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Here's something I've always found to be interesting. I think there's a latent political prior model going on that often interferes with political discussion. Namely: What motivates the people in Congress, individually?
Here's what I feel like is a fairly exhaustive list:
Obviously some of these overlap or could both be true. A few approaches (rank them or something?) but I feel maybe the best is simply to answer the question, "What percentage of people currently in Congress (House and Senate) ran for Congress (most recent election) for this as one of the principal reasons?" Here's my take:
Of course a lot of these can overlap a bit, but that's fine. I'm talking about major reasons to run for office in any given election. (PS: should I have split help people into generally vs some specific group?)
Do you think these are about right? Too charitable? Too cynical? I bring this up because I was recently talking to a friend who his mental model had pegged something like 60% of people in Congress as in it for the money and power. Another friend thinks that 70% are pure partisans (ideological purists). Another thinks it's mostly special interests and corporations. You can see how these can subtly skew opinions about almost any given topic.
Of course, to me, I'm correct of course :)
No but actually, if we think about the process many go to first get involved in politics, there's only a few common paths. There's being an activist of some sort and then you (or supported by an org) run as a logical next step. There's being fed up of some specific status quo and starting to run for something on a local level and then you end up working your way up. There's being wealthy and/or having connections (famous sometimes) and jumping in to something directly. There's being a pure egomaniac and running just for that. And then there's some group of people where you're minding your own business and you get recruited into it. And that's actually most paths into politics. Seems to me that there are better ways to make money, and better ways to spend your time, so I think most people run because they actually want to. Congresspeople aren't aliens, they have similar motivations to you and I, at least I think. How many people that you've talked to who have idly talked about what they would do if they were in charge, have given a corrupt reason to do so?
I'd like to add another option
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My experience is with Westminster in the UK but having now moved to the US my interactions with politicians here seems to indicate they aren't any different.
I think you are vastly underestimating personal ambition and desire for power. My experience directly with hundreds of those national level politicians is that those are the top motivations for most of them. Some ideological purists but they tend to get ground down over time. Doing the right thing and helping people are what politicians say, but when you are in a room with them hashing out election strategies their revealed preferences show a different side. Maybe they started out that way but by the time you get to national level, your ambitious, power hungry types have outcompeted the rest.
I've worked with hundreds of MPs and there were at best a handful I would call good people who were motivated by helping people or doing the right thing.
If my years in politics have taught me anything it is whatever level of cynicism you have towards politicians it is probably nowhere near enough. Desire for money may be there, but its less than ambition and power because politicians don't get paid huge amounts in general. Though you can leverage it afterwards if you are successful.
No its ambition and power. Top 2, by a lot. If you assume any given national level politician is a borderline narcissist with nuclear levels of ambition, who has to filter that through pretending to be committed to an ideology and to want to do good, then it explains all the various undercurrents in the halls of power.
Politicians are sharks with good PR. That's why they both have big smiles to show off.
You’ve gotten it a little confused. You’re completely correct that politicians are largely motivated by power accumulation, but that isn’t the surprising thing. That a politician should want to achieve power should be no less surprising than that a corporate climber should want to be CEO or that a star athlete should want to win gold. The surprising thing is that most of these people are essentially ideologically neutral or ambivalent. At most, largely by osmosis, they have absorbed some version of the general views of their class and peer circle. What is surprising is that it’s power without real purpose.
Triessentialism would not be surprised that people with an especial intuition of power (its acquisition, maintenance, threats of use used as leverage, etc.) would be ideologically uncommitted.
Assume three basic mindsets of people in this world: people with intuition of power, of logic and reason, or of emotional motivations. I, as a person with intuition of logic (hereafter “a Thinker”), am unfamiliar with power except in its media (nonfiction and fiction) portrayals, and I had to build my own philosophy from scratch for ten years to begin to understand how Feelers use emotions to shape their world.
Movers are intuitive in matters of power, whether they’ve studied and practiced car repair or geopolitics, but without study find logic and emotion to be wastes of time and Thinkers and Feelers mysterious antagonists with hidden sources of power.
I am likely to agree with a Mover if he suggests a course of action. It’s no surprise to me that a Mover would find the most “powerful” Thinkers and Feelers to inform him of what his politics should be; what his purpose should be.
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Why should that be surprising? I've worked with politicians nearly my whole working life. That isn't a surprise at all to me.
Because at least I would expect that people interested in politics, even if they primarily sought power for its own sake, had a more-than-average passing interest in ideology. This is because people with a strong interest in ideology who also like power are probably more likely to go into politics than people with a weak interest in ideology who like power (who might go into finance or something else where money is more readily available).
They may have an interest in ideology, but that isn't the same thing as having a firm one yourself. But power and money are different. Money to an extent can buy power, but most people in politics want direct power and influence. Not indirect. Sure they won't turn down extra money, but that isn't the drive.
Ambitious and money hungry you go into the City (well in the UK at least). Ambitious and power hungry, you go to Westminster.
Some few ideologues do make it, and fewer principled ones but it's a shark tank otherwise. And the last 10 years show it, with various sharks eating each other to achieve their own ambitions.
