If you watched the Louisiana Republican Senate primary leading up to the June 27 election and came away inspired, you were watching a different race than the rest of us. What played out for just about the entire campaign was, by most accounts, an embarrassment – attack ads drowning out policy, personal destruction standing in for debate, candidates more focused on tearing each other down than giving Louisiana voters a single compelling reason to believe things might actually get better. The ugliness was enough to turn the stomach of even the most loyal Republican voters, and more than a few of them were saying so out loud.
The numbers tell the story; turnout was dismal. And perhaps more telling, conversations around kitchen tables and in church parking lots the weekend after included something that would have been unthinkable in this deeply red state just a few years ago: some actually wondering whether they might switch parties and pull the Democratic lever come fall.
That is what happens when a party forgets what it is supposed to be doing.
But this is not really a Republican problem or a Democratic problem; it is an American problem, and it has a name. To put it simply, we have too many politicians and far too few statesmen.
The difference matters more than most people realize.
A statesman begins with his intentions but does not end there. The defining question is not what office he holds or what party he belongs to but whether he felt genuinely called to serve the nation or whether he simply wanted a cushy title and a comfortable pension. A statesman values the health and well-being of those he serves more than his own advancement. He is not selfish. He measures success not by what he accumulates but by what he leaves behind for the next generation. He would rather lose an election than do what he knows is wrong for the country. (Although I’m using the male pronoun, this applies to both genders.)
A politician is something else entirely. A politician (or synonym “career politician”) is someone who keeps one finger permanently in the wind, monitoring the public mood and adjusting his positions accordingly from one week to the next. He does not lead. He follows, but only in the direction that protects his next election. He sees public office not as a calling but as a career opportunity – a platform for selfenrichment through pandering, through short-term thinking, and in the worst cases, through outright corruption. His one great fear, his only fear, is losing his next election. And he will do and say virtually anything to make sure he does not.
The Louisiana Senate race we just witnessed was a masterclass in that second category.
Political scientists who study this phenomenon point to three reasons America finds itself drowning in politicians while statesmen have become nearly extinct. First, a significant portion of the population is now living off the public treasury, creating a built-in constituency for whoever promises to keep the benefits flowing. Second, the corrosive effects of the welfare state have hollowed out the nuclear family, weakening the foundational unit from which civic virtue has always grown. Third, and perhaps most critical, is that civil society itself is crumbling. The churches, civic organizations, community institutions and neighborly networks that once formed the backbone of American public life have been steadily eroding for decades.
The consequence of all three working together is what scholars call “social atomization,” which is a society of isolated individuals who have lost their connection to community, to shared purpose, and to the kind of long-term thinking that produces statesmen rather than opportunists.
And here is the hard truth: you cannot rebuild a strong republic without first repairing that social fabric. The politics will not fix themselves until the society underneath them is healthier.
James Freeman Clarke put it plainly more than a century ago: “A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman thinks of the next generation.”
Louisiana, and the nation, is desperately short of the latter. What we witnessed in this Senate race was the inevitable result of a political culture that rewards performance over principle, attack over accomplishment, and survival over service.
Voters deserve better. And until they demand it at the ballot box, in their communities, and in the standards they hold candidates to before the first attack ad ever airs, they are unlikely to get it.
Craig Franklin is the Publisher/Editor of The Jena Times.
