Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship

By Jeffrey A. Becker

Most Americans admire the determination and drive of artists, athletes, and CEOs, but they seem to despise similar ambition in their elected officials. The structure of political representation and the separation of powers detailed in the United States Co

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813145051

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Ambition in America

Ambition

in

America

Political Power

and the

Collapse of Citizenship

JEFFREY A. BECKER

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Copyright © 2014 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

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for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

For

Virginia Draper,

John Schaar,

and Wilson Carey McWilliams

All teachers, all friends

Contents

Preface: The Triumph of Ambition and the Collapse of Citizenship?

Introduction: The Paradox of Power in America

1. The Ambition of Moral Citizens: Belonging and the Limits of the Moral Community

2. The Ambition of Interests: American Constitutionalism

3. The Ambition of Popular Control: Jacksonian Democracy and American Populism

4. The Ambition to Recover Democratic Excellence: Tocqueville and Franklin Delano Roosevelt

5. To Flatter and Obey: The Triumph of Ambition

6. Keeping Ambition Accountable: A Place for Political Parties

Conclusion: The Collapse of Modern Citizenship

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

The Triumph of Ambition and the Collapse of Citizenship?

American democracy faces an enduring challenge to encourage, harness, and direct the ambitions citizens have to wield political power. Most Americans are familiar with the structure of representation and separation of powers James Madison put into the Constitution to restrain and channel self-interested ambition. Yet little attention has been given to ways of encouraging political ambitions. Though Americans encourage the ambitions of scientists, artists, athletes, inventors, entrepreneurs, soldiers, engineers, and others, political ambitions stand alone. We encourage private forms of ambition yet ignore public forms of ambition, leaving the republic to fend for itself, without training or encouragements for politics. While we promote ambitions for private achievement, aspiration, and success in private venues, we leave the training of citizenship and public ambitions to itself. The ambition to be a private success is lauded; public success is more complicated. Gratifying our material and sensual desires (privately) through ambition is accepted, but not publicly.

And as Joseph Schlesinger warned in 1966: A political system unable to kindle ambitions for office is as much in danger of breaking down as one unable to restrain ambitions.¹ More important, the way Americans talk about democratic politics offers little room for developing and educating healthy political ambitions of ordinary citizens or their elected officials for public life. And there are few if any explorations of the nature of ambition; the relationships that define, shape, and sustain ambition; the ways it can be expressed; or the ways ambitions might threaten or strengthen democratic politics.

This study is such an exploration. It examines how American political institutions and forms of association have sought to inspire, guide, and constrain citizens’ ambitions to rule. It explores how institutions and associations, social movements, and elected officials have offered competing incentives and norms for citizens seeking political power. And to identify those understandings that threaten self-government and those that can strengthen democratic politics, it examines different understandings about the value and role of ambition in politics.

My approach to ambition begins at the conceptual level. From its earliest usage in the English language, ambition has been associated with people soliciting others for support, status, and approval. See the Oxford English Dictionary: 1. going round, 2. going round to canvass for votes, 3. eager desire of honour, etc. The root of the word is from the Latin: ambit: 1. A circuit, compass, or circumference, 2. esp. A space surrounding a house, castle, town, etc. Keeping with this most basic definition, in this study ambition refers to a person’s desire for public support, approval, and power. An ambitious person moves beyond home, outside the self, into a broader field of social interaction to solicit support. In this respect, a person who wants to satisfy his or her ambitions must willingly engage the social and collective standards of other people because communities of people determine what counts as fame, what merits rank, and who legitimately exercises political power.

