Who We Drive Away

How Our Political Culture Discourages the People We Most Need

We say, often and correctly, that who we elect matters. But there is a harder truth underneath it, one we talk about far less. Who we encourage to run matters just as much.

If we are struggling today with the quality of political leadership in many parts of our government, it is not simply because voters make bad choices. It is also because we have built a political culture that actively discourages capable, ethical, community minded people from ever putting their names on the ballot. What we are seeing now is the downstream consequence of that choice.

Government is not an abstraction. It is a collection of human beings making decisions under pressure, with real consequences for their neighbors. The quality of our institutions is inseparable from the quality of the people willing to serve in them.

Over time, however, we have made politics more hostile, more performative, and less forgiving. We have normalized cynicism, treated mistakes as evidence of corruption, and treated compromise as weakness. In doing so, we have blurred the line between good faith disagreement and bad faith behavior. The result is predictable. Many of the people we most want in public office conclude that the personal cost is no longer worth it.

Public Service Made Unattractive

Consider who tends to opt out.

The parent with young children who does not want their family dragged into online attacks. The professional who understands budgets, systems, and long term tradeoffs but has no appetite for performative outrage. The community leader who cares deeply about outcomes but knows nuance is easily weaponized. The neighbor you trust who does the work quietly and avoids the spotlight entirely.

These are not fragile people. They are serious people, and seriousness is exactly what our current political environment punishes. A system that rewards attention over competence should not be surprised when it produces leaders skilled at attention rather than governance.

When we talk about electing good people, we are not talking about purity or perfection. We are talking about people who take responsibility seriously and understand that public trust must be earned repeatedly.

Caring about a community is demanding. It means explaining difficult choices, sitting with complexity, owning outcomes rather than blaming systems, predecessors, or opponents, and accepting that many decisions involve tradeoffs rather than villains.

That kind of care carries risk in a culture that treats honesty as a liability. When uncertainty is framed as weakness and long term thinking is flattened into soundbites, the incentive structure becomes clear. Good people learn quickly that discretion is safer than service.

We often assume that capable leaders will naturally rise to the top. History suggests otherwise. Competence does not self select in hostile environments. It is filtered out.

Public finance, infrastructure, public safety, housing, land use, and schools are technically complex domains. Governing them well requires experience, judgment, and humility. When these roles are treated as symbolic battlegrounds rather than serious responsibilities, the people best equipped to handle them step aside. Incompetence is not neutral. Its costs accumulate quietly and then arrive all at once.

The Consequences Are Showing Up

Many people sense that something has shifted in recent years. Institutions feel thinner, decision making feels more brittle, and trust is harder to find. That is not an accident. It is what happens when a society spends years degrading the idea of public service itself.

What erodes first is not policy, but people. Experience drains quietly. Mentorship never forms. Judgment shaped by repetition and responsibility is never passed on. Over time, institutions do not fail because they lack rules or authority, but because they lack stewards who know how to use them with restraint, humility, and care. When that human infrastructure thins, even well-designed systems begin to fracture, and recovery becomes harder the longer the loss goes unacknowledged.

We did not simply lose trust in government. We taught a generation of capable people that running for office was foolish, dangerous, or naive. We are now living with the consequences.

Experience Is Not Being Replaced. It Is Being Lost.

One of the clearest signs of this shift is who is no longer running. Many of those stepping away are senior professionals who have managed organizations, overseen complex budgets, built institutions, and lived through the full arc of policy decisions. They understand not only how ideas begin, but how they age, strain, and either hold together or fail.

They are not leaving because they lack energy or conviction. They are leaving because the costs of service have changed. Public life has become more hostile, more performative, and less forgiving. For people with families, careers, and reputations built over decades, the risk reward equation no longer works.

What fills the gap is often younger, less experienced candidates who are frequently more partisan, more ideological, and more comfortable treating conflict as the currency of politics. That shift brings real benefits. Energy matters. New voices matter. Fresh perspectives matter. But youth is not a substitute for experience.

Too often, what looks like a fresh perspective is simply a naive one, not wrong in intent but untested by implementation, constraint, or consequence. Governing is not just about identifying what should be fixed. It is about understanding what breaks when you pull on the system.

Without experienced leaders in the room, institutions lose memory. They repeat old mistakes under new slogans, underestimate complexity, overestimate the speed of change, and confuse certainty with clarity. Healthy democracies blend generations. They pair urgency with judgment and allow newer leaders to challenge assumptions while seasoned leaders translate those challenges into workable action. What we increasingly see instead is replacement without mentorship and movement without ballast. That is not renewal. It is fragility.

Rebuilding Starts Long Before the Ballot

If we want better outcomes, the work begins earlier than Election Day. It begins with how we talk about people who serve, with distinguishing disagreement from contempt, with leaving room for learning, growth, and good faith error, and with remembering that government is not them. It is us.

Electing better leaders requires creating a culture where better people are willing to lead. Who we elect still matters, but so does who decides not to run and why.

If we want communities that are resilient, fair, and capable of solving real problems, we must change not only our votes but the incentives that shape who shows up in the first place. That responsibility belongs to all of us.

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About Andrew Flynn

Andrew is an elected commissioner in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, public finance and policy expert, volunteer firefighter, and community advocate committed to building safer, more resilient, and better-connected neighborhoods. Through public service and hands-on experience, Andrew works every day to make a positive impact in communities across the United States.

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