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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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