One of this book’s central purposes is to move beyond examining the ambitions of those who want political power to look at the ambitions Americans have (and once had) for themselves in public life and those they have (and once had) for their communities. The story of ambition in America is many stories taking place across time, in different locales, and in response to particular events and historical circumstances. The introduction describes the challenge ambition offers to democracies and looks briefly at contemporary attitudes and theorists, to identify the need for a more comprehensive study of ambition. Chapter 1 shows how the Puritan commonwealth’s moral community based on biblical harmony and godly order relied on a social division between the virtuous and the sinful that resulted in a concept of ambition based on moral absolutism that undermines democracy. Chapter 2 examines how the concern to channel and restrict ambition that motivated Madison and others to frame the Constitution overlooked the importance of encouraging political ambition in the citizenry. Chapter 3 shows that the legacy of American populism, drawn from the periods of Jacksonian democracy and the late-nineteenth-century Populists, leaves American citizens with an incoherent and ineffective model of political ambition. Chapter 4 develops a concept of political ambition that can be a corrective to the democratic populism of the Jacksonians and the Populists by drawing on the aristocratic sentiments of Alexis de Tocqueville and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Chapter 5 examines ambition in contemporary electoral politics in light of these preceding concepts. Chapter 6 shows that political parties can still serve as a mechanism for keeping ambitious people accountable to democratic norms.

This study concludes that ambition is a necessary feature of democratic politics; public life must accommodate a range of ambitions; an inequality in citizens’ ambitions to rule, though unavoidable, is compatible with democracy; democratic politics requires all citizens to be educated about the need to encourage and sustain certain kinds of political ambitions; and, most important, citizens must be taught to defend institutional practices—though they may be imperfect—that nurture and allow the public to recognize people of ambition. When existing political institutions and associations are unable to satisfy the ambitions of citizens in American public life, ambitious people become frustrated and either withdraw or seek political power in ways that undermine principles of equality and due process.

I propose that an increased understanding of the nature of ambition in American politics will help citizens meet the challenges now faced, when political institutions and economic organizations increasingly appear too powerful or complex for citizens to comprehend, much less control.

Introduction

The Paradox of Power in America

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. . . . It thirsts and burns for distinction. . . . Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? . . . Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

—Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum

of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838

The Challenges Ambition Poses to Democratic Politics

Ambition, the desire for public fame, rank, and/or power, poses a challenge to democratic governments whose legitimacy rests on citizens equally sharing responsibility for self-government: namely, how does a governmental system founded on rule by equals—where no person has natural dominion over another—make room for the unequal desires of its citizens to actually rule? On the one hand, the ambition of some citizens to seek political power while others are content to be ruled can be the genesis of dictators and tyrants. After all, people ambitious for personal success may want either a disproportionate amount of control or to achieve more than public life can reasonably accommodate. On the other, citizens who lack a healthy measure of ambition for fame, rank, or power may too readily surrender their civic responsibilities for the public welfare.

In representative democracy, the people entrust the public welfare to their representatives, who will administer public power on their behalf. While democracy originated with the classical ideal that the demos (people) would exercise the power of the kratia (state), Robert Michels famously argued in Political Parties that the sociology of democratic societies produces such a consistent call for leadership that there exists an iron law of oligarchy. Despite the prevalent advocacy of popular rule and frequent calls for greater participation, Michels points out that at all levels of political activity there will be the inevitable division of the people into leaders and followers because there is a need for leadership felt by the mass. For Michels, society cannot exist without a ‘dominant’ or ‘political’ class, and . . . the ruling class, while its elements are subject to a frequent partial renewal, nevertheless constitutes the only factor of sufficiently durable efficacy in the history of human development.¹ While we may dispute the division of people into leaders and mass, the need for leadership remains. And in societies with populations larger than a handful of people this means that some and not all people will rule; some and not all people will have the ambition to rule.

Political power in democracies will concentrate in a ruling class, but this iron law of oligarchy does not automatically generate a system for deciding between those who want to rule and those who are content to follow. Because citizens in modern democracies must choose some of their number to rule, they need to recognize that not all citizens share an equal ambition to rule, that not all citizens want to share in self-government. Citizens’ ambitions to rule vary across the population; even groups calling for more citizens to participate in government recognize that not everyone shares an equal ambition to participate in self-rule, that there are those who want more responsibility and are willing to invest more time and effort, and there are those who do not want as much responsibility and are less willing to invest as much time and effort. Since all citizens do not share the same desire to participate in governing, the inequality of ambition produces a tension between the ruled and those who seek to exercise political power, the rulers.

