Why is it so difficult to find good leadership for those who seek less federal government intervention in and control of our lives?
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I think that this difficulty is at least partly due to the mind-set of people who adhere to the viewpoint that America would be a better place with a reduced intervention by all facets of the federal government. Such a person firmly believes in both the efficacy and the primacy of individual action over collective action. Therefore, such a person is motivated by his or her personal wish to be free to engage in those acts they deem worthy and efficacious for themselves as well as for the discharge of their responsibilities to the rest of mankind. They prefer to take responsibility to do things and do not want “government” either to preempt their action or siphon away the resources which they could use to accomplish their own view of the bettement of things. They want to be left alone to act personally and responsibly. They look at governmental intervention and its implied threat of force as disrespectful of the individual rights and abilities of both themselves and their neighbors. They do not seek governmental power to compel actions by other people. They would choose to use that power in very limited and constrained areas of life. What would motivate a believer in such philosophy to seek to enter high government office in the first place?
The very difficulty posed by this question is the fundamental flaw with finding leadership from among those claiming to be adherents to this philosophy. No one who prefers individual action to collective action sees their calling in seeking high office in order to use governmental coercion to achieve their vision. By definition they prefer personal action. Indeed they are suspicious of collective action which can only come into being through the coercive powers of government.
For the reason that a true adherent to this philosophy would seek nothing or nearly nothing from being in charge of the Federal government, only a sense of self-sacrifice is capable of motivating such a person, a believer in the primacy of individual action, to undertake leadership of the federal government’s power. George Washington was such a man and probably the only one in the history of the republic. He showed the spirit of sacrifice in his willingness to serve as the first President. The first few sentences of the First Inaugural Address clearly indicate his preference for individual action and his willingness to sacrifice personally for the benefit of his country as well as his profound humility given the task at hand:
Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:
AMONG the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years—a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.
Washington himself, a person who had risked everything to obtain independence for his country and liberty for it’s people, clearly felt himself inadequate to the office of first President of the United States. When approached he wanted nothing more than to be left alone to pursue his own private affairs at Mount Vernon. Nevertheless his heeded the call of his country and agreed to serve it once again. Upon leaving office he significantly remarked to his successor, John Adams, “[y]ou are fairly in and I am fairly out, let’s see which one of us will be happiest.”
How different the idea of “government service” has now become. The loftiness of the idea of sacrifice which was Washington’s idea has now been replaced by the idea, famously expressed by the Washington Post’s late columnist, David Broder, that ‘anyone willing to do what it takes to run for the presidency is automatically unfit for the highest office in the land.’ The idea of sacrifice has grown passe and in it’s place, at least according to the venerable and experienced Broder, has arisen the idea of a willingness to be debased in order to achieve presidential power. What would lead a person to debase themselves in this way in order to achieve something which requires, according to Washington, a separation from that which is personally most pleasing, minding to one’s own business? This drive, given the necessity of being debased, is fueled by human pride. This pridefulness is the belief that they are capable of doing great things if only given the reins of presidential power. The power to force others to submit to their will. For instance, President Obama expressed his own ideas about presidential power unabashedly:
This is why finding good and worthy leadership for the “less is more” crowd is so difficult. Lord Acton observed that:
Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; . . . there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
He did not, however, explain how to find people to lead a government which values the individual action perpetuated by liberty over the type of collective action perpetuated by the coercion. Such people are the ones to whom the use of power against people who have not harmed them is distasteful even when necessary. This is especially so when the price to be paid for seeking presidential power is personal debasement and that goal, the power, is not sought after for it’s own use but only in order to deny it’s use to another for his time in office.
Given these circumstances it is not surprising that the selection of a candidate must be done with one’s nose held tightly shut and is among a group of politicians who are, because the nature of politics, only partly of the same a mind.
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