Politics is about the strategies of controlling human groups. Humans have a deep tendency to form groups, to develop and defend boundaries and to treat outsiders as enemies. All groups have interests, privileges and costs of membership. All groups have hierarchies and competition for privilege and prestige. The effort to create tolerance and an ideal, egalitarian state counters these deep tendencies and probably will never be stable and enduring. Political groups advance the interests of their members, tending toward ideologies that oversimplify complex issues and average fears and beliefs so that a spectrum of individuals can belong.

Democracies have carried politics to an advanced level of refinement or absurdity, depending on your point of view. The original idea of democracy was that every citizen could advance his point of view and vested interests in a public forum. The ability to speak well was an essential skill to succeed. Other essential skills were the ability to understand local issues and the ability to affiliate with and influence others. In the best case, politics is the art of gathering information, public speaking, affiliation and negotiation.

As groups grow in size, ideal democracy becomes impractical. A few representatives take on the job of speaking, affiliation and negotiation. The transition from individual participation to group representation has numerous problems. Hierarchical organization prevails in human and animal societies. Leaders are self-appointed in animal groups winning and protecting their status with aggressive display, intimidation and occasional fights with competitors. Democracy introduces the option of electing the leaders who will dominate you. This is an inherent contradiction. The status of the leader in every animal society is always open to challenge. All leaders, therefore, must have strategies of winning favor, defeating rivals and dominating the individuals in their group.  In animal groups, leaders are essential and mostly constructive in their endeavors. In human groups, leaders remain essential but are not always constructive in their endeavors. Elections are probably better than fights, but election campaigning, even in the most polite democratic nations tends to be a bitter name-calling and slander contest that obscures substantive issues.

Groups and Ethics

The professional politician has become a media personality who no longer represents his or her constituency but instead, seeks to manipulate and control his or her constituency.  Elections are popularity contests and proper evaluation of the suitability and competence of candidates is replaced by marketing persuasion, propaganda and the irrationality of mob dynamics.  It is hard to imagine how humans chosen by elections would function at adequate levels of competence and integrity.

In an idealized version of politics, the best trained, most intelligent and most altruistic people would run for office. The ideal politician would be an unusual blend of knowledge, wisdom, superior motivation and ability and, at the same time, would be in touch with the thoughts and needs of the “common man”. While some electors continue to hope that people running for office are superior beings and supporters feed this hope with exaggerated praise and loyalty, the reality is that politicians are limited and flawed creatures just like everyone else. A politician may be qualified to win elections but incompetent as an administrator and policy maker.

In practice, politicians and political processes are inherently irresponsible, as politicians are inexperienced, short-term administrators who are unprepared to undertake the responsibilities offered to them. The greatest problem is the promotion of unqualified politicians to senior administrative roles in charge of large budgets. They face a variety of problems, but they seldom have solutions. Election strategy continues to influence or dominate the administrative strategy of elected governments. Policies are developed politically more than by intelligent design. Success is measured in terms of polling results, not real results in the community.

Klein suggested in the US that: “Every President since Lyndon Johnson has run his Administration from a political consultant's eye view... The pressure to "win" the daily news cycle—to control the news—has overwhelmed the more reflective, statesmanlike aspects of the office… G.W. Bush's White House is a conundrum, a bastion of telegenic idealism and deep cynicism. The President has proposed vast, transformational policies—the remaking of the Middle East, of Social Security, of the federal bureaucracy. But he has done so in a haphazard way, with little attention to detail or consequences. There are grand pronouncements and, yes, crusades, punctuated with marching words like evil and moral and freedom. Beneath, though, is the cynical assumption that the public doesn't care about the details—that results don't matter, corners can be cut and special favors bestowed. “ 

In all fairness, we can acknowledge the few good politicians who began their careers with high hopes of improving the world, but discovered that they could only court the favor of those with vested interests, power, money and influence. They soon understood that every policy or decision will please some vested interests and offend others, so that the range of political decision making is constrained. One political strategy is to do little or nothing and support token measures that offend the least. The realist might say that the politician can only do what is politically expedient and this usually means what is in his or her best interest in the next two to four years. Another strategy is the fascist or power group approach that depends on securing powerful allies, taming the electorate with promises and propaganda and limiting the ability of other politicians to object.  The US leads the world in the professional engineering of political identities and consensus control. Public opinion on topical issues is measured daily by pollsters and policy decisions are all but determined by understanding how elections are won. Nordlinger claims that elections are won by targeting 20% of the population - the low information, persuadable, swing voters who won't read campaign literature but will respond to televised symbols, slogans and emotional appeals.