The Making Of A Politician - The Abject Dishonesty Of A Man Without Principle And His Remarkable Rise To Power

Nick Carraway, the narrator in Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, 'I am one of the few honest people I have ever known', a self-assessment made without pride or arrogance, but just a true statement - more a comment on a world he finds deceitful and duplicitous than any supposition of his own superiority. 

He is also one of the least judgmental, for he has always adhered to his father's advice, 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you have had'.  

Nick, however, draws the line.  Tom and Daisy are despicable people at heart. 'They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made'. 

'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together', Nick says to Gatsby about the hundreds of people who fill his mansion every weekend to attend his fabulous parties - guests with no thoughts other than about themselves, with no interest, feeling, or compassion.  Nick again suspends his reticence and admits a judgment.  Despite the fact that there is nothing about Gatsby that he likes - his association with Wolfsheim, his confabulations, his deliberate deception - he can't help but admire the man's optimism, his marvelous embrace of life, and especially his romantic sense of the unrecoverable past. 

Bradford Lane, son of a clothier and a nurse, a precocious child and one from an early age had little of Nick Carraway's moral vision.  While most children grow out of the demanding, self-centered, survivalist mode of infancy, Bradford never did. 

While most children gain a sense of empathy for others and have at least some of Nick's sense of value, Bradford never did. 

He was, if one looked at him individually and narrowly, an impressive boy, smart, talented, good looking, and proper - the most likely to succeed, the dean of his peers.  If one looked at him in the context of those peers, with a perspective on how he treated them, one would come to a completely different conclusion.  

Yet Bradford's unshakeable self-confidence, his conviction that he was an Übermensch, his amorality, and his sense of inevitable destiny made him the ideal politician. 

 

Now, politics has never been a sissy's game.  Blood has been shed over trifles, opponents have been bulldozed, trampled upon, stomped, and tossed in the gutter for slights, lack of proper respect, and simply getting in the way.  Political campaigns have displayed the worst political vanity, the worst, most offensive slander and ad hominem hatred that one can imagine. 

Yet the most successful politicians get rid of their enemies and leave them swinging in the breeze without their knowing who strung them up, or who thrust the dagger in their back, put the poison in the drink; and Bradford was such a politician.  With this admixture of conceit, absolute conviction, and absence of even the most off-kilter moral compass, Bradford was able to clear the path to higher office without attracting notice. 

Bradford was the perfect example of the Nietzschean Superman who rode over the herd, and the philosopher would have delighted in following his exploits. 'The expression of pure will is the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world', said Nietzsche, and without any such reference or intellectual understanding, Bradford Lane was a Caesar. 

'Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves', says Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, reflecting the theme of the insignificance of ordinary men in the face of a powerful leader like Caesar. 

Bradford, unlike Caesar, never reflected on his own greatness and for that lack of arrogant self-importance his naked ambition was overlooked.  Bradford felt no need to express his scorn for the masses as Coriolanus did. He was the offspring of Richard III who was unaffected by moral doubt or indifference.  Richard killed when it suited him in his pursuit of the crown.  He had not one iota of compassion, consideration, or valuation of others. 

Bradford, like Richard, was singular of purpose, determined, and unstoppable; and shared with Richard a silver tongue.  Richard's wooing of the daughter of the man he murdered and his marriage to her despite her well-founded suspicions of his complicity, was brilliant - the coup de grace for a supremely willful man. 

Where did this indomitable will come from? What in the past of Bradford, Richard, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mussolini were the predisposing factors to this result?  Circumstance, environment, conditionalities alone cannot explain such profound, amoral ambition. 

Clyde Griffiths, the main character in Dreiser's An American Tragedy, comes from humble beginnings.  His parents are street preachers, evangelists who had out flyers on street corners. He is at first accepting, then questioning, then resentful, then dismissive and goes off on his own to find his own way and to have the wealthy, beauty, and glamour of the rich.  His ambition and desire is so great that he murders a factory girl whom he gets pregnant. While neither ambition nor murder in the pursuit of it are unusual, the question of how and why anyone becomes so devoid of human respect is the issue. 

Nothing in the upbringing of Bradford Lane suggested such an indifference to others and such a dismissal of ordinary moral rectitude.  His parents were generous, considerate members of the community and had brought up their son in the same vein.  Nothing in Bradford's background would suggest such a callous moral indifference. 

As much as the idea of innateness is dismissed by progressives who believe like their Marxist predecessors that environment alone is responsible for the direction of all human actions, one cannot ignore it.  Some people are simply born without the native civility common in others. Although Conrad excuses Donkin, the disruptive, dangerous crewmember onboard the Narcissus, because of his destitute, homeless life in the poverty of East London, he cannot ignore the fact that there is something malignant and unrepentant about the man.  He is innately evil. 

So Bradford went about his business without pause or deterrence.  He was a suave, persuasive, engaging Genghis Khan.  Instead of sweeping down from the Central Asian steppes to conquer all in waves of barbaric, savage violence, slaughtering all in his path and leaving their heads impaled on spikes, Bradford conquered through savvy - an understanding of the willing complicity of the people, their gullibility, and vulnerability to charm, promise, and idealism. 

Nor was he a snake in the grass - a hidden, camouflaged predator waiting to strike.  He was always open and transparent, so confident was he in his ability to win over the complaisant, the followers, and the emotionally hungry. 

His appeals were not empty ones - or at least such was the packaging of his nostrums.  They all seemed right and proper and in the interest of all; but his marvelous Christmas wrapping was just the finesse on his purposeless ambition. It all sounded so good, and the man simply radiated good faith.  How could anyone resist; and so it was that Bradford rose higher and higher in electoral politics. 

As of this writing, he is being talked about for the highest offices in the land, so complete has been his marvelously, brilliantly confected persona.

Ivan Karamazov's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov says that he is a vaudevillian, a tummler, a jokester and without him life would be bloody bore.  Without his tricks and legerdemain, his shell games, and cons, his makeup and finery, his appeal to the worst in the garb of the best, life would be insufferable. 

 

And so it is that we need the likes of Bradford Lane, vote for him every election, listen to him, quote him, and share his wisdom.  What you see is what you get, a man for all seasons, a chameleon, an empty suit but an elegantly tailored one.  What's not to like?