The Patriot Post® · If You're Crushing on a Political Candidate, You're Doing Democracy Wrong

I like my primary care doctor very much. Not only is he friendly, attentive, and reassuring, but I can reach him easily with questions and he is unfailingly quick to reply.

I also like the painter that my wife and I have hired several times for jobs around the house. He operates quickly and efficiently, his rates are reasonable, and he has an engaging personality.

But it would never occur to me to put my doctor or painter — or for that matter my dentist, accountant, or plumber, all of whom are also skilled and reliable — on a pedestal for veneration. I certainly wouldn’t automatically endorse anything they might tell me. I value them highly for the good service they provide, but I don’t idolize them. I imagine that’s true of most people: They appreciate professionals and craftsmen who are capable and trustworthy, but they don’t make demigods out of them.

Why do so many have a different standard for politicians?

I’ve never understood the giddy rapture with which countless Americans regard political candidates and elected officials, especially at the presidential level. This is not a knock on the recent Democratic and Republican conventions. It’s fine for parties to organize a few nights every four years to cherish and cheer for their standard-bearers. But in America the glorification of politicians by their adherents never seems to let up.

Certainly we need to elect men and women to public posts, just as we need to hire men and women to practice medicine, paint shingles, and prepare tax returns. What mystifies me is why people invest so much emotion and passion in the political process — emotion and passion they would never invest in the hiring of any other provider of a necessary service. Why do they embrace their preferred candidates with such elation? What explains the Obama Girl’s crush? Why do MAGA stans travel the country to attend not one but dozens of Donald Trump rallies? Why would 100,000 people stand in line, sometimes for hours, to take selfies with Elizabeth Warren? Why would some devotees of Ronald Reagan have gone so overboard in their reverence that they campaigned to name something after him in every one of the nation’s 3,067 counties?

For numerous reasons, falling in love with politicians is unhealthy and undemocratic.

● It fuels blind loyalty, with voters so enraptured by their political darlings that they are far more likely to overlook, dismiss, or justify their unethical behavior or policy blunders. At its most extreme, blind loyalty becomes a cult of personality, whose adherents — as the world saw at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — are apt to do anything at the urging of their champion.

● It undermines support for constitutional checks and balances. If the legislature or the judiciary impedes a favored politician’s agenda — whether that agenda is building a border wall, confiscating firearms, or canceling student loan balances — see-no-evil acolytes are frequently willing to support unilateral action or even to demand that the mediating institutions be weakened.

● It shreds accountability, without which no democratic republic can flourish. When presidents or other politicians are deified by their admirers, they are much less likely to be held to the standards required of their office or made to answer for their failures. When the COVID pandemic erupted in 2020, then-New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings drew cloying admiration; he became so popular with his supporters that many took to calling themselves “Cuomosexuals.” But as they were swooning, the Cuomo administration was dramatically underreporting New York’s coronavirus death toll — and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the governor was engaging in egregious and repeated sexual harassment.

The glorification of politicians has always creeped me out. My father’s family was murdered in Auschwitz, and from an early age I was horrified by newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler addressing those massive crowds of Germans chanting “Sieg Heil!” America has never sunk to that level of derangement, thank God, but I still shudder when I see the fervent exaltation that political figures as varied as Trump, Obama, and Bernie Sanders inspire in their followers.

In The Making of the President 1960, his famous account of that year’s presidential campaign, journalist Theodore H. White described the phenomenon of the “jumpers” — the girls and women at John F. Kennedy’s rallies and motorcades who were so overcome with enthusiasm for the candidate that they began jumping uncontrollably. As the campaign progressed, more and more jumpers would lose themselves in bouncing ecstasy. Granted, mass jumping is not a menacing phenomenon in itself. But something is wrong when voters react to politicians like hysterical fans at a rock concert. Government of and by the people cannot work effectively if the people are too busy genuflecting to political officials to care overmuch what those officials do.

Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men was inspired by the story of Huey P. Long, a Louisiana governor and senator. The book’s main character is Willie Stark, an idealistic lawyer who enters politics. As his popularity and charisma intensify, so do his corruption and ruthlessness — and the willingness of his followers to follow wherever he might lead. Because Stark’s followers so adore him, they are willing to abandon critical thinking; having convinced themselves that he stands with them, they stop being concerned with what he actually stands for.

Related to the intense devotion so many voters feel for specific politicians is the intense devotion many voters have to a specific party. In a 2015 study, researchers at the University of Kansas concluded that most partisans “act like fans in sports rivalries instead of making political choices based on issues.” Drawing on data in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a survey of more than 50,000 respondents, they found that 41 percent of voters with firm party loyalties “agreed that simply winning elections is more important to them than policy or ideological goals.”

None of this is meant to suggest that worthy political candidates shouldn’t be admired and supported. None of this is meant to denigrate people who work hard to elect men and women whose views they agree with or whose background they esteem. But when citizens in a democracy treat public servants as celebrities and near-divine beings, they undermine the rule of law on which society’s stability depends. You want to worship the ground beneath an athlete or movie star’s feet? Knock yourself out. When you do the same with a politician, however, you contribute to the corrosion of our self-government and democratic norms. That is the road to demagoguery and authoritarianism.