Do We Need To Elect Good Politicians Or Good People?

The Trump era shows the answer is both,

One shibboleth early in the Trump era was that, while Trump would be a bad president, he’d be safer than Mike Pence or other mainstream Republicans simply because he’d be so incompetent. Pence, the argument went, would be able to advance his evil agenda and get more evil shit done; Trump might want to do more evil things, but would be less able to implement them.

You rarely hear people making this argument anymore. Trump’s incompetence in his first term led to a failed Covid response and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Meanwhile, Pence’s commitment to norms led him to incinerate his career in Republican politics rather than participate in Trump’s coup.

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And of course in his second term, Trump has accomplished a whole range of awful things, including destroying USAid, leading to mass death abroad to the tune of some 750,000 people. Trump’s body count rivals, and arguably surpasses, that of any of his more competent predecessors, to say nothing of the damage he’s done to the Constitution. Gutting government is easy; getting it to work for people is difficult. As a result, a bumbling and evil president is, it turns out, horrifically dangerous—even more so in many ways, Trump’s tenure suggests, than a competent and evil president.

Trump’s incompetence has been so damaging that you might be tempted to make the case that competence, rather than moral fiber, is the main thing to look for in a president. And in fact political scientist Jonathan Bernstein argued just that in a post earlier this month. Responding to singer Mandy Patinkin’s assertion that Zohran Mamdani will make a good mayor of New York because he’s a good human rather than a politician, Bernstein replied, “what I like about Mamdani is that I suspect he’s a very good politician, and what’s more I think what New York really needs – what democracies really need – are very good politicians.”

Bernstein adds

If we take a step back, it’s no surprise that the consensus three greatest US presidents, Washington and Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, were all master politicians. And the three recent presidents who were very bad presidents – Carter, George W. Bush, and Trump – were all terrible politicians. It’s not a perfect predictor; Richard Nixon undermined himself despite having a good set of political skills. Lyndon Johnson, too. But overall? Being a good elected official is far more about having and using the best skills than it is about being a good person.

And we shouldn’t apologize for that. Democracies that have depended on good people have invariably failed. Democracies that depend on political skills have a fighting chance. And when we see skill, we should absolutely celebrate it.

As I’ve already said, I have some sympathy for this view of the importance of a kind of non-partisan competence for politicians. But I think that our current fascist crisis also underlines the terrible damage that can result when you elect a truly evil man to the most powerful office in the world. If we want a better politics, I think we maybe need a fuller account of just how Trump’s incompetence and evil have interacted to get us to this bleak dead end.

Professional competence is a kind of virtue

For starters, I think it’s important to think about the way that incompetence and evil are often the same thing—or, in Bernstein’s terms, the ways in which for a politician being a good person and a good politician are often the same thing.

Since everyone hates politicians and tends to think of them as craven and power hungry, it might be useful to use an analogy with another profession: doctors.

Doctors, like anyone, can be kind or cruel, and they can have moral fiber of various sorts. They can also be competent or incompetent—but I think most people would agree that an incompetent doctor is, often by definition, a moral failure. A doctor who (as a not especially random example) recommends that children not get vaccinated is violating their professional ethics and is spreading disease and death. Similarly, a doctor who erroneously believes that Black people feel less pain than white people and who acts on those beliefs is both professionally and morally negligent. A bad doctor, in this sense, is both incompetent and immoral, because when people’s health and life relies on your professional competence, negligence and ignorance are in fact unethical.

This isn’t just doctors. Lawyers have an ethical duty to competently represent their clients; teachers have an ethical duty to understand the material they are passing on to students; truckers and bus drivers and airplane pilots have an ethical duty to know how to operate the big dangerous vehicles they are in charge of getting from one place to another. A person can of course be good or bad in ways that are over to the side of their professional responsibilities—a doctor could be a murderer or a Trump voter, for example. But the professional responsibilities are in themselves an ethical responsibility and failing them has moral implications.

Trump’s badness as president is in part this kind of badness—a failure to meet professional obligations which is effectively a failure to meet moral obligations. This was perhaps most obvious with Trump’s response to the Covid pandemic, in which he refused to inform himself about the crisis and rejected expert advice, going so far at one point to suggest that people should fight Covid by injecting bleach.

