Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship

Introduction

Introduction The Paradox of Power in America Towering genius disdains a beaten path. . . . It thirsts and burns for distinction. . . . Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? . . . Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down. —Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838 The Challenges Ambition Poses to Democratic Politics Ambition, the desire for public fame, rank, and/or power, poses a challenge to democratic governments whose legitimacy rests on citizens equally sharing responsibility for self-government: namely, how does a governmental system founded on rule by equals—where no person has natural dominion over another—make room for the unequal desires of its citizens to actually rule? On the one hand, the ambition of some citizens to seek political power while others are content to be ruled can be the genesis of dictators and tyrants. After all, people ambitious for personal success may want either a disproportionate amount of control or to achieve more than public life can reasonably accommodate. On the other, citizens who lack a healthy measure of ambition for fame, rank, or power may too readily surrender their civic responsibilities for the public welfare. In representative democracy, the people entrust the public welfare to their representatives, who will administer public power on their behalf. While democracy originated with the classical ideal that the demos (people) would exercise the power of the kratia (state), Robert Michels famously ar1 2 Ambition in America gued in Political Parties that the sociology of democratic societies produces such a consistent call for leadership that there exists an “iron law of oligarchy .” Despite the prevalent advocacy of popular rule and frequent calls for greater participation, Michels points out that at all levels of political activity there will be the inevitable division of the people into leaders and followers because there is a “need for leadership felt by the mass.” For Michels, “society cannot exist without a ‘dominant’ or ‘political’ class, and . . . the ruling class, while its elements are subject to a frequent partial renewal, nevertheless constitutes the only factor of sufficiently durable efficacy in the history of human development.”1 While we may dispute the division of people into leaders and mass, the need for leadership remains. And in societies with populations larger than a handful of people this means that some and not all people will rule; some and not all people will have the ambition to rule. Political power in democracies will concentrate in a ruling class, but this “iron law of oligarchy” does not automatically generate a system for deciding between those who want to rule and those who are content to follow. Because citizens in modern democracies must choose some of their number to rule, they need to recognize that not all citizens share an equal ambition to rule, that not all citizens want to share in self-government. Citizens’ ambitions to rule vary across the population; even groups calling for more citizens to participate in government recognize that not everyone shares an equal ambition to participate in self-rule, that there are those who want more responsibility and are willing to invest more time and effort, and there are those who do not want as much responsibility and are less willing to invest as much time and effort. Since all citizens do not share the same desire to participate in governing, the inequality of ambition produces a tension between “the ruled” and those who seek to exercise political power, “the rulers.” Herein lies the challenge to republican democracies: the demos struggles to rule itself according to principles of equality and popular sovereignty yet it depends on an oligarchy of ambitious office seekers to govern. Because all citizens do not have an equal ambition to rule, republican democracies must choose leaders from pools of ambitious people, while trying to prevent those same people from exploiting public power to dominate the less ambitious. Political practices need to accommodate the unequal desires of ambitious people for fame, rank, or power; yet those same practices must also sustain the norms of democratic equality by filtering out those people...