I’ve always had a soft spot for Richard Nixon.
While researching for a paper on Sino-American rapprochement, I became enthralled with his personal story. Not having grown up in the US I was often skeptical of the unforgiving vilification he so often faced in the mainstream media, and reading about his life—in politics and beyond—I felt immensely sorry for the man whose entire career was shrouded by Vietnam and Watergate.
While it’s indisputable that many of his decisions were made in horrific taste, I could not help being in awe of his poise and conviction amidst the meticulous media project to mould him into a caricature of deception and evil.
This is an awe I hold for all politicians—those who are able to weather incessant misrepresentation and attack, and not take it personally.
We all vilify politics as disingenuous and manipulative. We laugh darkly at those political ads that grossly oversimplify complex issues into ridiculous slogans. Many of us—myself included—have at some point become completely disillusioned with the process. When I tell people I’m a political science major with zero plans of going into elected office, they raise an eyebrow initially and then immediately nod in approval. It’s a terrible, messy business, they say. I’m glad you’re steering clear of it.
And the numbers don’t lie. Only 30 percent of the Duke student body voted in the most recent DSG elections.
We don’t give our politicians enough credit, do we?
It is at this point that I shall invoke the words of the great—also much vilified—Machiavelli, who argued that politics functioned under an alternative moral framework. Public necessity requires acts that private ethics condemn as immoral and unjust, he said. Once power was no longer personal, it must be moralized based on ragion di stato—the reason of state. After all, should we not care less about the authenticity of a leader than about the deliverance of peace and security?
Politics is an art, and a noble one at that. Being a politician requires balancing the often-contradictory interests of the public and your party with your conscience. It doesn’t take an Einstein to realize how incredibly difficult that is. As the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada Michael Ignatieff once said, “it is really something in life to be utterly disabused about human motive, venality, capacity for double-crossing, and yet still come to work every day, trying to get something done.” Beyond that, the political process we have today, vulgar as it can be, is the only way we can carry out any form of democracy.
We spend far too much time dissecting the person and not the policies—to this day, Americans still get fired up about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. In democratic North America we demand total transparency without realizing that transparency usually makes it harder for politicians to find compromise and get things done. And let’s face it, we all think we’re better than our politicians.
Now, I’m not discouraging active dialogue and criticism. We absolutely need to hold politicians accountable to their words. But I also think we need to give them more leeway, especially in our judgments. There needs to be a public consensus that sometimes in politics "what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas".
There are opportunists and glory-seekers in every field, but I think that we’ll find that at the end of the day, most politicians simply want the best for their public. They are ordinary humans carrying out an extraordinary task.
And so to all the student governmentarians and politicians out there: I salute you. I salute your stamina, your ability to play the game and your ruthless ambition to do something that matters. But while I respect you, I never want to be you.
Bochen Han is a Trinity sophomore.
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