That was an example of clownish incompetence. But the president of the United States has a professional, ethical responsibility not to be clownishly incompetent when communicating with the public on an issue of massive public consequence. As president, Trump has access to the absolute best public health advice and expertise in the world. When he is too lazy or too self-important to take advantage of that, he is demonstrating both incompetence and moral turpitude. The two aren’t separable.

You could say the same for a lot of Trump’s actions as president. Politicians are supposed to try to represent and serve their constituents. To do that, they need to gather information from and listen to constituents. They also need to gather and evaluate information about the state of the world so that they can get things done for those constituents. Trump, though, lives in a bubble of one; he treats his own random impulses as the will of the people and he largely refuses to learn anything at all. As a result, he believes tariffs are magic beans which can solve any problem; he thinks windmills are an environmental danger; he insists that undocumented immigrants are voting in great numbers in elections. These are all lies, and a president who believes and spreads lies is both bad at the job and a bad person—again, the two are intertwined.

In this sense, then, Mamdani is a good human because he is a good politician, and vice versa. In contrast, Kyrsten Sinema’s abandonment of her constituency and her weird spiral into solipsistic self-aggrandizement made her a bad person because she was a bad politician. Good person/good politician isn’t an opposed binary, because to be a good politician is, to some degree, to be a good person, while to be a good person who is a politician is to be a good politician.

Competent evil is still evil

Politician—like doctor—is a position of public trust, and to fail that position of trust through rank incompetence is to fail in your duty as a human being.

But politician is also—unlike doctor—a position of moral leadership. Politicians can choose to lead people to evil or to good, and that choice is at least somewhat separate from questions of competency such as finding good information or being sensitive to constituents.

To take one infamous example; South Carolina representative Preston Brooks is best remembered for his vicious physical assault on Senator Charles Sumner in 1856. After Sumner delivered a searing anti-slavery speech, Brooks beat the senator almost to death on the floor of the capital.

That beating was enormously popular with the people of South Carolina; they reelected Brooks by acclaim, cheered him wherever he went, and send him hundreds of canes to commemorate the ugly beating. In terms of listening to his own voters, Brooks’ violent assault was an exemplary instance of constituent service.

But that doesn’t make the violent assault a good or moral act. Brooks’ South Carolina was a corrupt community dedicated to white supremacy; Black people had no voice and no vote. A politician launching a violent physical assault in the name of evil has committed an evil act, even if that act is also in some sense politically successful.

There are numerous examples of Trump being evil in the way Preston was evil, rather than (or in addition to) being evil in the way an incompetent doctor can be evil. His vicious attack on the rights of trans people is one example. Targeting trans people for discrimination and hate is not a winning issue in elections. But it energizes Trump’s base just as white supremacy energized Brooks’ constituents. Trump’s transphobic moral panic isn’t great or masterful politics. But it’s not obviously incompetent. It’s nonetheless evil and a disgrace just as Brooks physically assaulting a colleague to defend and advance racism was evil and a disgrace.

Why it matters

This isn’t just parsing pointless ethical nuances. The relationship of virtue and politics matters a lot if we want a virtuous politics. Which I think we’d all agree we really do at this point.

Bernstein’s argument that we need good politicians rather than good people fails to grapple with the extent to which “good politics” in the history of the US has often meant “white supremacist politics” or “fascist politics”, inasmuch as white supremacy has always been quite popular with US voters, especially since the Black voters with whom it is least popular have often been disenfranchised.

The press, which also answers to and wants to court white supremacist and/or bigoted voters and readers, is often reluctant to make these moral judgements. Media outlets use technocratic measures of success and failure—poll numbers, election numbers, “winning” the news cycle—as the only measures of virtue, which is part of why journalists, and even opposition politicians, have had trouble reacting to or accurately characterizing Trump’s evil.

On the other hand, the prevalent “we need politicians who aren’t politicians” boilerplate fails to acknowledge the ways in which politicians who do their job badly are morally culpable. When people insist that being a good human is separate from being a good politician, they undermine political virtue, which is, in part, predicated on politicians being good at their jobs. The refusal to grant ethical virtue to the job of politician, the claim that competence as a politician is divorce from or even antithetical to virtue, is why an ignorant outsider like Donald Trump was able to gain traction in the first place.

Virtuous politicians are politicians who are good at their jobs. And virtuous politicians are also politicians who pursue virtuous ends. One or the other isn’t sufficient. That may seem obvious. But our public discourse about politics and virtue often struggles to keep both in mind.