Just plain pols

In the lead-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election — the one in which Barack Obama became the leader of the Free World and inadvertently set off the racist chain reaction that vaulted Velveeta Corleone and his unfit Legion of Lickspittles to power — there was a sketch on Saturday Night Live that you’ve almost certainly forgotten in the unlikely event that you saw it in the first place.

Jason Sudeikis played Joe Biden in a parody of his vice-presidential debate with Sarah Palin, whom Tina Fey personated so uncannily that it was difficult to tell them apart, even if you happened to be in Russia at the time as I was, peering through the Alaska governor’s living room windows. (It’s neither here nor there, but I can still vividly recall the bacon-themed wallpaper and the tinsel strands hanging from the mounted moose antlers and walrus tusks, left over from the holiday season the previous winter. Presumably.)

In the SNL sketch, Sudeikis’s Biden — who had by then served 36 years in the U.S. Senate, having first been elected in 1972 — tried to distance himself from accusations of being a member of the Washington elite by pointing to his roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania, “the most godforsaken place on Earth.”

Fey makes an interesting point about the sketch in her book Bossypants:

I thought that was ingenious, because not only was the ad hominem attack on Scranton a hilarious comedy left turn, it also exemplified what the election had become. Instead of talking about issues, everybody was trying to prove how “down-home” they were. “I’m just like you” was the subtext of every speech.

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers.

Precisely the same dynamic plays out in Canada, of course.

Politicians who normally relax by loosening a notch on the belts of their Tom Ford suits while sipping some snooty drink in the comfort of their subsidized Rockcliffe Park condos undergo a complete fashion makeover in folksy, homespun election ads.

Suddenly they’re wearin’ tees and jeans and cowboy boots while droppin’ the g’s from gerunds and talkin’ kitchen issues with hard-working salt-of-the-earth types in humble farm or suburban kitchens, where the candidates spend as much as two minutes talkin’ turkey about grocery and gas prices as the cameras roll.

Why? Because savvy politicos have learned that the George W. Bush-style goobers with whom young and middle-aged male voters most would like to share a beer, regardless of whether they know their ass from a hole in the ground, routinely trounce far more qualified Al Gore types in elections at all levels, from dog catcher on up.

We have arrived at a point where the ideal qualification for governing a complicated modern country is that the candidate appears to have strayed into politics after getting lost on the way to a backyard barbecue.

The venerable ancient Greek philosopher Plato, as the Orange Voldemort would not recall nor ever have the slightest interest in learning, had a different idea.

In the Socratic dialogue The Republic, Plato proposed that the people entrusted with running the state should undergo an arduous education designed to develop wisdom, discipline and an understanding of what justice actually is. These people, the guardians, were not supposed to win elections by demonstrating that they could operate a chainsaw while wearing a plaid shirt. They were supposed to spend years learning things.

Imagine the modern political campaign if Plato’s system were applied today:

“Candidate Johnson has spent 27 years studying philosophy, economics, history, science, mathematics and political theory.”

Voters: “Yeah, but can he change a tire?”

“Mmmm. Possibly.”

“Does he own a pickup truck?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Has he ever eaten a corn dog at a county fair?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Then how can he possibly understand us?”

This is where things get wonderfully weird. As Fey was suggesting, we demand expertise from virtually everybody else.

If you need surgery, you generally do not insist that your surgeon be “just an ordinary guy who cheers for the Ticats.” You want somebody who has spent approximately forever learning where the organs are.

If your airplane develops an engine problem, you do not want the pilot to say, “Folks, I’m no fancy aviation expert. I’m just a guy who’s always had a good feeling about the power of prayer. Please form a circle and hold hands.”

If your accountant tells you that he has never actually studied accounting but has watched several episodes of Schitt’s Creek, you do not respond, “Finally, somebody who understands accrual concepts and testamentary trust legislation!”

Yet when it comes to politics, we frequently treat expertise itself as suspicious.

