Ealy, On Willie Stark as Political Leader
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III: What Does it all Mean?
After Adam Stanton shot Stark, the Governor told Jack “it might have all
been different” (400). Before he was shot, Stark had begun to make changes, both
personal
16
and political, that reflected a renewed commitment to not just the
rhetoric but to the reality of his populist vision.
The deepest forms of corruption may be missed by the typological
approach to the issue, whether the typology of political corruption is based on
Jack Burden’s categories of original sin, ambition, love, fear, and money, or on
the more scholarly standards of conflict of interest, nepotism, illegal conversion
of public into private goods.
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The British political thinker Michael Oakeshott
points toward the deeper, and subtler, forms of political corruption in his essay,
“The Claims of Politics.”
A limitation of view, which appears so clear and practical, but which
amounts to little more than a mental fog, is inseparable from political
activity. A mind fixed and callous to all subtle distinctions, emotional and
intellectual habits become bogus from repetition and lack of examination,
unreal loyalties, delusive aims, false significances are what political action
involves. And this is so, not because the politically active are under the
necessity of persuading the mentally obtuse before their activity can
succeed; the spiritual callousness involved in political action belongs to its
character, and follows from the nature of what can be achieved politically.
Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the
Convention