind of different result.
The fourth premise is this: As a wise man whose name I can't remember once said, All Politics is Local. Thus what in practice is systemic unethical, corrupt, immoral behavior is good insofar as the locals benefit from it. If some other locality does, that's considered a bad thing and a major failure of the system. In this sense, it is not the deed that is the offense in political terms, it's the perpetrators. If the people perpetrating the abuse benefit a rival political movement or a neighboring city with a not-so-thinly-veiled rivalry, that offends the group that's advocating these benefits for themselves. It is to be certain itself a hypocritical and immoral approach. Which is precisely the point: hypocrisy is the seed of politics in practice. Seldom, if ever, is there any kind of consistent advocacy of principle, because principle seldom makes good copy, let alone pays a politician the bills.
Is this to say that corruption cannot be fixed? Arguably, actually, yes. Corruption and unethical behavior on the part of political elites has been here since Sumer and the Pyramids, and is not going anywhere any time soon. This is, however, not to say that efforts should not be made to mitigate them. Refusal to mitigate it, in fact, leads to it running unchecked and that's how political systems and states go from strong to a whitewashed tomb to fallen statues in the desert of Oyzmandiae whom nobody remembers. The refusal to recognize that it will always be here, however, leads to attempts to eradicate it that are based on the unsound concepts of utopian politics. In real life, a utopia tends to become an uncompromising and dystopian system, because in attempts to blaze away the failures of the past, the people who do so are shaped by the failures of the existing system, and to replicate that system they are most familiar with, creating the pattern of the revolution that leads to a system much the same as what it succeeded. Reality, unfortunately, is rife with injustice and a system where the voice of the few outweighs the voice of the many. This is far from an ideal system, but then again, unfortunately, reality has never been under any obligation to conform to human ideals to begin with.
So in answer to the question of can a politician be ethical or moral, the answer is yes, they can be. But it is vanishingly unlikely in a real-world scenario that they will be. Accepting this, however, is difficult even for people who while criticizing the existing system accept it to a point that there is in a very real sense no genuine alternative to the system in question, for all its grave flaws.