Throughout the long history of English politics, a history out of which, not so many years ago, the dazzling appeal of our own American system so brilliantly emerged, the men who sought the repute and esteem of public office, for whom a seat in the House of Commons or, should they be so lucky, in that of the Lords was considered one of life’s highest achievements, one of society’s most beguiling adornments, seldom lifted a finger to campaign for the satisfaction of that end.
They neither stood nor ran, fought nor crawled for the offices to which their eyes were fixed. To do so would be to affect the mannerism of an ill-bred beast, a meanly political animal to whose swirling passion, the superiority of their reason would never dare to condescend. They neither jumped into the trenches through which, with an unblinking fixation on the outcome ahead, our modern politicians so breathlessly wade, nor leapt into the battles by which their reputations might be sullied or bruised. Such acts would’ve been, in the minds of so leisured a class, exertions unbecoming of the noble gentleman. Nobility, after all, was the quintessence of life, the engine of ascent and the spark of improvement by which, to greater heights, they might be propelled, while the gentleman was the ideal figure in whose image they so meticulously cultivated their own.
To act in so bestial and desperate a way, then, would’ve offended the quiet repose of said gentlemanly calm. It would’ve ripped the silky-gossamer of that aristocratic spirit, and deflated it of all its puffed-up wind. It would’ve demeaned the haughty grandeur of that patrician soul, that deep core of refinement atop which an elegantly-tailored suit—in combination, perhaps, with a smart frock coat and crisp chapeau—might not wish to get themselves too sweaty. These were items, and this was a man, to which perspiration was completely unwelcome, to whom politicking was absolutely unwholesome.
The physicality, the direct contact, the crude and low competition, weren’t at all to these men’s liking. Such maneuvers, rough and rustic, weren’t consistent with the urbanity of their taste. They sought, instead, the comfort of the unnavigable distance at whose furthest reach, they sat and watched. They relished the atmosphere of an extraordinarily high elevation, a mountain of sophistication, a tower of dignity from which, with Olympian froideur, they could coolly look down. This was where they were most at home.
As such, they very seldom deigned to interact with those lower members of the species, with the uneducated class upon whom, however burdensomely, their political fortunes inescapably depended. It was a descent upon which they were loath to embark. They sneered at the idea of groveling at the feet of those contemptible vulgarians, the workaday herd, upon whose suffrage their career’s public advancement ultimately relied. They wouldn’t think to supplicate their electorate, prostrate themselves before the crowd, nor humble themselves to listen to the inarticulate mutterings of the barbarians and the hoi polloi. They wouldn’t pander to the shifting weight of the citizenry’s bloated caprice, a swelling abdomen around which no consistency, much less rationality, could ever be girded.
They scorned populists, detested demagogues, and hated those rabble-rousing arrivistes in whom, so far as they could tell, there was to be found neither sincerity, philosophy, nor scruple. These, they thought, were more parasites than politicians, scoundrels than statesman, rogues than representatives of the people whom they ostensibly “served”. They preferred, instead, the cold disinterest of a yet unpurchased man. Their opinion was not to be bought and sold, as if a cheapened commodity in circulation through the open-air market. This was a place, after all, through whose avenues and bodegas, unpredictable winds so regularly flowed. Venality, to them, was a grievous and unforgivable sin, one to which those parasites, scoundrels, and rogues might very well be susceptible, but with which they were pristinely unacquainted. In the best possible way, they were autonomous actors and wonderfully independent men.
Others, you see, were dependent on them. We call these people by their varying names: subordinates, pamphleteers, apparatchiks, party coordinators, door-knocking volunteers, campaign officials. And though patronage might’ve been, from the first to the last, their unspoken eventual aim, they acted with the unblemished ardor of a fraternal spirit. The purity of their motivations wasn’t always in question, and they struggled indefatigably for the victory of their man. He was, after all, the champion behind whom all their energy was cast, into whom all their loftiest political hopes were invested.
The man standing (or, as we conduct ourselves here in the America, running) for office wasn’t the man campaigning for office. The subordinates, as opposed to that potential statesman of whom we speak, were the people by whom this was done. They were the workers by whom, while he quietly watched, his message was forwarded and refined. In the forest of the night, in the suburb and the street, they were the echoes by which his agenda was amplified and grown. They were the ones responsible for dealing in those quotidian but necessary matters on which campaigns live or die—for delivering “stump” speeches to the hungry appetites of gathering crowds; for accumulating monetary donations from those unencumbered by tight pockets; for securing to the public man his requisite share of the faceless population’s vote.
All the while, he stood silent, always allowing others to clamor on his behalf. The toil would be theirs, the laurels, his. This was the way in which political campaigns were conducted in the older, and perhaps the better time from which we’ve since evolved. And, considering the ineloquence, the ineptitude, the senility, the bellicosity, and the loutish behavior of the two candidates between whom, come one fissile Tuesday at the dawn of November, we’ll have the opportunity to choose, I’m not sure that we shouldn’t adopt that old Anglican maneuver. Maybe we’d be better off having candidates sitting quietly, distantly aloof, instead of running like hamsters debasing themselves.
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