"It not infrequently happens that persons without any other special qualification than the drama of their lives are precipitated into important political positions"
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Politics has always had a soft spot for the compelling protagonist. Merriam’s line lands like a weary aside from someone who’s watched government drift from competence toward casting. The target isn’t “ordinary people” entering public life; it’s the particular kind of entrant whose main credential is narrative heat: hardship, scandal, heroism, reinvention. The phrase “without any other special qualification” is the knife. He’s diagnosing a selection bias where biography substitutes for policy fluency, administrative skill, or ethical steadiness.
“Precipitated” matters, too. It suggests a chemical reaction or a fall: sudden, reactive, not deliberative. People don’t slowly earn these offices; they’re flung into them by circumstance, media fascination, party desperation, or public hunger for a story that feels like meaning. Merriam’s educator’s eye is on incentives: democracies reward what they can quickly recognize, and drama is legible. Expertise is quiet, incremental, hard to televise.
The subtext is an anxiety about modern mass politics, where attention becomes a gatekeeper. A dramatic life can be real suffering, but it can also be performance - a persona built to travel. Merriam is warning that when politics becomes a stage, the electorate becomes an audience, and institutions start confusing catharsis with governance. The line reads less like snobbery than like an early critique of a system that elevates biography as proof of capacity, then acts surprised when governing turns out to require something other than a plot.
“Precipitated” matters, too. It suggests a chemical reaction or a fall: sudden, reactive, not deliberative. People don’t slowly earn these offices; they’re flung into them by circumstance, media fascination, party desperation, or public hunger for a story that feels like meaning. Merriam’s educator’s eye is on incentives: democracies reward what they can quickly recognize, and drama is legible. Expertise is quiet, incremental, hard to televise.
The subtext is an anxiety about modern mass politics, where attention becomes a gatekeeper. A dramatic life can be real suffering, but it can also be performance - a persona built to travel. Merriam is warning that when politics becomes a stage, the electorate becomes an audience, and institutions start confusing catharsis with governance. The line reads less like snobbery than like an early critique of a system that elevates biography as proof of capacity, then acts surprised when governing turns out to require something other than a plot.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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