By Lee H. Hamilton
I’m often struck by how often I meet people who think that all politics are dirty. They view politics as innately unethical, something they should avoid altogether. They stereotype politicians as dishonest and corrupt.
I spent decades working in politics, and I can say with confidence that this view is mistaken and deeply unfair. It’s also self-defeating: If we turn our backs on politics, we reject an essential way to improve our communities and our nation. Politics is simply the way we govern ourselves in a democracy. It’s quite possible for politicians to live lives that are ethically sound. In my experience, most do.
There is no question that many Americans are, to put it mildly, suspicious of politicians. When it comes to Congress, about four in five Americans disapprove of the way it does its job, according to a recent Gallup poll. Ratings of the ethics of various professions put politicians near the bottom, with car salesmen and TV reporters.
I encountered the idea that politics is not a worthwhile calling when I first ran for public office. It probably didn’t help that my brother was a United Methodist minister. People who knew the family claimed to be bewildered that two siblings would take such opposite career paths. In fact, I’d argue that politics and the ministry have a lot in common. Both are people-oriented professions that require us to withhold judgment and work with individuals as they are. And, in their distinct ways, both are concerned with virtue.
It may seem odd today to associate politics with virtue. It wouldn’t have seemed odd to America’s founders. I’ve always been impressed by how often they wrote about virtue. They were concerned with private virtue, the idea that people should live ethical lives; and they cared deeply about public virtue, the concept that people had a civic duty to prioritize the common good. They saw both as essential. “Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private (virtue),” John Adams wrote, “and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.”
The founders were certainly politicians. They competed for power, and their supporters engaged in energetic and contentious political campaigns. They sometimes fell short of living virtuous lives: several owned slaves, for example, even if they knew slavery was wrong. But any list of virtuous Americans would surely include Washington, Adams, Jefferson and other founders. Abraham Lincoln, considered by many historians to be our greatest president, was a politician who compromised and acted strategically to achieve his goals. He was also an ethical and deeply serious man who sought divine guidance and agonized over the suffering caused by the Civil War.
It may seem that politics and virtue are irreconcilable today, given our era’s bitter partisanship and take-no-prisoners election tactics, along with the outsized influence of money in politics. Donald Trump has engaged in behavior that once would have been unthinkable for a president. It’s easy to find examples of politicians acting corruptly: by accepting bribes, for example, or by manipulating policies to enrich themselves.
Bad actors in government get a lot of attention, and rightly so. But we should remember that there are 435 members of the U.S. House and 100 members of the Senate, along with thousands of officials in state and local governments. The vast majority are doing their jobs with a sense of responsibility and integrity.
As for those who aren’t, it’s up to the people to hold them accountable or replace them with officials who will serve the public. If we take our responsibility as citizens seriously – if we attend to the public virtue that the founders wrote about -- we are more likely to get the politics and the politicians that we deserve.
More commentaries from Rep. Hamilton are available on the Hamilton on Foreign Policy news page.