Hans F. Sennholz, “The Poverty of Politics” (1992)

This file is a short polemical essay. Its scope is the moral and institutional diagnosis of modern American politics, especially Congress, lobbying, special interests, and the rhetoric of public compassion. Sennholz’s thesis is that politics has declined from an art governed by moral principle into a competitive mechanism for distributing privileges through pressure, votes, and public funds.

In ages past politics was an art built on the great principles of political wisdom, as in the laws of Moses and the precepts of the Founding Fathers.

The opening contrast sets the whole argument. Politics once required judgment about government, law, and principle; now, Sennholz argues, it rewards the knowledge of “your own interests and those of your voters and backers.” This is the essay’s central conceptual move: politics is redefined not as public deliberation but as organized self-interest, with “political logrolling” replacing statesmanship.

In recent years, under the influence of alien thought, politics has become a science of self-interest and political logrolling, that is, trading of political influence or votes to achieve passage of laws favoring one another.

From there the essay proceeds through a compressed institutional anatomy. Successful politicians are those who comply with powerful groups or obey political hierarchies; reelection becomes evidence not of civic trust but of structural capture. Public opinion, party organization, lobbying, and pressure groups form a system in which power is exchanged for material advantage. Tocqueville is invoked as a prophetic witness to the danger of democratic majorities voting themselves benefits.

Special interests, grasping, self-serving, narrow private interests, are the moving force for much of government activity today.

Sennholz’s discussion of lobbyists and associations is not merely anti-corruption rhetoric. He argues that the modern political marketplace turns even corporate representation against free enterprise: business lobbyists do not defend markets as such, but seek advantages for managers, firms, districts, or industries. Thus the problem is not simply “big government” versus “business,” but the mutual corruption of political allocation and private appetite.

Clearly, they are not advancing the cause of individual enterprise and free markets.

A second major move is the critique of majority rule when detached from principle. Sennholz does not reject voting as procedure, but he treats majoritarian politics as dangerous when it becomes a mechanism for overriding moral limits. The legislator becomes “outer-directed,” shaped by district demands, employment slogans, industry protections, import restrictions, tax favors, and federal spending.

Majority rule is a principle of power which obeys the interests of the majority and elevates them over all other principles and precepts.

The essay’s most vivid section attacks the “compassionate politician.” Sennholz portrays this figure as morally theatrical: promising wars on poverty, disease, crime, and drugs while spending other people’s money. Compassion becomes a political costume, a means of claiming virtue while evading the source of funds. The rhetoric of benevolence turns punitive when it requires new targets—corporations, the affluent, or rival groups—to finance largesse.

Their "generosity" obviously is nothing but bluster about their ability to gain access to the public treasury and engage in legal plunder.

The argument is therefore less technical than ethical. Sennholz says such politicians are “immune to economic reasoning,” so they must be confronted on moral grounds. His key charge is hypocrisy: public benevolence funded by coercive redistribution is not charity, and political “compassion” can mask envy, opportunism, and careerism. The essay’s relevance lies in this enduring diagnosis of democratic politics as a competition among organized claimants on the treasury.

Its final turn is practical and exemplary rather than programmatic. Sennholz offers no institutional blueprint; he calls for withdrawal from the moral economy of privilege. Citizens must cease worshiping political saviors and leave the coalitions that demand favors.

There is little probability that the trend will change as long as we remain infatuated with the gods of politics.

The closing sentence gives the essay its austere remedy: reform begins not with another political bargain but with refusal, example, and upright conduct.

There is great power in example; we lead others when we walk upright.