Molly Ball of The Atlantic produced a lengthy online profile last week of Tom Cotton. By its new information, it warrants our careful consideration.
She came into receipt of Cotton's senior thesis at Harvard. It covered 92 pages and delved into the Federalist Papers.
Cotton's writing extolled the nation's founders for not trusting the people--selfish and narrow-minded and impulsive as they be--in our modified democracy.
Cotton wrote that our system works as intended only by the relentless ambition of the smartest, the elite. He endorsed a superior class' uncommon ambition-driven willingness to endure the public indignities of the electoral process.
He wrote that the dirty process amounted to a kind of self-selection. From it, he asserted, the fittest ideally survive to lead our country to greatness.
So is Cotton's writing as a college senior relevant to his bid for the U.S. Senate 16 years later?
That's one of the very good questions to ponder from the article. It is vital in that context, then, to note that Ball interviewed Cotton a few weeks ago about these writings and that he failed to disavow them. In fact, he quoted from them.
So I thought I'd share the fruits of my studied consideration of Cotton's thesis.
First, he is absolutely right about the founders' intentions and the wisdom therein.
Indeed, the people can be selfish, narrow-minded and impulsive. Not to mention uninformed.
It's true in our system that the people's democratic self-governing is, and must be, limited to their selection of presumably more informed and able people to make the direct policy decisions.
Those who write me to say our elected representatives ought simply to vote as we the people want them to vote--perhaps they should seek out a country willing to be governed by the nightly data spat out by an automated pollster.
The founders' wisdom as praised by Cotton explains how U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor is justified in voting for the Affordable Care Act although the folks back home didn't want it.
I am glad Cotton sees that my way.
Second, I agree with Cotton that we are fortunate that some of the more highly competent people among us apply their obsessive ambition to endure the public messiness of politics.
I don't want to run for office. I suspect you don't either.
There surely is something essentially different, and fortunately different, in the wiring of, say, Bill Clinton. He chose to endure, time and again, the most debasing of deeply personal affronts.
He did it to serve, at once, his ambition, his ego and the greater good.
Ken Burns' documentary on the Roosevelts on PBS last week showed us, in its depiction of Teddy Roosevelt, that a madman and megalomaniac can be a great president.
But I cannot agree that raging ambition necessarily produces the only qualified political leaders or even the best ones.
Some people can go along most of their lives not interested in seeking elective office, then get an appointment, then apply their regular-world wisdom to a superior performance.
Kaneaster Hodges, tabbed from normalcy by then-Gov. David Pryor to go to the U.S. Senate on the passing of John L. McClellan, did a splendid job.
Gerald Ford didn't want to be president; he scarcely wanted to cause trouble as House minority leader. Yet he may have been the perfect president between the evil of Nixon and the voters' over-reactive turn to self-righteousness in Jimmy Carter.
Third, it cannot go unnoticed that Cotton, by his senior thesis and subsequent early career bid for the U.S. Senate, appears rather clearly to deem himself the smartest, the best, the elite.
I suppose we wouldn't want anyone to run by thinking himself inferior.
But I prefer the mantra of Dale Bumpers when he burst on the scene in 1970, after an early adulthood of normalcy, to seek and win the governorship. He said time and again that his father taught him that "politics is a noble profession."
It's a stark distinction. Bumpers, not impaired in the least in ego, chose to couch public service in terms of the nobility of that service, not the elitist superiority of those who seek to provide the service.
Some have concluded from Ball's article on Cotton--and I tend to think they're right--that his writings reveal the foundation of his conservative absolutism.
In a single term in Congress, Cotton has been an outlier even by the conservative standards of his Republican congressional colleagues from Arkansas.
He votes alone and uncompromisingly because, it would seem, the essence of his service is that he knows best because he is the smartest and best.
So if you are beset occasionally by ambivalence, and if you tend to believe we'd be better off if our representatives in Washington gave a little ground toward each other to achieve compromise, and if you surmise that we needn't make insistence on perfection the fatal enemy of the merely good ...
Well, it might be that you're more interested in a restored nobility of politics than in the self-asserted and self-selected superiority of the politician.
------------v------------
John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/21/2014