Strangers in Strange Lands

American politicians are traditionally hard, aggressive, artful, imprecise--to put it midly--in the use of words and accustomed to the uses, acquisition and trading of power. Intellectuals, on the other hand, have a long-range view of things, see many sides to many questions, are diffuse of purpose and have a tendency to conceptualize issues. They find it difficult to accept, no less to use, slippery language and permit their self-doubt to interfere when hard judgments are required.

Nevertheless, there needs to be a closer interchange between the two disciplines. Politics needs intellectuals because intellectuals are affirmative and concerned people who can help the political process to become, in the popular terminology, "responsive." Intellectuals need politics both institutionally and because the process concentrates the intellectual mind on the business and challenge of living in society.

I should also like to say that my definition of politics means getting elected to public office as opposed to working as a research assistant or executive advisor. I mean votes, people and that kind of grubby business. And by intellectual, I mean that habit of thought which tends to view events intelligently and humanely in their long-term social and historical context. It's not a very satisfactory definition and I certainly don't mean to include first-rank intellectuals with a total commitment to the academic or editorial community.

Even allowing for this loose definition of intellectual, very few get involved in the political process as I have defined it. It may be temperament, inability to communicate on the levels which politics demands, or fear of failure. The intellectual people who end up getting elected are accidental in the same way that undertakers, dentists and persons with other callings find their way into legislative bodies.

Politically the intellectual is no great operator. He takes himself far too seriously for that. But there's some compensation for him; the political process does not become, as it is for many of his political colleagues, an end in itself--there is more to life than just the next election.

My observations, while casual and broad, are part of a long self-examination and political experience. I have spent seventeen years as an urban Democrat (from Queens) in the New York Sate Senate--eleven campaigns and endless contact with the needs and demands of my constituents. My principal contribution to politics is my ability to address difficult problems in depth and write about them at length; my publications, which have been remarkably accurate and influential, range from analyses of educational financing to advice to young people who get in trouble. I serve from time to time as Party Platform Chairman and position paper draftsman. I am not the greatest political strategist who has ever come to a state capitol and my limitations in that respect are traceable in large part to an intellectual attitude. But I have a least a thought or two about that experience which may be valuable.

First, intellectuals should be in the legislature in the same arbitrary way other groups find their way there. There is no district which will necessarily send a person with intellectual qualities to Congress or a state legislature and there is no rule (other than the law of averages) which says that there must be any such people in any legislative body at all. But it adds a dimension to the body--to say nothing of the person--to have them there.

Second, intellectuals need forcefully to introduce their special long-term vision into party and legislative deliberations which tend otherwise to focus upon immediate voter reaction, a flimsy guide to the management of a complicated society. Obviously, intellectuals also want to be reelected--but someone needs to state long-term goals and sometimes those goals may be the next year's voter appeal.

Third, intellectuals in the legislature can translate to the intellectual community the necessities and the potentialities of the practical political process. The academic community can help enormously to supply answers to social problems because it has the resources and objectivity to try to find those answers. That community needs to understand how its work fits into the legislative process so that "answers" can be stated and implemented in terms which may be more acceptable to the community at large.

Fourth, intellectuals can generally be trusted in the most prosaic sense of that term. Intellectuals tend to believe in the life of the mind and that belief exists independently of sheer ambition or greed. The ability philosophically to accept defeat at the polls or in party councils is a factor of one's ability to function in a world in which that kind of success is not as important as it is elsewhere. Intangible although this may be, it lends a quality of independence of judgment and action which sets a different and better standard than electoral success for its own sake.

Fifth, intellectuals tend today to deal more realistically and candidly with their own limitations; after all, it is not a long way from affirmation and concern to naivete and sanctimony. Intellectuals in the legislative process are no longer self-conscious idealogues--they have begun to understand (the 60s and all that) the uses of non-ideology and the beauty of natural wisdom. They are somewhat more patient today than before with the frustrations of the average voter and have some understanding of how those frustrations must be dealt with if any goals are to be achieved.

Finally, there is the effect of the process upon the intellectual himself. Self-confrontation and self-recognition are bound to result from a process in which intellectual qualities are pitted against the problem of meting and doling unequal laws to the general savagery. There is no intellectual symmetry at a civic association meeting and one can only vote "yes" or "no" on complex legislation whatever theoretic intellectual alternatives may exist. The personal result is an immersion into the reality of life and the necessity for decision which, in general, is better than unreality and indecision.

To sum up, human reason persists as the best available tool to deal with complex temporal problems. Love, intuition and spirituality help somewhat but we have gotten ourselves into an economic and social interplay of forces which requires some intellectual delicacy and foresight to keep in place. Intellectuals possess substantial powers of reason and ought to be willing to use them in the denser underbrush of a complex society instead of only in its airy reaches.

Jack E. Bronston '42, who graduated from the Law School in 1948, has been a New York State Senator for the past 17 years.