Bring your REAL ID
For fairly obvious reasons, my subconscious keeps renaming today’s national holiday:
As a bona fide, card-carrying political scientist, Brian Klaas writes that he’s
supposed to want to read the news voraciously, to follow every twist and turn, to devour front pages, drown myself in the minutiae of policy, wear out my elbow patches with late nights pondering the machinations of various leaders.
But I am, probably like you, exhausted by it.
I can relate. Except I spend days poring over past election data, building spreadsheets, and teasing out patterns others can’t or won’t see, in part, because my presentation skills are lacking.
Most of all, these days, I despair not just for the fact that we mostly have terrible people in charge—and we certainly do—but also that a disturbingly large proportion of them do not seem to care at all about other people who are less fortunate in life.
Except for protecting the most undervalued class of disenfranchised people in America. White men, poor dears.
We clearly have broken people in charge, as Klaas sees it. He asks audiences if any would trade places with politicians. Few raise their hands. Not even for the money, the fame, and the power? Nope.
So what kind of people do want the jobs?
Unfortunately, it turns out that psychopaths really want power—and are very good at getting it. There are, as we’ll soon see, a disproportionate number of psychopaths in politics (and business), destructive figures who have been dubbed “snakes in suits.”
That’s why the dedication of my previous book, Corruptible, reads as follows: “To all the nice, non-psychopaths out there who should be in power but aren’t.”
(That’s a bit too cynical. Officials with whom I rub elbows seem really dedicated to public service and the greater good. That last term has been reduced to a bad joke over the last decade or so, but my friends aren’t laughing. They mean it. One of my local reps comes from a farm family. State Rep. Eric Ager spent 25 years in the Navy before running to serve pretty thankleesly in the state House minority. NC Secretary of State Elaine Marshall is also from a farm family. She’s dedicated and pretty damned effective. Neither fit the description below.)
Klaas rehashes the elements of “The Dark Triad,” posting a chart from “Dark Politics“:
When you pause and consider it, it seems particularly obvious that people with these traits would excel as politicians. The Machiavellian schemes and strategizes. The narcissist chases the spotlight. The psychopath craves power and control.
Most politicians are not psychopaths. But as a proportion of the whole, there are vastly more psychopaths in politics than in society more generally. And that’s bad news for all of us.
Indeed. See Truth Social post above.
It’s raining here. But it is supposed to stop raining in Washington, D.C. by 10 a.m. ET. Someone scheduled to deliver remarks at Arlington National Cementery at 11 about Americans who gave their last full measure won’t have to worry about the rain messing up his carefully sculpted comb over. Pray he does better than he did at his rambling West Point speech.
Bring your REAL ID, pal.
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