Herein lies the challenge to republican democracies: the demos struggles to rule itself according to principles of equality and popular sovereignty yet it depends on an oligarchy of ambitious office seekers to govern. Because all citizens do not have an equal ambition to rule, republican democracies must choose leaders from pools of ambitious people, while trying to prevent those same people from exploiting public power to dominate the less ambitious. Political practices need to accommodate the unequal desires of ambitious people for fame, rank, or power; yet those same practices must also sustain the norms of democratic equality by filtering out those people who are too ambitious or whose ambition is at cross-purposes with democratic norms.

Normative ideals of direct democracy foster the popular expectation that an active and involved citizenry can participate in public decisions, voice its opinions, and thereby exercise collective control over public questions.² In this respect, democracy holds out the promise of equal voice and participation for all citizens. The normative ideal is that all citizens are capable of self-rule. And attitudes about ambition take shape in response to these norms. What people believe they want and what they are capable of become defined by the democratic expectation that all citizens can rule. All are capable of the knowledge and qualities necessary for self-government. As Wilson Carey McWilliams describes, Democratic aspiration levels up, aiming to raise all citizens to the highest possible level of excellence, but democratic practice entrusts the judgment of excellence to ordinary human beings . . . ancient wisdom and common experience testify that ruling and being ruled require different sorts of knowledge and qualities of soul, but democracy demands that its citizens have both.³ Because democracy expects all citizens to be capable of ruling, democratic institutions not only need to teach ordinary human beings the sorts of knowledge and qualities of soul ruling requires, but they also need to encourage people to take responsibility for public rule; democratic institutions need to offer ambitious people incentives to accept the obligations of self-government, incentives for welcoming the duties of citizenship by seeking public office and by making better judgments about whom to elect.

Obviously, citizens who value the republic enough to seek elective office are needed to shoulder the responsibilities for shaping public life. Moreover, those civic responsibilities need to offer ambitious office seekers a public dignity or nobility of character unavailable in private life. Public office and civic duty have to offer citizens sufficient respect and rewards to compete with—and possibly exceed—the private rewards of money and wealth. Public life has to appeal to the private and tyrannical impulses people have for the recognition that comes with controlling other people. American citizens therefore mediate between dependency on and suspicion of ambitious people.

Consequences of Americans’ Ambivalence and Mistrust of the Publicly Ambitious

The importance and value of ambition for politics may be underestimated because of Americans’ ambivalence about people who aspire for power in public life, an attitude that often leads to a pervasive mistrust of those who seek and hold public office. In America, to say that someone is ambitious may be to praise or to reproach. Private forms of ambition are praised, but public forms remain mistrusted. To lack private ambition is to tempt failure and disgrace, yet too much public ambition is considered the folly of tyrants. Americans simultaneously distrust and admire ambition. The politically and socially ambitious are greeted with both reverence and contempt; politicians who seek office may inspire and put off citizens at the same time.

Children get ambiguous advice about ambition: parents and teachers encourage them to have some ambition in life, be all that they can be, get ahead, while friends caution one another not to be too ambitious and frown on people who too aggressively seek attention or honor. Citizens expect their leaders and representatives to have the motivation and desire to campaign for and serve in public office; yet they often suspect that ambitious candidates and officeholders exploit public office for personal gain.

Every strong leader is a potential dictator, and weak leaders may well be the pawns of those with narrow private interests, such as lobbyists. And if citizens believe that the only goal ambitious people have is to maximize their own self-interest, they will conclude that people who want public power will use that power only for personal gain.

Lincoln feared that ambitious people are like menacing wolves that threaten the civic order. The person ambitious for public power is seen as a predator who seeks to exploit, control, and conquer otherwise virtuous citizens. People accustomed to this way of thinking begin to regard all public servants and politicians as enemies; John Schaar warns that this suspicion has become self-fulfilling: Today our skepticism toward all notions of disinterested, public-regarding behavior is so thoroughgoing that the patriot can hardly appear. We are inclined to regard all professions of disinterested and altruistic motive as the blandishments of a charlatan or the intrigues of a schemer—and we are largely right, for over time, a people gets the politics it expects and asks for.⁴ When citizens have a reflexive mistrust of elected officials, those they elect find it difficult to govern in ways that confer dignity. Because citizens regard their elected officials as scheming against the public good, holding public office no longer provides a measure of respect or admiration; public service is a career no longer worthy of the ambitious person’s time and effort; the office no longer provides a measure of recognition or esteem worth fighting for.

