Every once in a while, one comes across an idea well-intentioned but so wrong-headed that it takes one’s breath away.  I encountered such a one recently on the webpage of my esteemed former employer, the Brookings Institution, in a blog entry by an earnest non-resident Brookings scholar, Professor Jennifer Lawless of American University.  Readers are encouraged to look up and read the blog on the Brooking’s website, www.Brookings.edu. Blog Entry

The problem, as Lawless explains, is that young people –high school and college students –aren’t interested in running for office these days and would rather spend their lives in a profession other than politics.  These apparently misguided young people perceive politics as a battle ground for egotistical, self-centered liberals and egotistical, self-centered conservatives who posture, advance themselves, and pretend to be doing something for the common good while in fact are merely scoring political points and accomplishing nothing.

The cure for this parlous condition of the body politic, Lawless and her co-authors assert, is threefold: government should sponsor more programs for youths (like AmeriCorps, Teach for America, Peace Corps, etc.); colleges and universities should refocus admissions standards to reward knowledge of politics; and an app should be on smart phones to give young people information on which elective offices are currently vacant, how to qualify for the ballot, and how to become a candidate.

A few observations come to mind about both the diagnosis and the remedy.  First, do we really need more brown noses, big men on campus, and other ambitious self-promoters in high schools and colleges?  Of course not, by any measure.  There is no shortage of people who think they know best, want power, and just love to run other people’s lives.  When young people suspect the motives of their peers who want to be the class presidents and teachers’ pets, they display a healthy understanding of human nature.  This skeptical stance, far from endangering, promotes and indeed is the essence of democracy.  As a former activist in student politics, I can attest to the difficulty of getting out the vote and persuading fellow students that this or that proposed campus reform would actually accomplish anything.  A skeptical citizenry is critical for democracy and a useful counter-balance for the ubiquitous and hyperactive would-be big shots.

Should government use taxpayer funds to tempt more young people into running for office?  The thought makes one shudder.  We should have fewer, not more, politicians, fewer half-baked enthusiasts with grand schemes for remaking society.  Politics should be the business of a small number of professionals who are thick-skinned and cynical enough to survive the contempt of their fellow citizens and pragmatic enough to understand that compromise is their main business.  The ultimate task of the politicians is to keep society from blowing apart, a goal that is served by keeping the well-intentioned amateurs as far as possible out of the process.  We have too many do-gooders, blundering amateurs and ideologues, who just know in their guts that they are right and everybody else is wrong.  The misfits, who half-understand the issues, greatly complicate the task of arriving at sound policy.  The few who actually run things should be judged harshly by their fellow citizens who are not wrong but are essentially correct in disparaging politicians as egomaniacs.  But we need those few egomaniacs who really know what they are doing and are strong enough to survive without flattery from sycophants and self-important journalists.

We should aspire to a condition where most of the people are apathetic about politics, most of the time because they are busy building companies and creating jobs, writing novels and scientific papers, raising their families, enjoying the higher things of life, and mostly minding their own business.  Give the real pros, the professional politicians, the scope to make their deals, solve problems, and mind the store.  But they don’t need to be loved and we should come down on them hard when they screw up.  Keep the media clatter within bounds, the hyperactive amateurs marginalized, and the hysterical alarms and the alarmists off to the side.  If people don’t want to vote, that’s fine.  It has become a cliche that our political system is dysfunctional and the nation is suffering from gridlock.  The fact is that the nation is not misgoverned and the critics are quite wrong and have grossly exaggerated the problems.  The dysfunction these days pales in comparison to other periods in American history – for example, the era that produced the Civil War, the Federalist-Jefferson disputes the second George Washington term, the Vietnam era and the late 1960s, the battles between the interventionists and non-interventionists on the eve of WWII, the late Truman Presidency, the governmental paralysis in the last two years of Hoover, just to name a few examples of far worse dysfunction.  Politics, alas, is not and has never been a pleasant business.  It is not made easier by fairy tales that see benign results coming from having government devise incentives to induce more youths to become perpetual candidates for office.

Bruce L.R. Smith is a Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy of George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. Professor Smith made his career principally at Columbia University in New York City and at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D. C. He lives in Washington, D. C. with his wife Elise, a health attorney and association executive representing and advising skilled nursing facilities. Mr. Bruce L. R. Smith has B.A. & M.A. from The University of Minnesota and a Ph.D from Harvard University.