Why Do Our Political Options Suck?

The stalemate over house speaker brings to mind a question: Isn’t it strange that in a nation of such ambition and inventiveness, our options for political candidates basically range from bad to worse, from senile morons with no understanding of basic economics to ditzy Marxists and outright frauds and crooks? Not every politician is awful, but I think most Americans now believe, as a friend of mine used to say, that if we could get fifteen or twenty ordinary people in a room, they could be infinitely more effective than Congress at solving national problems.

Some blame the lack of term limits. Those probably would help. Government doesn’t bankroll its own operations—citizens do. And citizens bear the burdens of laws and regulations. So we want people in government who actually know what it’s like to be productive, value-creating citizens, making their own money and subject to the same laws as everyone else—not spendthrift careerist technocrats hell-bent on burning through all our earnings and then some.

Others say there’s a deeper problem: too much fidelity to the supposedly “false theory” on which America was built. Reportedly, on the third day of failed votes to elect a House speaker, Representative Justin Amash—one of today’s only politicians who cares about liberty—said the House needs a nonpartisan leader and suggested “he could be that guy.” National Conservative think-tank leader Yoram Hazony spat back in a tweet, “Liberalism is ultimately the theory that the state can be neutral. Stew in this false theory long enough and you end up believing that *you* yourself can be neutral.”

Liberalism is ultimately the theory that the state can be neutral.

Stew in this false theory long enough and you end up believing that *you* yourself can be neutral. pic.twitter.com/h3oNfojEuA

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) January 4, 2023

The problem as Hazony and other National Conservatives construe it is that government cannot “be neutral among all individuals with respect to certain rights,” largely because they view “rights” not as protections of people’s pursuit of goods but as government grants to goods at the expense of others. Hazony writes, in his book The Virtue of Nationalism, “which goods can be made available is a practical matter that cannot be determined without trial and error in actual societies. True rights, those that incur obligations on others to take action, are for this reason incalculable without reference to the constraints of real-world contexts.”¹ For instance, he writes, a person’s right not to be drafted into the military depends on whether the military needs him.

So, Hazony holds, governments must be pragmatic, granting certain groups “rights” to things as and when those things become available and align with the goal of conserving the nation. In his latest book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, he writes, “Marx is right to see that every society consists of cohesive classes or groups, and that political life everywhere is primarily about the power relations among different groups.”² So we must drop the charade; governments can’t be neutral. Pressure-group warfare is a metaphysical fact, and we need politicians who embrace this and promote the “right” groups. We need politicians who don’t pretend to be neutral or shrink from the responsibility of wielding power over us like a father over his brood of bratty children.

This, mind you, is a thinker on what is popularly—though wrongly—called the political “right.” The man who may be the next Republican candidate for president of the United States, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, keynoted Hazony’s recent National Conservatism conference. Senators Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley also spoke, along with a slew of other Republicans.

And this handily illustrates why our political options suck today. Whether you turn to conservatives or “liberals” (also a misnomer, the origin of which I explain here), you will be hard-pressed to find any politicians who understand what rights are, where they come from, and how we know it. They don’t know that rights are a recognition of the fact that to create the values on which our lives depend, we must be free to act on our own judgment so long as we don’t violate the equal rights of others. They don’t know that rights stem directly from this aspect of human nature, and many doubt we can be objective or reach true knowledge at all (“Stew in this false theory long enough and you end up believing that *you* yourself can be neutral”). Sharing a common root—Marxism—skeptics on both sides of the aisle operate as unprincipled pragmatists.

The Harvard-trained historian J. Rufus Fears observed more than two decades ago that we have plenty of politicians, but virtually no statesmen—no honorable people versed in the principles of government, particularly the principle of individual rights. Barring their return, it doesn’t matter who is elected speaker. All will lead us in roughly the same direction: downward.

About Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey (@revivingreason) is managing editor of The Objective Standard and holds fellowships at Foundation for Economic Education, where he writes in defense of freedom, and at Objective Standard Institute, where he teaches courses and hosts the podcast “Philosophy for Flourishing.”

View all articles by Jon Hersey →