“Every variation of public service, including elective office, should be anchored by one complete and overriding truth and objective—to make a better world.” — Chuck Hagel
The former Republican senator from Nebraska, Chuck Hagel, has issued a powerful statement urging civility and good-will from all who seek to involve themselves in the work of public service. Hagel’s open letter to the political world comes at a time when many election observers say the campaign of 2010 is the most degenerate and ill-intentioned in memory, where lies are prevailing over evidence and the ability to commit to effective and relentless distortion has become the most sought-after weapon of campaigners.
Hagel writes:
Politics is a noble endeavor—only if it is about public service. I often tell bright young people who seek my advice on running for office: Consider it only for the right reasons and understand it will be frustrating, often unfair and negative, occasionally brutal, but always exhilarating as well as enriching, rewarding, and worth doing.
In politics you can witness courage up close, experience inspiration you never knew existed, and find opportunities to help bring consensus to difficult and divisive issues to solve problems.
Elected public servants have the responsibility to govern, to find the common interests of a society and build around them—not polarize and paralyze for base political interests. Governing is not easy, especially during times like the present when there is so much anger and distrust of public institutions, especially government and elected officials. It is during challenging times that elected officials must show the most courage. They must engage the headwinds of negative public opinion with honesty and straight talk. The two most indispensable qualities of leadership have always been character and courage.
Hagel’s reference to “character and courage” is vitally important to understanding his view of public service as a noble calling that must remain free of partisan and ideological bias. He calls on political actors of all kinds to honor the principle that engaged public service in a true democracy is about dealing with and discussing truths, not forcing self-serving diktats on the media or the masses, not seeking loopholes or fulcrums for attack and character assassination.
His eloquence speaks for itself, but it’s worth noting the context. Hagel has witnessed the rapid degeneration of the rhetorical landscape of his party from Ronald Reagan’s determined conservative philosophy to George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light”, a hopeful dream for a future of opportunity and equality, to George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” and promises of no aggressive wars and no “nation building”, to a climate of fear and propaganda.
Radical activists like Karl Rove and Richard Mellon Scaife, who have used lies, corporate money, secret donations, smear campaigns and the logic of terror, to distort our nation’s political discourse to where it is now more a constant caricature of itself than a sincere policy debate. The steady erosion of the intellectual grounding of the Republican policy leadership is echoed by the steady deterioration of political rhetoric and the logic of flourish and retreat attacks.
Instead of learning how to lead by governing or to outflank an opponent rhetorically by altering the political landscape for the better, political leaders seem to be more and more convinced by the doctrine of cynical detachment: truth matters less than one’s aims; ends justify means; liberty is rooted in money, not in principle; and so there is no justification for adhering to principle or being more decent than one’s opponent; scorched earth is the only valid approach.
Hagel rightly views this deterioration of the American political mind with grave concern. He reminds readers that “Democracies and institutions of self-governance work because of responsible citizenship.” That means citizens who are actively engaged in the life of their political environment, who know how to distinguish fact from spin and who do so not to service a preferred ideology but to allow their efforts to operate in service of a higher ideal: that of making a better world, forming “a more perfect union”, securing the next phase in the true opening up of democratic freedoms.
Barack Obama, when announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president, in February 2007, said that after a few years of involvement in public service and in working for civil rights and studying and teaching Constitutional law: “I came to understand that our cherished rights of liberty and equality depend on the active participation of an awakened electorate”. It was this message that gave so much power to his grassroots campaign, and it is this spirit that calls down such fury against him from both left and right, from political actors whose goal is to annihilate the other side and be done with the conflict of intense and informed debate.
Hagel is reminding everyone who seeks to make a better future, through the democratic process, that this can only take place if “Elected officials … realize they fail their country and those they represent if they succumb to the sometimes violent currents of political opinion—which they bring on themselves when they don’t lead and govern with integrity.” It matters, in the short and in the long term, if a public official strays from or commits to this ennobling vision of public service conducted in good-faith and from good-will. The future of our democracy and our ability to do good in the world depend upon it.