The anxious impatience of our politicians

This week, David Cameron resigned from his seat in Britain's Parliament. This came as a surprise, because after the June Brexit vote, Cameron vacated his post as prime minister, but said he intended to stay on as a humble backbencher, at least for the remainder of Parliament's term.

The reason for the sudden change of heart? We learn from James Hanning, a plugged-in journalist and Cameron biographer, that while money played a role, the bigger reason was probably plain old boredom.

After leaving 10 Downing Street, Hanning reports, Cameron "received 'a flood of job offers,' all of which he turned down," but then "found himself constantly disappointed by his previously ever-buzzing phone."

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As a consummate PR man (his only job in the private sector), Cameron ought to know too well that though he is being ignored now, the tides of the PR gods will turn, and he will soon be asked again for his opinion on various matters of import, now as an elder statesman. But he was too impatient. He was too itchy. He needs the limelight now, not later.

This sort of anxious hyperactivity seems to be a dominant psychological feature among many successful politicians.

Bill Clinton hit the accelerator on his political career so hard so soon that he was quickly America's "youngest ex-governor." He ran for president as soon as he got a shot, but derailed the crucial early days of his first term by trying to keep too many plates spinning at the same time. Even now all his aides can testify to his compulsive need to always be doing something.

As an ambitious young politician in France, Nicolas Sarkozy wore his hyperactivity on his sleeve, arguing that it showed he would push through tough reforms where others got cold feet; he is now full-on running for president after vowing to "retire permanently from political life" after losing his re-election bid in 2012.

When Sarkozy's main rival on the right was Jacques Chirac, the sitting president who was then in his 70s, Chirac painted himself as the cool statesman against the callow up-and-comer. But in his early political career, Chirac was known for exactly this same kind of hyperactivity, so much so that he got caricatured for it in that monument of French culture, Astérix.

This year, America's campaign-addicted politician is Marco Rubio. BuzzFeed's must-read portrait of the running senator who once promised not to run again describes an anxiety-tinged restlessness. Change a few words and details, and you could be writing about Cameron, Clinton, Sarkozy, or Chirac. After leaving his office as speaker of the Florida House, Rubio contemplated a politically nonsensical run for mayor of Miami-Dade, simply because he needed to run for something.

What explains this odd psychological trait, and its overrepresentation among politicians?

That anxiety breeds restlessness seems straightforward enough. An anxious person needs to busy himself to run away from the anxiety. They have an extra helping of the universal human need for what the French mystic Blaise Pascal called divertissement, the need to distract oneself from one's mortality. "All of man's misery comes from his incapacity to sit alone in an empty quiet room," Pascal once wrote.

Anxiety also breeds the need to be liked, the need for praise and validation, the need for a pedestal. Politics provides the best fix for an anxious, attention-craving, validation-seeking person. Cameron, Clinton, Sarkozy, Chirac, and Rubio have spent their entire adult lives in politics, and were drawn to it from early adulthood.

While anxiety can be self-destructive, it can also be a political asset. Through some strange alchemy, a need to be liked can be translated into a powerful form of interpersonal charisma. Chirac was without a doubt the greatest retail politician of the French post-war era, with an almost supernatural capacity to fixate his entire attention on just the person in front of him, as if they were the only person in the universe, and then do just the same with the next person.

Bill Clinton has a similar way about him. He's all but impossible to dislike at a personal level, no matter how much you may disagree with his politics and character. He and Chirac both pass the "Would you like to have a beer with them?" test with flying colors — and it's only slight hyperbole to say that Chirac has had a beer with every adult in France.

While these men all have stunning political resumes, their legacies tend to be thin in accomplishments. The same anxiety that breeds political success does not fit well with actual governance. If you get into politics for psychological reasons, because the game of it feeds some deep craving, you will not tend to be the statesmanlike character.

So why do we vote for them?

Everyone talks about the mediocrity of politicians, and this year is certainly a great example. But, of course, we get the politicians we deserve. We say we want courageous statesmen with gravitas, but if that was such a political winner, that's who we would get. Perhaps attention-addled leaders are fitting for an attention-addled age, or perhaps we want anxious politicians because we ourselves are anxious. Perhaps we want to be ravished by the dashing seducer, even though deep down we know we'll regret it in the morning, instead of the boring, steady, take-him-home-to-mom character. Perhaps it's not our politicians who need to chill out and grow up, it's us.