Daniel J. Mahoney has known a few statesmen and a host of politicians during his decades in and around the politics of the West. He points out there’s a difference between the two, and there’s also the tyrant who tends to separate himself or herself from the two despite originating in the same circles. The age of COVID-19 has indeed revealed a number of tyrants in America and throughout the rest of the West.
Although there are the ongoing battles of liberty and control between citizens and governments during this ongoing crisis, Mahoney indicates a crisis may be just what is needed for statesmen to arise.
The Statesman, the Politician, and the Tyrant
But what exactly is a statesman? And how do they differ from a typical, even influential, politician? Also, how do they differ from the ambitious leader who tends toward tyranny, yet accomplishes great feats?“The statesman exhibits the qualities of character and soul that separates them from the ordinary political leader, and especially from the rapacious tyrant,” he said. “It doesn’t mean they’re saints.”
In the book, Mahoney highlights Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Vaclav Havel, but he points readers back to Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great orator and politician of the Roman Republic. Cicero was known as a political philosopher, whose writings described what was required to be a statesman.
“He sort of described the Churchillian spirit before it embodied a figure like Lincoln or Churchill,” he said. “He was also an acting statesman who tried to save the Roman Republic at a time when it was collapsing and it was under the specter of a new kind of charismatic despotism of Caesar.”
The Current State of Statesmanship
Although the history of statesmen goes back thousands of years, Mahoney believes the best examples are relatively recent. As a caveat to that belief, unfortunately, he added that he doesn’t see any statesmen today. He said there’s a very reasonable explanation for this political misfortune that has led to what he calls “a crisis of self-confidence.”“Education,” he stated. “We don’t educate in American political thought to any considerable extent. We don’t study the great speeches of the Western tradition. We don’t teach rhetoric. We don’t teach an account of American history that is sympathetic. A lot of it is self-loathing.”
On a brighter note, he does believe that the West still possesses enough resources to cultivate human greatness, but added that if America and the West continue to destroy their civilizational and civic heritages, then it makes statesmanship less likely. Nonetheless, he is hopeful.
“We need someone in the future—not a Caesar saving us—but somebody who can articulate the promise of the American Republic,” he said. “And I think that will come. It will happen because it has to happen.”