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The issue is the way we’ve set up the system. The absurd amounts of money required to win and the connections required to gain access to enough funding to win things like large city offices, statewide offices, and obviously Congress itself. The activist path you mentioned isn’t exactly “I helped in a soup kitchen.” Most that I’m aware of came to prominence in what I call the “professional protest” charities. Advocates for popular causes among the elite and they’re generally high up in those organizations. The professional paths that lead to candidacy are generally the kind that run through getting to know movers and shakers. Working a campaign, professional advocacy, being a lawyer or other elite professional, one does not simply run for office above dog catcher or local school board.
So of course this tends to weed out the altruist fairly quickly. An altruist wants to actually help people, so his charity work would be less about “professional protest organizations” than building or fixing things, feeding hungry people, educating kids, and so on. The kind of work that gets things done other than legislation. But that sort of charity is highly unlikely to get you into the social network that allows you to be a viable candidate for serious leadership roles. You also have to spend a lot of time being vetted by those elites for acceptance both ideologically and socially. You have to start early enough to have introductions to local [party of choice] leaders, and thus be fairly well off before you start. This is why most of our current political leaders are lawyers and mostly from elite schools.
All of this is basically like the old Roman system. Find Patrons, do high level high visibility things that powerful people like. Then once you’ve been accepted as one of them, you can help out on high visibility campaigns and eventually get to run for office yourself. None of which actually solve real world problems, and in fact are a pretty strong headwind against people who want to work on real world problems. If you want to fix infrastructure, get into construction and fix potholes. But it’s not glamorous enough to be the kind of thing that makes you a potential candidate for elected office.
Of course because of this, I think it would be highly unusual for someone to run and win because he wants to fix things in the way you and I would think about it. The system effectively weeds those people out quickly, especially if you’re talking about the federal government. They have to care about the opinions of their sponsors, the opinions of the people attending very expensive dinners, and the opinions of the tastemakers in the media. None of whom care about blue-collar Americans or potholes on main street.
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"Do the right thing" is a little too abstract.
I think "personal gain" or "ambition or pride" account for a lot of it, but in a nicer way than you're probably thinking.
People get into a position where running for office makes sense for them. They were involved in politics at a young age, they helped out on some campaigns or worked on the hill, then they find themselves living in an open seat while being sick of their jobs.
The other one is people who became political staffers because they were interested in politics, only to discover that the pay is terrible. So they wait for a redistricting and move into a winnable district without a clear incumbent.
There are people who want to be recognized a pillars of their community, and running for office is a way to get that recognition.
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I'm not sure about the ratios myself, but it's for that sort of reason I want to increase Congressional salaries. No one is in Congress for the money, pretty much everyone competent enough to be a federal politician could be making more money in some other job. To some degree that's inevitable- the public sector will never match the sort of spending in the private sector, nor should it. But if we want very competent people to be leaders, we should at least try to pay them half of what they'd get in the private sector instead of a quarter. And I think if being a Congress member was a better job to have, people would be less willing to risk that career by being corrupt.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/congressional-pay?r=62ico
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Ambition or pride has to be close to 100%. Not quite literally 100, but high nineties. Even if people have other motivations as well, choosing to be the candidate yourself takes a lot of ego.
Anecdotally, politicians in my experience tend to be extremely vain.
Yeah I struggled with that one. I think that's one question where my phrasing isn't very helpful. Like, are candidates very prideful and ambitious? Obviously yes. But does it make sense to ask whether candidates run on pride or ambition as a major, primary factor, or is it just background or a catalyst for other reasons? I sorta imagined the question getting at the former, but maybe it's not a useful or informative question to ask (what does running on ambition alone even mean? I guess there's sort of 100% overlap with the other categories, perhaps)
One interesting distinction I've heard is "being ambitious" vs. "having an ambition".
A person who is being ambitious might do well in school, put together a good college application, do well in college, put together a good job application, do well at their job, put together a good promotion application, etc. then end up as a multimillionaire CEO/partner/senator/other-0.01%er. They follow the predefined "ambitious" path, reach elite status, and kind of just do normal stuff.
A person who has an ambition starts with an audacious goal (develop a martian colony, change society on a constitutionally-relevant level, break an Olympic record, etc), organizes their life to achieve that goal, and blasts past obstacles that would stop any reasonable person.
Under that framing, a politician who is running on ambition alone ("being ambitious") would be a person who follows the straight line to power/money/status and ends up in government.
This is a commonly overlooked distinction, and good on you for remembering it. That conceptual space of [Having an Ambition] is often what overlaps with [Ideology], as the nature of having a goal to work towards often depends on not only the interests behind the person, but the entire framework that leads them to the conclusion that the objective is worth focusing on above more 'reasonable' things, which is also what gets them critical enablers / associates who empower this. This [Ideology] could be religious or secular, but it serves as a framework for consolidating the [Having an Ambition], as well as a legitimization and cooperation-enabling framework to enable action.
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Economics is split into two very different fields. Macroeconomics is the art of economic forecasting. Microeconomics is the study of incentives. In microeconomics, politicians are modelled as maximizing votes in the next election, to the best of their ability.
