One reason many politicians behave badly these days is that we spend less time thinking about what it means to behave well. This was less of a problem in past centuries when leaders, teachers and clergy held detailed debates over what it meant to have good character.
In the 18th century, for example, Edmund Burke composed a long, famous passage defining the standards of political excellence. In the 19th century, Anthony Trollope wrote a series of popular novels fussing over what it means to behave well in political life. Trollope’s view was different than ours. Many Americans today assume that people are born with a good Inner Self but get corrupted by politics. American voters are always looking for the Innocent Outsider who can come in and bring sweeping change.
Trollope admired Prudent Insiders, not Innocent Outsiders. His most admirable characters have been educated by long experience. They have grown mature by exercising responsibility. They have been ennobled by custom and civilization. In his books, powerless outsiders often behave self-indulgently and irresponsibly. Those who are in government have to grapple with the world as it really is.
Trollope’s ideal politicians—who have names like Plantagenet Palliser, Joshua Monk and the Duke of St. Bungay put service before independence. Their party and their country have asked them to accept certain duties and face certain problems, and they just get on with it. They are more weighty, but also more boring.
Trollope’s ideal politicians share certain traits. They are reserved, prudent and scrupulous. They immerse themselves in dull practical questions like, say, converting the currency system. They are not sweeping thinkers, but they make sensitive discriminations about the people and the circumstances around them. They learn to operate within the constraints imposed by their idiom, and they don’t whine or complain about those constraints. They develop delicate understandings of what is required in a given place in time.
Trollope’s ideal leaders are not glamorous celebrities of the sort we have come to long for since J. F. Kennedy. They are more like seamen or carpenters. They are judged by their professional craftsmanship. They are thin-skinned about any moral transgression they might commit and rigorously honest when judging themselves. They try to make things better but are acutely aware that everything they do might make things worse. Trollope’s leaders don’t embrace change quickly but have to be dragged into embracing it after much interrogation, and the change they prefer is incremental.
Trollope praises one of his prime ministers, Plantagenet Palliser, for "that exquisite combination of conservatism and progress which is his country’s present strength and her best security for the future. " Trollope’s readers would have come away from his books with a certain model for how practical people should behave, which they could either copy or argue with. I’m not sure his exemplars could thrive amid the TV politics of today, which calls for grand promises and bold colors. But there are prudent, reserved people in government even now.
Unlike such leaders as Kennedy, Trollope’s political leaders（）
A. are born of humble or modest origins
B. have the intention of making themselves famous
C.often make things worse when they engage in reforms
D. do not embrace radical political changes