Attacks on institutions of government, notably Congress and many state legislatures, are common when citizens see governing institutions as little more than conglomerates of ambitious people colluding to retain power. And citizens who conclude that ambitious politicians are only motivated to seek power come to view the collective actions of government (and politics more broadly) as no longer truly collective. Rather, citizens believe political life—often thought of in terms of a large impersonal bureaucracy—is an impediment to their individual liberty. Government then becomes something to shrink, kill, or abolish to preserve individual autonomy. In turn, citizens no longer trust their political institutions, since they see government not as the realm of us but of them—a view that contradicts much of our democratic political history.⁵

And this mistrust of these institutions is far more threatening to civic life than the danger posed by the ambitious officeholders. As Hugh Heclo notes: Institutions represent inheritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations. They constitute socially ordered groundings for human life. . . . To live in a culture that turns its back on institutions is equivalent to trying to live in a physical body without its skeleton or hoping to use a language but not its grammar. A culture wholly committed to distrusting its institutions is a self-contradiction.⁶ American politics today exists in this self-contradictory climate. Suspicious of ambitious people, citizens withdraw from political life, preferring to spend their time on personal (and less public) pursuits. For Alexis de Tocqueville, the retreat to private pursuits fosters an individualism that draws people away from civic life: Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.⁷

Furthermore, when people form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation, they abandon commitments to collective actions. As Tocqueville observes, they imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.⁸ When people remove themselves from the historical and social connections that tie them to the political life of the country, they lose a sense of the collective purpose political ambition can serve. Lacking a concern for the collective fate of the larger society, people come to regard ambition as little more than a desire for individual advancement. Wilfred McClay believes Tocqueville rightly identified the unhappy consequences of this dual nature of the American self: A seemingly incongruous melding of assertion and passivity was noted by Tocqueville . . . as a baffling coexistence of individualism and fatalism in the American psyche. The empowerment of all individuals in a democratic society, Tocqueville observed, had the paradoxical effect of making those individuals feel painfully isolated and relatively weak, incapable of overcoming their rivalrousness to experience genuine community or effect any meaningful political or social change. When people feel isolated from one another and relatively weak, ambition takes on a solipsistic quality. McClay sees Tocqueville’s Americans retreating into a heroic fantasy of boundless individual potential, a vision of personal infinitude that impatiently brushed aside the severe and impassible limits imposed by custom, by history, by the accidents of birth, or even by the venerable doctrine of original sin.⁹

Many Americans reflexively value a private ambition for individual satisfaction more highly than preserving community solidarity or participating in public life. E. J. Dionne Jr. remarks, A new sensibility linking radical individualism with a loathing for government has taken hold in American politics. This radical form of individualism . . . simultaneously denigrates the role of government and the importance most Americans attach to the quest for community.¹⁰ As a result, politics becomes dominated by competing private ambitions characterized by petty rivalries of personality, parochial interests, and ideology. These disagreements may appear benign, but they undermine the public’s capacity to act collectively to resolve public problems.

Collective action in a representative democracy depends on people ambitious for public power building bonds of trust with the citizens who endorse them. This trust between citizens and public officials not only frames democratic accountability, it also confers dignity on the people responsible for carrying out public service. If, in the pursuit of personal fame, rank, and power, people ambitious for public office no longer respect or value institutions and practices of democratic accountability, then citizens become reluctant to trust the ambitious people who seek to represent them. And a citizenry unable or unwilling to trust those they elect is again thrown back on itself for political leadership. Convinced that the individual is the best manager of his or her own life, people increasingly reject the guidance of people they perceive as outsiders.¹¹ Christopher Caldwell explains that as citizens grow more independent, unaffiliated and atomized, they may yearn for guidance precisely to the extent that they think themselves unwilling to be bossed around.¹²

Paradoxically, Americans need leaders they can trust, but they do not trust the qualities of the ambitious people who seek public office. The consequence of this paradox is that Americans get leaders who believe they deserve to rule by virtue of being ambitious enough to run for office. Moreover, this