Lots of books on politics come across The Scrapbook’s desk, and most, if we may speak with brutal honesty, aren’t to our liking. Often we can’t even make it past the titles. You know the ones we mean. Grand Theft: How a Band of Know-Nothing Media Magnates Is Stealing Your Liberties—and What You Can Do About It! . . . Jackboot: The Coming Authoritarian Nightmare and How to Avoid It. . . . Uncivil Liberties: Why It’s Time to Take the Fight to the Partisans Corrupting Your Democracy.
A felicitous variation on this tendency toward abrasive titles came to us a few weeks ago: Politicians: The Worst Kind of People to Run the Government, Except for All the Others. The author is Bruce K. Chapman, founder and chairman of the board of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. Chapman, to sum up his wise and elegantly written book, thinks politicians get a bad rap.
With the election of Donald Trump, a fair number of transatlantic commentators and academics began publishing books and articles that question our attachment to republican democracy itself. Maybe, these writers have suggested, we’re better off with some form of enlightened state run by technocratic mandarins. Look what happens when you allow people to vote—you get Trump! Chapman asks us to go back to the Founders, who anticipated every one of these complaints. The problem with our politics, he thinks, isn’t that we have so many politicians—their number hardly grows at all—but that we have so much of everything else.
We have lots and lots of what he calls “middlemen,” the nonpoliticians who have a great deal of influence over public policy but who aren’t accountable to voters: lobbyists, activists, consultants, pollsters, bureaucrats, political journalists. These people treat politicians so unfairly—criticizing their every move as if it’s a sign of civilizational collapse, attacking their legitimacy, ridiculing them as idiots and liars—as to make them paranoid and unable to speak and act candidly. “The one thing all middlemen have in common,” Chapman writes, “is the exercise of political power outside the restraints of representative government. They borrow from the authority within the system, whether they acknowledge the debt or not.” Speaking as quasi-political commentators ourselves—that is, middlemen—we can only say: Ouch!
But of course The Scrapbook endeavors to treat the politicians with whom we disagree with fairness and good humor. Sometimes they try our patience, but we’ll take them over mandarins every time.
