POWER OF POLITICS

The Empowerment Factor

Mickey Edwards, John Quincy Adams Lecturer in Legislative Politics

The Kennedy School has long had a clear and specific mission — to prepare its students to make meaningful contributions to the common good through their active participation in careers of public service. As Dean Joe Nye put it in a recent joint meeting of the school’s faculty and staff, it is the school’s mission “to make the world a better place.” He mentions making “the world” a better place, rather than just America, because each year approximately half of the school’s student population now arrives in Cambridge from homes as distant from the Taubman courtyard as Austria or Zimbabwe, both of which were represented in my classes last year, along with students from China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Germany, Australia, Great Britain, Ukraine, the Philippines, and a host of other countries. To take on such a critical mission, so important to the entire world, is quite an undertaking.

But that’s not the whole of it. On top of that “mission,” the school has a quite definite goal in mind. In his meetings with members of the Admissions Committee, the dean makes clear what it is we’re looking for: the men and women who will become not just servants but leaders. That is why the school established a Center for Public Leadership and why the Admissions Committee considers, among its criteria for acceptance, “potential for leadership.”

And that is why it is so critical that the school increase its emphasis on what I will call “the empowerment factor.” If there is one unambiguous hallmark central to the idea of democratic governance, it is this: in a democracy, the people rule. And the way the people rule is through citizen participation, whether as candidates for public office or as voters. Thus it is politics that is the sine qua non of self-government. In every true democracy, analysts analyze and advisors advise, but it is politicians (meaning, those people who seek and are elected to public office) who make the decisions and set the policies. It is through politics that the people of a free society most effectively exercise public leadership.

Last year, while I was teaching a course titled “To Be a Politician” (along with David Pryor, a former U.S. senator and a man I greatly admire), the Institute of Politics was offering a presentation titled “Why Politics Sucks.” Most of the IOP’s fellows were nonpoliticians. There is no fault to be found with this: the IOP’s failure to encourage — to inspire — students to enter the political arena is simply a part of an overall national tendency to dismiss, or be disdainful of, politics. Certainly our courses should (and mine do) discuss ways in which our political systems can be improved, both at the campaigning level and in the making of public policy. But there is a substantial difference between considering various forms of improvement and a failure to inspire the bright young leaders of the future to follow in the footsteps of an Abraham Lincoln, a Franklin Roosevelt, a Ronald Reagan, or the man our school is named for, John F. Kennedy (or the various Winston Churchills, Indira Gandhis, and Corazon Aquinos of other lands), each of whom brought change to the world by embracing the most important power tool of a free people: politics.