Many people who serve in government get up, go to work, do the best they can, and then go home again at the end of the day. That’s as work should be: simple, consistent, and humble.
It’s many, but not all, who live this way.
For a few in office, even a relatively small government (town, village, rural county, etc.) presents a daily struggle with vanity, self-serving pronouncements, and grandiose contentions.
That there are vast cities elsewhere does not prevent a proud person from falling victim to small-town vanity. Once ensnared in the minutiae of the near, the level-headed perspective of seeing and judging from afar means nothing to a person like that.
There may be many reasons that some people become small-town squires, and slip into a world self-promotion on a public tab.
I’ll suggest two reasons in this post.
First, even in a small town, local government may control millions in annual expenses and public property. That’s more than most people control privately, and more than they will likely ever control.
For self-promoters who seek office, the relatively greater scale of government compared against ordinary residents’ lives is a heady, intoxicating experience. A town may be small, but even then it will have a budget probably larger than most household budgets, and many business budgets.
The weak-minded get caught up with the idea of government-as-bigger-and-better, even in small places.
Second, people fall sway to self-promotion when they have nothing greater than themselves to promote. Conservatives, liberals, moderates, libertarians: if they arrive in government with a firm set of principles to advance, they’ve insulation from the warm, dangerously attractive glow of self-advancement.
If, by contrast, they arrive with views easily discarded for the sake of continuing participation in a small circle, they’re already susceptible of name-dropping, line-jumping, and self-serving.
Once they start down this path, they’re the office-seeking equivalent of nicotine fiends, and they just can’t get enough…