“It was too big for me to judge. He was too big” — The Complexities of Judging Politicians

By Will Barber Taylor

The judgement of a politician’s influence, whether in their lifetime or after it, is complicated. Anyone who knows anything about politics will know that people in power get derided, abused and mocked. Satirising and complaining about politicians is as old as politics itself — you only have to go back to Aristophanes to see not much has changed for how we view our leaders. Yet, there is within this generalised framework of political derision a space for admiration.

This comes not just from those who are members of parties but from the general public as well. You utter names like Churchill, Roosevelt, Lincoln, De Gaulle, Disraeli, Gladstone and you will find people who not only admire them but also revere them. This reverence is, of course, normally reserved for politicians who are dead. In their own lifetimes, each of the people I mentioned were not only derided but dismissed by many.

Greatness was not bestowed upon them at any one moment. Even those that were war leaders — Churchill, Roosevelt, Lincoln and De Gaulle were attacked for blunders or criticised for not ending their wars soon enough. So how is it then that these people capture a place in history to be affixed with terms like “great”?

The title of this article contains a quotation, not from a political text but, strangely enough, from a comic book.

The particular line is taken from a sequence in Frank Miller’s 1986 work The Dark Knight Returns. It is from a scene in which outgoing Commissioner of Gotham Police, Jim Gordon talks to his successor Ellen Yidel. Yidel questions why Gordon has for so many years supported the activities of Batman. Gordon responds by making a comparison between Batman and FDR — it is interesting that Gordon saw in both of them an ability to judge situations out of the scope of other people.

The quotation relates directly to Gordon being able to consider how FDR could have allowed Pearl Harbour to go ahead if, as some had speculated, he had known about it. His conclusion, and one Yidel shares with him at the end of The Dark Knight Returns, is that he cannot judge him. That to judge him would be difficult because he cannot possibly imagine himself being in the situation that FDR was.

This is, of course, in the context of the graphic novel and a means of demonstrating why Gotham needs Batman and broadly fits into Miller’s worldview — which at this point was not as repugnant as it later became.

Yet, it also raises an interesting question about the judgement of politicians and their actions. It is, as Stephen Fry once said in A Bit of Fry and Laurie, “incredibly easy to knock Mrs Thatcher” as it is with any politician. Witticisms, however, cannot dictate political insight. If we can, as we should, properly judge politicians both in the past and present then we must remember that they are human beings and also attempt to understand their motivation.

Politicians that we disagree with will naturally fail to meet our own standards, in policy if not in personality, because of who they are. That does not follow through therefore that they are failures on their own merits. To go back to the example of Margaret Thatcher, by her own metric she can be said to be a success.

She fundamentally transformed Britain and won three successive general elections, two of which were landslides. If you asked the people of Liverpool or North Wales or anyone who suffered under her or saw her as a political opponent, they will, of course, take the contrary view. Is either wrong? Of course not.

Thus, we must come back to the idea of politicians that are revered, that are in Miller’s words “too big” are perhaps somehow disconnected from traditional political discourse in which others inhabit. They are, of course, not. Criticism of FDR and Churchill is as valid as criticising Joe Biden or Boris Johnson — whether as individuals or political commentators, we cannot restrain ourselves by feeling that the reverence seals off these individuals for time immemorial.

If we sealed such figures in amber, pickled in a reverential glow then we would be unable to move forward and reflect upon them as flawed but important figures.

So why does this reverence exist? It fundamentally exists because we as humans derive comfort from archetypal figures. It is why, as Jung hypothesised, we engage with and react to some people and do not react to others.

To understand the world, we feel we must fit people into categories and individuals that accomplish a great deal, we feel must be indestructible for to besmirch or criticise them is to undermine our own understanding of the world.

These figures cannot and must not be free from criticism however — how can we advance as a people, as a species if we inoculate ourselves from analysis and free thought?

Yet, if we only undermine figures from the past and do not view them in their context then we fail to fully comprehend how the world we live in is formed by them.

This attempt to untether ourselves from reality and instead try and exist in a vacuum is politically destructive. It leaves us without the ability to make arguments that can be fully comprehended in connection with the past.

It is easy for political parties that are newly formed to argue why they will be different and should be in power because they have no past. This is not the case for established political parties, even if they reinvent themselves.

For those political parties that do have a past though, to ignore the reverence by which many people feel for the likes of Churchill we are ultimately shooting ourselves in the foot — we all have a past and if we continually denigrate the past of others, then how can we argue that our record is better, that we should be in power again?

Does this continual denigration, without regard for context or the wider political spectrum not open us to denigration — if we do it to others then why should it not be done to us?

This is why the criticism and analysis of a politician’s career is ultimately complex. It’s a complex process that has to be done to ensure the stability of the democratic process and avoid falling into the strained and suffocating stagnation of continual agreement.

We can’t always agree because if we did then we would fail to change. Therefore, we must understand not only how and why people are revered but how to engage with it in a way that isn’t ultimately destructive.

It may not be true that there are some people who are “too big” to be judged but we must understand why people believe it to be true. Once we accept this then we can acclimatise ourselves to the reality that the reverence and belief many people have in these figures might not be a bad thing.

Admiration and respect are not terrible things to believe in. To live in a nihilistic, overly analytical world that would make Twitter seem warm and caring isn’t the kind of world I would like to live in and I hope that is something that at the very least, you, me and everyone else can agree with.