A candidate who has spent decades studying public policy is described as “out of touch.” A candidate who has spent decades acquiring experience in government is accused of being part of “the political class.” A candidate who admits that an issue is complicated is regarded as mealy-mouthed and weak.

Meanwhile, the candidate who confidently announces that every problem can be solved by “getting back to basics” receives thunderous applause, even though nobody has established what the basics are or where we are supposed to get back to them.

This is particularly ludicrous because governing is not, in fact, a basic activity.

A modern government is essentially a gigantic machine assembled from tax codes, courts, bureaucracies, treaties, infrastructure, monetary policy, environmental regulations, health systems, military alliances and approximately 14 billion pages of paperwork. It is the sort of machine for which you would normally want somebody to read the manual sitting in the glove compartment.

But politicians have discovered that there is an enormous electoral advantage to behaving as though the manual is elitist.

“I don’t need egghead experts to know right from wrong,” the candidate says.

The crowd cheers.

“I don’t need elitist economists to know the value of a dollar.”

More cheering.

“I don’t need climate-change scientists to know which way the wind is blowing.”

The crowd goes wild.

“I don’t need fake-news historians to drone on about so-called slavery or the Holocaust hoax.”

At this point Plato’s ghost quietly leaves the building.

The trick, of course, is that nobody actually wants an ignorant government. People just want a government that understands them.

The candidate is therefore required to perform ignorance rather than necessarily possess it.

This produces the modern political miracle in which an individual can spend years attending elite schools, working in government and consulting experts, and then appear before the public in a denim shirt and say, essentially, “Heck, folks, I’m just a regular person who happened to become enormously powerful.”

And we all nod approvingly. Because the denim shirt is apparently very persuasive.

There is nothing wrong with politicians being ordinary human beings. Of couse they should understand how ordinary people live. They should know what groceries cost, what rent costs, what it is like to wait for a doctor and what happens when your furnace makes the noise that suggests it has entered a spiritually significant phase of its existence.

But understanding ordinary life and being pig-ignorant are not the same thing.

A good doctor can understand your fear without deliberately remaining ignorant of medicine. A good engineer can understand your concern about a bridge without saying, “I don’t know anything about load-bearing structures, but I drove across an iced-over lake once.”

And a good political leader should be able to understand the concerns of ordinary citizens while also possessing enough knowledge to avoid turning the country into the world’s largest experimental kitchen.

Which brings us back to Plato.

The guardians were supposed to be educated precisely because, as the ongoing Théâtre du Grand-Guignol south of the border illustrates every frigging day, great power is enormously dangerous when combined with ignorance, vanity and the conviction that one’s instincts are an adequate substitute for knowledge.

That may sound rather old-fashioned.

But then again, Plato — who believed democratic majorities were prone to injustice and emotional panic (as exemplified in the 399 BCE death sentence handed to his mentor, Socrates, on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth) — never saw a campaign commercial in which a billionaire politician wore a baseball cap backward while flipping a hamburger at McDonald’s.

In the end, the real problem is not that politicians pretend to be ordinary people. It is that we have somehow persuaded ourselves that being ordinary requires them to know less.

Nobody expects the pilot to be one of us. Nobody expects the brain surgeon to be one of us. Nobody expects the person fixing the nuclear reactor to be one of us. But the person who gets to decide what the nuclear reactor is allowed to do?

Well, that’s different. All too often, we would prefer someone who can really rock a pair of work boots.

Q. Who should run the Pentagon?

A. A grease slick who looks like a B movie corporal, drinks like an old-time sailor and is obsessed with testosterone, rather than someone with experience who knows what he’s doing and would have advised President Oompa J. Loompa to stay the hell out of Iran.

But back to the SNL debate sketch that started this:

Interviewer Gwen Ifil: Senator Palin, address your position on global warming and whether you think it’s manmade or not.

Gov. Sarah Palin: Gwen, we don’t know if this climate change hoozie-what’s-it is manmade or if it’s just a natural part of the End of Days.

I’m just sayin’ you might want to sip that goober beer a little faster as the End of Days crowd gets its wish, eh.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER, Y’ALL.