sing) "they are all a bunch of crooks." That is, the general opinion, which Walzer holds is fundamentally correct, is that politicians--and, by extension, public officials of all sorts, whether directly elected or not--are not and cannot be good, because in taking their posts they have acceded to the iron law of expediency. That is, even if they have sought office, and exercise office, in the sincere pursuit of good ends, they sooner or later (and generally sooner) find themselves face to face with the Machiavellian question of whether the ends justify the means. Whether it is dealing with the seamy side of patronage in order to win an election so that one can achieve some worthy goal, or incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to avert the greater horror of a prolonged war, political actors must do wrong if they are to act at all.
Let us begin where Walzer does, and examine the public perception of politics and politicians. This perception is not loftier in the 1990s than it was when Walzer wrote in the 1970s. Go out onto the street corner and ask, and you will still be told "they are all crooks." Indeed, in the 1990s we have the phenomenon of the "non-politician" candidate for public office--that is, the candidate whose chief qualification for office, self-proclaimed, is that he or she is not a politician. The assertion is of course illogical; anyone running for office is by definition a politician, but the "non-politician's" real claim is to not be a career politician, that is one who supposedly has acceded to the Machiavellian imperative.
In Walzer's analysis, he proceeded from the public's suspicion that politicians are venal to their suspicion that politicians committed more than venal evils. When Walzer wrote, the Vietnam War was still raging, so this dimension was perhaps more obvious than it is today, when our politicians are not conducting a large-scale, widely unpopular war. The curious thing is, thou...