When Socrates says that philosophers should be kings, or at least kings philosophers, he attests that the conduct of politics requires wisdom and prudence. When I listen to the people talk, politicians are power-hungry, corrupted opportunists. Which attests that political reality is about as far from Socrates’ wish as it can get.
Is that so? To find out, I want to dissect the terms “power-hungry”, “corrupted” and “opportunist”. The greed for power can be a driving force of human action. A driving force in the Nietzschean sense, the first step towards the power of choice (Willkür), from which, according to Kant, the will to act arises. Politics, which congeals into law, into society’s rules of the game, is the immediate tool for extending and preserving power. But how does one come to be a politician in the first place? What motives does a politician have for becoming a politician?
Either a politician is an idealist with a vision of a better existence, or his idealism is limited to gaining power and keeping it. In the latter case it is fair to speak of an egocentric idealism – a vision whose primary content is not the common good.
The part of the political class made up of egocentric idealists, who regard lobbying and corruption as part of their existence from the outset, is the part that talks about “the people”, not about “us”. Politicians of this stripe promote cronyism, corruption and the aristocratic top tier. In modern democracy, entrepreneurs form that aristocracy which keeps its distance from the powers of the state only on paper.
A good number of politicians, on the other hand, went in with an idealism aimed at the common good, with a vision of a society that functions better. Strictly speaking, this idealism is only aimed at the common good if its idea benefits the mass of people: and that has always meant ideologies that raised up the working class. Naturally, then, these politicians make up much of the Left or the Greens. So if the political intention reaches many people instead of concentrating on one egocentric-aristocratic point, the personal gain for a politician is nonetheless purely of the non-material kind. That seems a weak personal motivation. What happens when, as an idealist of the common good, you are thrown into a pool of power-hungry opportunists? Is a vision of ideals enough to hold out?
Corruption is an ancient principle. It is “the exploitation of a position of power for personal advantage in disregard of universalist norms of conduct” – and those norms of conduct are laws and moral conventions. Corruption is – strictly speaking – an oxymoron where politicians are concerned; they are the ones who pass the laws. What about “moral conventions”? Distil the sociological and empirical attempts to classify the concept of “morality”, and the extract always comes down, in the end, to a definable culture or group. In the state, this group is easy to define: all those who are subject to its laws. The morality – in a simplified, political sense – to which a politician is subject is determined by what benefits the state’s citizens. In a democracy steeped in majority rule, that means the masses. Exploiting a position of power for personal advantage need not necessarily run counter to the interests of the masses.
Today this “moral” corruption is the acceptance of benefits (Vorteilsnahme) by way of lobbyists from business and industry. To disguise it, politicians talk of “locational advantages” and “jobs” when they grant companies tax breaks or bail out banks with taxpayers’ money – and they may well believe themselves that the economy is the common good’s first priority. Work and consumption – that is what politics boils down to at its core; it has to secure the money-flow, and only then do social and ecological problems make it onto the agenda. The fate of education, social welfare and the Kyoto Protocol can be followed everywhere: every conference is a farce, every flick of the German Chancellor’s hand a compromise and a postponement. Our political environment is giving us clear signals: the economy first, then the rest.
Now for opportunism: adapting to whatever situation is most expedient and favourable at the time. That is not to be condemned per se; instead one has to ask what goal is at stake. Starting from idealism, the question is whether it is devoted to the common good or not. There is not much more to say about opportunism, except that it blocks foresight and can turn political decisions into dangerous mayflies.
How much foresight does political office demand? According to Socrates, it takes more than intelligent people. It takes wise people to do politics. Wisdom is not to be confused with intellect; at times it even has rather little overlap with intelligence: many German politicians with doctorates – plagiarised or not – demonstrate a certain intellect, but nothing remotely like wisdom. For wisdom requires a certain measure of experience – and, to stay with Kant, concepts of empirical cognition are needed to be able to make use of intelligence at all. So the state needs politicians with experience. Political experience? Not in Socrates’ sense: what wisdom demands is life experience. Something like a health minister who has gone through the stages of a serious illness, a labour minister who had to do dirty jobs to feed his family, a family minister who was a single mother, on long-term unemployment benefit (Hartz IV) and beaten by her husband, a defence minister who served as a lance corporal in the trenches – is there any such thing?
Unlike America, where an election campaign is an open battle of millionaires, Germany is at its core a people’s democracy (Volksdemokratie) – in the sense of free elections, that is: ministers sometimes come from small villages and started out as local politicians before they went to Berlin. Here, at least, grassroots political experience is a given, and possible. The Germans can vote bricklayers and doctors into parliament; yet Berlin, the centre of lobbying (see, for one, SPIEGEL 2.9.2010), seems to corrupt those politicians of the people. Admittedly, the term “corruption” seems to carry a different context in Germany than in Greece, where bribery has always been part of the political landscape (SPIEGEL 27.9.2011). But Berlin’s lobbyists try all too hard to win the favour of politicians, who are only too happy to put up with having their work made easier. The “outsourcing” of services – above all of one’s own thinking – has by now reached the local councils as well. Does the legitimacy of German politicians stretch far enough to offload the substance of laws and regulations onto outside companies – the lobby?
Back to opportunism once more, and the short-sighted decisions that result from it: how far ahead can an opportunistic politician consistently think if he leaves the drafting of regulations and laws to others? And how far can those others – the lobbyists – determine the course of politics if they know the rules of the game they drafted better than the politicians themselves?
When the German parliament was debating the European rescue fund (ESFS) in September 2011, ARD conducted a survey among the MPs: how large was the sum under discussion that Germany would have to contribute? The result: here.
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