That sounds off. You'd want enough votes to win but why focus on running up the score beyond that?
Winning the election by 1% invites challengers next election. Winning the election by 20% tells the other party that their time and money are probably better spent elsewhere, so you run against a penniless, unsupported sacrificial lamb and cruise to reelection without having to dip too deeply into your war chest.
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Right, it's probably more of a balance combining what they actually want to happen with seeking votes.
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So in that model, an incumbent presumably starts to compromise any pre-existing moral principles (because of the incentive of winning) as long as the risk-weighted actions provide a net gain in votes. What about why people run the first time? Why some try to jump from House to Senate? A simple microeconomic model doesn't address these initial conditions, nor does it satisfactorily explain to what extent the incentive of winning distorts principles over time.
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Envelopes stuffed with cash, and bars of gold.
This led to a debate between me and the friend about if he was caught, and it's just the tip of the iceberg, or he was caught because the police normally catch this kind of thing. You can see how those schemas are very different, haha.
He was a first-generation college student of cuban immigrant parents who became a lawyer and while still in law school I believe he was an aide to a mayor. It looks like he then spent a decade or two in shady and backstabbing New Jersey local politics (known for being one of the most corrupt states to begin with, I would say). He definitely did some backstabbing himself. The history is a little wild. Why he didn't just go on to be a lawyer is hard to know -- maybe he got pulled into a cycle of power and retribution and ambition? The district got a lot of attention as a swing district. After about 20 years in local and then state politics, he ran for the House and then the Senate.
It seems to me this isn't a very typical political upbringing, and he was further corrupted by power while in office. So I don't know if this case moves the needle of "how much corruption is there" very much for me.
He was caught because he wasn't criminally sophisticated enough to know that the best way to receive bribes is underpriced investment opportunities.
Gold bars and envelopes of cash are seen as gauche.
It's hard to make money as a lawyer with a private practice. He built up his early career connections in politics instead of getting into the good graces of the local legal community, so he was basically shut out from the high paying jobs.
Hillary Clinton is an amazing cattle futures trader. Or her financiers found a (not so) sneaky way to transfer cash to her.
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Ehh the best way is high five figure speaking fees. Do twenty speaking engagements a year. Do that for 15 years. Couple that with underpriced investments and you are pretty rich.
Only the top politicians get access to the high paying speaker opportunities. Even your average representative isn’t being paid $5,000 for a 20 minute speech, let alone $500k to show up to a conference.
Depends on what committee you get on, etc.
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Yes, of course, your stuck prior is in your username.
Haha, it's definitely not always true. But my general political background view is that working within the system works a lot of the time, with enough time. I think it's pretty evidence-supported by US history. I was trying to come up with a new nick for the new forum to disallow cross-looking, I knew a prolific redditor with a similar and memorable nickname, and I was at the time of the opinion that signifying prior inclinations in a username would be helpful information on the forum. So it was a deliberate decision, not an indication that I'm some sort of status-quo warrior. As I noted, there's a specific story of Menendez' political upbringing and it's far from being some "regular senator we thought was a saint turns out to be corrupt" -- a major needle-mover if true -- it ended up being "senator from corrupt state with sketchy personal history ends up being corrupt" which... just isn't all that surprising?
Please refrain from wasting space with a low-effort personal attack (the very definition of rule-breaking, I might add) if you don't have anything to contribute. Would you care to outline what your percentages might be, or at least of a particular category? Part of the point is to get a read on people's priors and see if I'm wildly divergent (or if they are).
Which senator do you have in mind? I think perhaps we’d have a better understanding of why you perceive the system the way you do if we had some specific examples of individuals who you believe are in it for wholly altruistic reasons.
For my part, there is not a single individual over the last ~fifty years that I could name. Once upon a time, in my days as a member of the Fraternal Order of Bernard - often called Bernard Brothers for short - I would have said Bernie Sanders for sure. (I also sang the praises of Barbara Boxer, attempting multiple times to convince my cynical politician-hating mother that Boxer was the genuine article, a real paragon of moral virtue, committed to the betterment of her voters and of mankind as a whole.)
Of course, this is when I, like most millennials, believed that big business was uniformly conservative. That leftist politicians couldn’t possibly be taking big money from shady mega-donors and Fortune 500 companies, because why would those entities donate to the party dedicated to curbing their power and influence? And this almost seemed a teeny tiny bit true at the time!
Of course, only a decade later we live in an era where nearly every important corporation not only donates to progressive politicians and causes, but also makes a huge public deal out of doing so. (And that’s to say nothing of slightly more under-the-radar groups like the Open Society Foundation, and of investment firms like BlackRock who literally cut off companies’ access to funding if they fail to sufficiently debase themselves to progressive activism.) So there is basically no reason to believe that Democrat politicians are receiving less money from corrupt companies and cynical mega-donors than their Republican counterparts are; in fact, the dynamic may in fact be the opposite.
Given the obscene sums of money sloshing around in DC, why do you believe that even a person who started their political career with the purest of intentions would be able to withstand the onslaught of venal incentives that are immediately thrust at any politician who gets anywhere close to that level of power and influence?
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