In Aristophanes’ play The Knights, I came upon the following sentence, spoken by the Greek general Demosthenes to a sausage-seller whom the gods have prophesied will become the next leader of Athens: “No, political leadership’s no longer a job for a man of education and good character, but for the ignorant and disgusting.”
For some years I have thought that there isn’t a single member of Congress I’d care to meet for a cup of coffee. The last politician whom I did care to meet was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He contributed to a magazine I once edited, and would call me occasionally but never to talk politics. Our last conversation was about Émile Durkheim, the 19th-century French philosopher said to be the founder of modern social science. Moynihan was himself a social scientist before he became a politician, which, along with his high spirits, gave him a breadth of interest and high sense of disinterest.
As for cultivated American politicians, none perhaps surpassed Thomas Jefferson. His personal library of more than 6,000 books was for use, not show, and its catalogue demonstrates Jefferson’s impressive range of learning. John Adams was a thoughtful and educated man, and so were the Founding Fathers generally. Culturally, things begin to thin out with Andrew Jackson, though Abraham Lincoln’s majestic prose style bespeaks a man of deep if not necessarily wide culture.
Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton. J. William Fulbright, who sat for 30 years in the Senate, was a Rhodes scholar. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were both of the good-student type—Mr. Carter at the Naval Academy, Mr. Clinton at Georgetown, Yale Law School, and Oxford—but neither man could be said to be weighed down by culture. John F. Kennedy was thought to have been an intellectual, but it is more accurate to say that he hired intellectuals: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, among others. Kennedy’s own favorite reading was the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming. If there are currently in Congress any members with other than legalistic learning, they are cleverly hiding it.
But, then, would culture—by which I mean knowledge of the past learned through history; a sense of heightened perfection and appreciation of the variety of human nature gained through the experience of art; a love of tradition—in fact be an encumbrance upon the modern politician? A man or woman with anything resembling serious cultural attainments might just find it difficult to bear up under the bruising demands of contemporary politics. The nightmare of reporters’ relentless search for scandal among people in public life would alone make it a trial. Television news would offer no relief. The prospect of being interviewed by Chuck Todd or Sean Hannity would clearly not be his or her notion of a good time.
A person of true culture, with a steady vision of the ideal of the good society, would probably loathe the notion of spin, find himself appalled by the pressure exerted upon him by special interests, be nauseated by the corruption of his colleagues who enrich themselves while claiming to be wily for the public good. Enmeshed in the everyday cut and thrust of contemporary politics, a cultured man or woman would likely spend a fair amount of his or her time squirming.
This is not because culture makes one fainthearted or too refined or virtuous for politics. But true culture would tend to put one above pure partisanship. The last cultured political columnist, Walter Lippmann, was unpredictable in his views because he thought not like a liberal or a conservative but about what was best for the country. Moynihan, before becoming a Democratic senator, worked for the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. He was able to do so because he, too, was ultimately above party; he, too, wanted what was best for the country.
Of course, everyone in politics thinks he knows what is good for the country. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are confident they know; so are the members of the Republican Freedom Caucus, as are Messrs. and Madame McConnell and Schumer, Ryan and Pelosi. Ask any of them and you will hear that what is good for the country is what he or she believes is good for the country. Discussion closed, and with it the larger idea of the national good. Which leaves us where we are today, with the advice that Demosthenes offers the sausage-seller sounding quite sensible:
“To win the people, always cook them some savory that pleases them. Besides, you possess all the attributes of a demagogue: a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, cross-grained nature, and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.”
Aristophanes, clever fellow, some two millennia before now, appears to have nailed it.
