"On a visit to the US from Germany during the first decade of the last century, Max Weber asked a group of American workers why they kept voting for politicians who seemed barely qualified for the task and ended up letting them down. He got his answer: "We spit on these 'professionals', these officials. We despise them. But if the offices are filled by a trained, qualified class, such as you have in your country, it will be the officials who spit on us."
How Democracy Ends by David Runciman (2018), p164.
4 comments:
They...had a point. Germany's professionals killed 11 million of their own people, while DC's abuses at that time were mostly against the Cubans, Filipinos, etc. In "Harvard and the Unabomber", Alston Chase pointed out that some of the world's worst killers were also some of its best-educated. Reducing society and people to easily-manipulable abstractions makes it easier to abuse them.
It always surprises me that we expect or even hope that our politicians are incompetent. We'd never say this about any other profession. Competence is the *baseline* for electricians, plumber or doctors.... Given that politicians often have a great deal of say or power over our lives surely that profession should be the place for the best of the best in society?
Or is it a case that an incompetent politician who has the best of intentions is far better than a competent one who might have the worse? That the risk is too great that a competent politician might actually know what they're doing and be able enough to do it?
I think a good part of the responsibility for the rise of Hitler is that politicians in Wiemar where too stupid to realise what they were doing when they tried to control him by bringing him into power rather than excluding him from it. If they'd been more politically savvy maybe the Republic would not have fallen and WW2 might never have happened? But that's my *next* read..... [grin]
The difference between politicans and other professions is that we have a CHOICE with the other professions. We hire a plumber or a mechanic, judging between different firms, and if we don't like the looks of them we might enlist the help of friends or relatives and try it ourself. Or we can say hang it, I'll walk instead. But the politician, is insistent, invasive -- the ever-intruding boss. Sure, I want them incompetent, for the same reason if I have to endure house-flies in my house I want them fat and dumb, for the same reason if there are coyotes I want them lazy and skittish.
Sometimes I think that the phrase "professional politician" is an oxymoron.
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