This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea.
“It’s very easy to get jaded about politics today … Poll after poll shows a dyspeptic public that hates Congress, disdains politics, and has little faith in government to fix anything.” This observation, which could’ve been written today, was made by the Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham in February 2015, in a story about America’s dire lack of talented and experienced politicians. He traced this problem back to 1955, when former Senator Joseph S. Clark Jr. wrote in The Atlantic that “we have too much mediocrity in the business of running the government of the country.”
During this election cycle, voters and pundits alike grumbled about the options before them. A 2023 survey of American adults found that 84 percent of respondents think there is a leadership crisis in the U.S. government. Early exit polling from CNN revealed that 64 percent of Trump voters feel dissatisfied or angry with “the way things are going” in the United States. I spoke with David recently to ask him how much of his argument has held up a decade later, and how much has changed.
A Governance Problem
Stephanie Bai: In 2015, you wrote about the issue of mediocrity in politics—specifically, how our politicians don’t seem to be the best and brightest minds that our populace has to offer. Almost a decade later, how do you think that argument has aged?
David A. Graham: The problem is much, much worse. Shortly after this article was published, Donald Trump started running for president. I think he’s a good example of some of the things I wrote about before: He is very good at running for office, but a disaster in terms of governing because he doesn’t understand how the system works.
He’s also worsened a lot of the issues that I was thinking about then. His second term may produce a renaissance in hard-right political thought, and it will likely also accelerate most of the governance problems we see now. We’ve seen an exodus of experienced, serious policy makers who are disgusted with the state of things. They know they can’t get anything done, and they think that some people in Congress are kind of clowns. So instead of getting better people in office, we’re getting brain drain.
Stephanie: What do you think needs to be done to retain the talent in politics?
David: It feels like a vicious cycle. I mean, who wants to be a politician right now? It must take a lot of ego, and a lot of masochism. As long as you have Marjorie Taylor Greene as one of the most prominent members in Congress, you’re not going to attract people who are more serious and can instill a better culture.
One precedent we could look at is the post-Watergate moment, when there was a huge loss of faith in the government. You saw a crop of young Democrats who ran for office with big dreams of reform, and many of them stuck around for a very long time in Congress as serious policy makers. Maybe our current political crisis will produce something like that. But Watergate was a more contained crisis of the executive branch; what we see now is dysfunction across the legislative and executive branches, which is harder to break out of.
Stephanie: That reminds me of a recent story you wrote about politicians in Ohio, in which you noted that some local leaders “find their paths to higher office blocked by the country’s hyper-partisanship.”
David: If you look at the people working in local offices, it’s often a different kind of politician. When I talked to mayors in Ohio for this story, something that came up repeatedly was how often they spend time on things that are not especially partisan. Paving roads is nonpartisan. Cleaning up after storms is nonpartisan. These are things that have to get done. The question is: How do people like that rise higher?
The best-case scenario I heard is that if you have really good mayors who are schooled in that pragmatic, consensus-building style, maybe as they move up the political ladder, you’ll see an improvement in our political culture. But that outcome remains to be seen, because they usually end up in these hyper-partisan statewide races—which are hard to win without becoming hyper-partisan.
Stephanie: Do you think this election has upended or complicated any conventional wisdom about what makes a politician successful?
David: One thing that I’ve been thinking about is the role of people such as Elon Musk, who has discovered that by owning X, contributing a ton of money to Trump, and controlling systems that are necessary to the federal government, like SpaceX, he can give himself something like political power without ever having to run for office. When our political systems start to slide toward dysfunction, people like Musk can emerge, and they can find ways to have a lot of power over citizens but not face any kind of accountability.