One reason many politicians behave badly these days is that we spend less time thinking about what it means to behave well. This was less of a problem in past centuries when leaders, teachers and clergy held detailed debates over what it meant to have good character.
In the 18th century, for example, Edmund Burke composed a long, famous passage defining the standards of political excellence:
“... To be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; ... to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; ... to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man. ...”
In the 19th century,
Trollope admired Prudent Insiders, not Innocent Outsiders. His most admirable characters have been educated by long experience. They have grown mature by exercising responsibility. They have been ennobled by custom and civilization. In his books, powerless outsiders often behave self-indulgently and irresponsibly. Those who are in government have to grapple with the world as it really is.
The central tension in Trollope’s novel “Phineas Finn” is between independence and service. The title character is an Irish outsider who comes into Parliament vowing to be true to his individual conscience. “Let me assure you I wouldn’t change my views in politics either for you or for the Earl,” Finn tells a party leader early on.Continue reading the main story
But he enters a Legislature filled with insiders, some of whom are virtuous and some of whom are not. Finn has to either chart his own course or allow himself to be put in harness for the good of the common effort.
Trollope seems to have a passing admiration for Finn’s independence. Finn is a charming, good-natured man. But he is never really tested by power. He grades himself on a curve, never really facing up to his weaknesses. Being an amateur in life, he can afford to be unsteady in his affections, and rely on good looks instead of strength of character.
Trollope’s ideal politicians — who have names like Plantagenet Palliser, Joshua Monk and the Duke of St. Bungay — put service before independence. Their party and their country have asked them to accept certain duties and face certain problems, and they just get on with it. They are more weighty, but also more boring.
Trollope’s ideal politicians share certain traits. They are reserved, prudent and scrupulous. They immerse themselves in dull practical questions like, say, converting the currency system.
They are not sweeping thinkers, but they make sensitive discriminations about the people and the circumstances around them. They learn to operate within the constraints imposed by their idiom, and they don’t whine or complain about those constraints. They develop delicate understandings of what is required in a given place in time.
Trollope’s ideal leaders are not glamorous celebrities of the sort we have come to long for since J.F.K. They are more like seamen or carpenters. They are judged by their professional craftsmanship.
They are thin-skinned about any moral transgression they might commit and rigorously honest when judging themselves. They try to make things better but are acutely aware that everything they do might make things worse. As Shirley Robin Letwin wrote in her book “The Gentleman in Trollope,” the Duke of St. Bungay had “modest expectations of his fellow men,” but he was never cynical. Trollope’s leaders don’t embrace change quickly but have to be dragged into embracing it after much interrogation, and the change they prefer is incremental.
Trollope praises one of his prime ministers, Plantagenet Palliser, for “that exquisite combination of conservatism and progress which is [his country’s] present strength and her best security for the future.”
Trollope’s readers would have come away from his books with a certain model for how practical people should behave, which they could either copy or argue with. I’m not sure his exemplars could thrive amid the TV politics of today, which calls for grand promises and bold colors. But there are prudent, reserved people in government even now. And if more people spent their evenings at least thinking about what exemplary behavior means, they might be less likely to find themselves sending out emotionally stunted tweets late at night.Continue reading the main story