Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

We yearn for great leaders, but we seem to resist them when they come along. This is a paradox inherent to democracies, between the demand for liberty, equality, and self-reliance among citizens and the continuing need for leadership in the unruliness of an open society. We vacillate between power and drift, between embracing strong leaders and endorsing a kind of leaderless rule. Our confusion about statesmanship is partly because we have lost the language in which to understand the term. The term statesman has an old, even an antiquarian ring about it. Herbert Storing, a great historian of the American founding, once noted that there seems something almost “un-American” about the word. While politicians pay lip service to the concept, for the most part the term is regarded as outmoded, elitist, and vaguely anti-democratic. Harry Truman once joked that a statesman is just a politician who has been dead for ten or fifteen years.  Yet it is hard to deny that today we are experiencing a dearth of statesmanship. With the exception of Volodymyr Zelensky, bless him, who is doing a stirring impression of Winston Churchill, statesmen are in short supply. Our current moment has certainly witnessed a renaissance of authoritarian figures — Putin, Xi, Modi, Bolsonaro, Orban, Trump — but none of these seem to qualify as statesmen. What is a statesman, and how do we know one when we see one? The confusion about the concept is due in part to its unavoidably normative character. Isn’t one person’s statesman another’s demagogue? Historians are often wedded to a kind of social determinism that regards the statesman as an agent of powerful classes, interests, and social forces which he or she may only dimly understand. Political scientists, who only feel at home in the world of big data that can be quantified and analyzed by mathematical methods, contribute to the flattening out of experience. But it is impossible to study political phenomena without evaluating them. If we are unable to distinguish a magnanimous statesman from a humble mediocrity from an insane imposter, we will be unable to understand anything about politics.  Like much of our political vocabulary, the concept of the statesman is of ancient origin. It is a translation of the Greek word politikos. Plato devoted an entire dialogue to this concept, although his most famous discussion of the statesman occurs in the Republic, where he famously asked what kind of knowledge a statesman had to possess. His answer was that the politikos was required to be a philosopher-king, someone who blended a high degree of intellectual excellence or expertise with the skillful management of public affairs. Many people disagreed with Plato’s answers — most notably Aristotle, his student — but his question is the one we have been grappling with ever since. The understanding of statesmanship has been compromised by two tendencies fostered by modern democracy. The first view conceives the statesman as a technocrat, someone who is guided by scientific experts and who is then able to apply this knowledge to the various problems deemed to be plaguing society. This kind of statecraft is rightly called “progressive” because it regards progress in politics as dependent upon advances in scientific (and social scientific) knowledge. According to this view, as scientific knowledge increases so, too, does our ability to apply its insights to the most pressing issues of society, whether these are hunger, disease, poverty, inequality, or climate change. Social problems are regarded here as largely technical in nature and politics is seen as a form of policy science. The idea that politics is reducible to policy is at the core of what is sometimes referred to as the administrative state. This view was imperishably expressed in Alexander Pope’s couplet: For forms of government let fools contest; That which is best administered is best.  On this account, politics can be reduced to a form of problem-solving not unlike that encountered in the worlds of science, technology, business, and other aspects of a modern capitalistic economy. The claim that we frequently hear from public officials that they are just “following the science” is a perfect illustration of this approach. Politics becomes a matter of implementing the insights of scientists, medical professionals, and other policy experts. We do not necessarily expect our leaders to be experts, but we expect them to follow the advice of experts, certainly in arcane areas such as public health and monetary policy.  The second misunderstanding confuses the statesman with the populist leader. As William Galston has argued, populism and democracy are to some degree inseparable. Every democratic leader claims to have the mandate of the people even if he holds power by only the slimmest majority, and sometimes not even by a majority at all. The populist leader was best characterized by Max Weber with the term “charisma”. In his renowned essay “Politics as a Vocation,” he invoked this term to distinguish the charismatic leader from the party politician. The charismatic leader is someone who claims to stand above special interests and party loyalty and speak directly to the people, and who can serve as their voice. In modern American politics, Woodrow Wilson was the greatest representative of this viewpoint. The test of the charismatic leader is the claim to authenticity, that he speaks for the people. But how does one measure the authenticity of a leader? How does one distinguish the charismatic leader from the demagogue, the mountebank, and the fraud? How does one distinguish the true prophet from the false prophet? This is one of the oldest questions in the history of human affairs. Weber provides no acid test for charisma. There are no fixed principles, no program for action. There is only the personality of the leader. As Machiavelli said about the charismatic preacher Savonarola, he lost authority only when the people ceased to believe in him. Charisma is very much in the eye of the beholder.  The problem with charismatic politics is its almost complete lack of content. In recent American