The Debunking: Nice Guys

Good morning, Gentle Reader. Yes, it's the start of another series, possibly a long one. These "Debunking" pieces will have a common aim: to tell you, in no uncertain terms, what you already know but are unwilling to admit to yourself.

Many of Man's troubles stem from the widespread insistence that things are other than they really are, in the face of imperative, irrefutable evidence to the contrary. However, the overwhelming majority of commentators are rather too polite about our preference for such fantasies. As a fantasist of some accomplishments, I can sympathize, but not to the extent of silently watching the destruction of the United States of America or the human race generally. Anyway, someone has to pick up this gauntlet, and my colleagues in the DextroSphere appear, ah, disinclined to soil themselves by doing so. So here we go.

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    The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious.
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest—
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men.

[Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II]

Hearken to Ann Althouse about some Republican strategic and tactical decisions during the 2012 campaign:

The Republicans had good reason to believe that the American people resisted thinking ill of the famously likeable President and so they pursued campaign strategies that allowed people to maintain this treasured belief. Their idea was: He's a nice guy but it would be good to switch to this other person who's also nice and will do an even better job. That's lame, we can see in retrospect, but it was the decision at the time.

I added the emphases in the above. Let's explore the ramifications:

• Nice guys, Obama and Romney, contended for the highest office in the land;
  • Whose occupant is Commander-in-Chief of the mightiest military machine on Earth, with the power to lay complete and utter waste to any region thereof at his sole command;
  • Whose occupant also directs the Executive branch of the federal government, which wields powers so vast that the Constitution has become a present-day nullity;
  • Whose occupant also commands the resources of several intelligence-gathering bureaucracies, capable of eliminating the privacy of any person or institution upon which it might focus;
• And hired thousands of "opposition researchers" to dig up dirt upon one another;
• And slung whatever those researchers could find at their opponents, without conscience qualms or other inhibitions (other than "might this rebound against me?").

How many "nice guys" do you know, Gentle Reader, who would stoop to any of that, regardless of the potential gain? Of those you know who would do so, which ones would you be willing to trust with power over you?

Give that a spin on your mental merry-go-round while I pour myself more coffee.

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Among the political maladies of the nation, this one ranks high: The coverage of national politics by our news media -- including the much vaunted New Media -- focuses on the federal level with near-absolute dedication. State and local politics receives attention only when it evinces a degree of disorder verging on general rioting and bloodshed. Yet federal-level figures often get their start at the state and / or local levels, where, according to Ferdinand Lundberg, things are routinely less than savory:

...it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures -- state, county, and municipal -- are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade, and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff, or what the police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving." Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the race track, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights....

As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non-Mafians.

Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures -- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois -- and the impression is thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone, and not many in the local populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere -- no state excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves.

[The Rich and the Super-Rich, 1968]

To rise in American politics, the aspirant must be more ruthless and less scrupled than his opponents. The dynamic of political power requires it, for, as Friedrich Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, "the worst always get on top." Only men who love power and prize it above all other things will even attempt to scale that cliff, and woe betide him whose conscience forbids him a useful toehold:

In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, cunning, and cruelty. -- Leo Tolstoy

Just how many "nice guys" would you expect to find among such persons?

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There are no "nice guys" in politics. It's really that simple. Yet enormous effort goes into persuading the electorate that this or that official or aspirant to office is a "nice guy:" in Robert A. Heinlein's formulation, "good to dogs and children." The "nice guy" image appears to be essential to political elevation, at least in the thinking of political strategists and image engineers -- and they're likely to be right.

My thesis, for what it's worth, is that we're more likely to trust a "nice guy" with power and discretion no public official should have...and all aspirants to power crave.

Whenever a common citizen is told, directly or indirectly, about what a "nice guy" politician X is, he's being propagandized. Were the great majority of Americans aware of this -- consciously aware during political campaigns, rather than grudgingly willing to concede it to his asshole buddies over beer and pretzels on a Friday evening after work -- we would have far less taste for the sort of Government Uber Alles regime we suffer today. We would grasp viscerally that which we occasionally admit intellectually: that no man should be allowed power over others.

Whatsoever, for any cause,
    Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
    Suffer it not to live!
Holy State or Holy King—
    Or Holy People’s Will—
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
    Order the guns and kill!

[Rudyard Kipling]