Surgeons, as a group, adhere to a curious egalitarianism. They believe in practice, not talent. People often assume that you have to have great hands to become a surgeon, but it’s not true. When I interviewed to get into surgery programs, no one made me sew or take a dexterity test or checked to see if my hands were steady. You do not even need all ten fingers to be accepted. To be sure, talent helps. Professors say that every two or three years they’ll see someone truly gifted come through a program—someone who picks up complex manual skills unusually quickly, sees tissue planes before others do, anticipates trouble before it happens. Nonetheless, attending surgeons say that what’s most important to them is finding people who are conscientious, industrious, and boneheaded enough to keep at practicing this one difficult thing day and night for years on end. As a former residency director put it to me, given a choice between a Ph.D. who had cloned a gene and a sculptor, he’d pick the Ph.D. every time. Sure, he said, he’d bet on the sculptor’s being more physically talented; but he’d bet on the Ph.D.’s being less “flaky.” And in the end that matters more. Skll, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot. It’s an odd approach to recruitment, but it continues all the way up the ranks, even in top surgery departments. They start with minions with no experience in surgery, spend years training them, and then take most of their faculty from these same homegrown ranks.
—Atul Gawande, “The Learning Curve”

There’s a certain extent to which there’s not much to say about this. The entire essay, on the issue of practice versus perfection in the medical field, is quite long and rather informative about the issue of hands-on training for residents in the healthcare field.

The striking element of this paragraph was the use and application of the word “egalitarianism.” An egalitarian outlook is one that, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, believes in “equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people.” So, if I understand the author correctly, every surgeon begins residency with the same potential, and will survive purely through practice, not talent. If this notion is taken further and applied to other areas, a more universal truth behind the notion of egalitarianism begins to emerge.

For example, there is the old riddle of how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. In the world of music, I’ve always heard an emphasis on the notion of talent, especially in classical music. There are talented pianists, talented rock stars and talented singers. That’s what they say, at least. However, what I’ve personally witnessed tells me a different story. I’ve seen singers who start out virtually tone deaf, then through many hours of practice and hard work, become soloists. In witnessing this dedication to music, whole audiences receive entertainment and (presumably) a sense of inspiration to greater things.

In the world of politics the application of the egalitarianism concept translates to the practice (or the art) of winning elections and re-elections. Just as surgeons may make an imprecise incision or musicians may hit a wrong note, many politicians lose some of their elections before winning higher offices. That’s one way of looking at it. On the other hand, politics is not simply about winning elections. To be an elected administrator or legislator is itself a practice. Clarence Stone’s book Regime Politics, for example, focused on the importance of forming alliances in not only winning elections, but also in running a city and keeping the peace. In a real world example, Hillary Clinton’s refusal to play politics with Ari Fleischer is said to have been a decisive move that facilitated her long-term effectiveness as a senator.

When politics is cast in an egalitarian light rather than a competitive light, ideology and self-interest matter less; the public interest (presumably) matters more. Rather than fight over what our founding fathers intended&emdash;they had ideological disagreements among each other&emdash;we can at least take a look at the compromise they eventually came up with, our Constitution. It is not the practice of winning elections and advancing a particular ideology that would matter nearly as much as advancing the public interest and providing public goods in an efficient manner.

To that end, it may be worth studying what factors account for shifts in the voting preferences of the public. A research study that followed Reagan’s win for a second term as president found that “no liberal-to-conservative shift occurred during the 1980s… Some measures of voting strength during the 1980-86 period show that liberal legislators received slightly higher support than conservative candidates” (”The Myth of the Conservative Shift in American Politics” by Larry Schwab, Western Political Quarterly, Dec. 1988). Is it possible, then, that the general public would respond less to ideology and more to a skilled political practice? If only it were that simple.

As noted in The Economics of Collective Choice (p. 238), while the ideological positions of voters tend to be moderate, legislative politicians tend to listen to the extremes among the ideological spectrum. What research has found is that “participation in the political process is highly self-selective. Consumers, workers, voters, and firms who have the largest net gains from action (or the largest net losses from inaction) will tend to participate.” Ideological groups, as a result, tend to cluster and vote together. The question remains: how does the seasoned politican figure into this formula? Of any application on the notion of career-oriented egalitarianism, the political application may be the most difficult.