The Crown and the Cudgel

A celebration of ambition and embarrassment

Often I will rewatch old presidential debates because I am both a dork and genuinely fascinated by the dynamics of these events. For most of the men¹ on stage, these debates signify a rejection of reality in service of their total ambition. They have eyed the Oval Office for decades, and nothing, not even abysmal polling numbers and minuscule fundraising totals, will change their belief that this is their destiny. They are the man for the moment. Some openly proclaim that their decision to run is a calling from the Almighty, and others proudly state that their movement is decades in the making. Yet, as I’m sure you know, most of these men never even see the Iowa caucuses, let alone the Oval Office. Their campaigns die in the cold winter months in Des Moines diners. Their withdrawal is covered by a lonely CNN article and quickly forgotten as the real contenders fight for the crown.

In 2020, more than twenty-five candidates ran for the Democratic nomination. Twenty-five! Sitting Senators and Governors, a former Vice President, and everything in between—all lunging for a nomination that could end up being totally worthless. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley both felt that the time to take the crown from Donald Trump was worth the risk of political suicide, and both failed. Conversely, loyalty and ambition can sometimes work in complete unison, as those eyeing the nomination can remain suddenly quiet when the party engages in controlled detonation. When President Biden’s mental deficiencies became clear, there were hundreds of stories about “sources close to the President” describing a man unfit to live alone, much less run the free world. Yet, where were those who just four years ago had wanted so badly to have the keys to power?

Senator Bernie Sanders, the last candidate to withdraw and endorse Biden, steadfastly defended the sitting President and rejected calls for his resignation. Governor Gavin Newsom, a man so obviously obsessed with the Oval Office it may rival my own ambition, passionately defended the President as a man of mental courage and conviction. Time and time again the American people were obviously, incredulously, lied to. We knew it, and they knew it, but the charade of loyalty continued because nobody wanted to be “the one that cost the Democrats the election.” It’s fitting that when President Biden heard about Senator Mark Warner quietly pushing for his withdrawal, the President brought up how Warner had once eyed the same office that Biden now held. Success is as much a crown as it is a cudgel, and those that wield its power can just as easily bludgeon those that failed in the chase.

I think we all remember where we were when we saw Biden had dropped out. I do, at least. I remember for a brief hour thinking that the party would see its first open convention in decades. I remember thinking about the candidates who had obviously been posturing for this position for years. Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, of course Governor Gavin Newsom of California, and many more that would fill the Wikipedia section of “also-rans.” Yet as quickly as those thoughts entered my head, they left them. President Biden had endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris, and the knives were put away for another four years. I don’t think that Gavin Newsom suddenly stopped wanting to be President, nor do I believe that Shapiro and Whitmer aren’t quietly daydreaming over the campaign to come.

Therein lies the fight in ambition. Few people are truly ambitious. True ambition is not a glamorous pursuit of greatness but a tumultuous and usually miserable need to always be moving towards a public goal. You may think that this need for external approval is some type of psychosomatic trauma originating from childhood. Being picked last in the dodgeball game turns into your Senate campaign—or so it goes. I reject this flatly. Ambition is miserable not in the need for external validation or the pursuit of approval but because the truly ambitious are aiming for something that can physically not be given to everyone. How many members of the House of Representatives dream of their would-be Senate campaign? I would bet a lot. Almost every Senator has expressed at least a bit of interest in a Presidential campaign, as has every Governor eyeing the full purview of the executive. Yet, there can only be a hundred Senators, fifty Governors, and one President.

If ambition was always a vice, then I’m not sure what you could call its presence in younger people especially. Largely, ambition has turned into something to stay away from, something you should ignore out of fear of embarrassment or even mere perception. Don’t look for a new job in a field you care about; simply “quiet quit” and resign yourself to a lifetime of safe passivity. I typically find large think-pieces on young culture to be verbose examples of people who spend far too much time online. We could repopulate the rainforest with the pages of “dating sucks” pieces that act as if before the iPhone was invented, dating and sex were a wonderful and mature exchange of feelings. Yet, one thing I will admit is that young people are, more than ever, afraid of saying—and therefore doing—what they truly want.

We live in an excuse culture, which in some respects is a great step forward. Understanding the effects that mental health has on job and school performance isn’t optional; it’s a necessity. Many people follow the safe financial route out of high school because they can’t afford to gallivant around Europe “finding themselves” and writing Substack articles.² The downside of an excuse culture is that those who otherwise need to be pushed out of their comfort zone and cognitive dullness are dissuaded from taking the risks they need to take. A thousand screenshots of Hinge profiles or “story times” of personal relationship details that should stay personal have severely impacted the minds of young people, making them incredibly risk-averse. There is always a foreboding sense with any interaction or relationship that this will be broadcasted.

Naturally, this risk-averse behavior extends into the belief in oneself. I’m not going to say “failure builds you, blah blah blah” because A, failure sucks and is hard, and B, there is never a guarantee of future returns. Luck plays a massive part in success, particularly in the political field. Sure, grit and perseverance matter, but luck is the true kingmaker. Luck is also something that we like to pretend doesn’t exist, and when we do acknowledge it, we tend to perceive it as having total control over our lives. You either control everything or control nothing. Mark Zuckerberg is either a result of superhuman grit and intelligence or supernatural luck. In reality, neither is totally true. The work you put in, particularly in your younger years, gives you more metaphorical darts to aim at your personal bullseye.

Being risk-averse, particularly when you’re young, is pretending that the one dart you have is good enough and that you never truly wanted to hit the bullseye in the beginning. Besides, what if someone saw you miss? So you sit in the back of the bar, watching other people aim and, yes, sometimes miss, and snicker about how stupid and embarrassing they are for trying. Those that hit the bullseye are written off as lucky or born with better aim; you couldn’t have ever done that. In fact, hitting the bullseye is embarrassing! This extends everywhere in modern life. Dating apps, while vilified for exposing natural human behavior, are emblematic of how afraid we are of risk. You know everyone on Hinge and Tinder is at least looking for someone in some type of romantic aspect. It’s safe. You aren’t bothering a person on the street or in a café, and you aren’t emotionally invested or embarrassed if things go awry.

If you were to line up a hundred people my age by how ambitious they were, I think I’d be first. I’ve wanted to be a politician since I was sitting on my grandfather’s lap in the Barre, Vermont city council building. When I was thirteen, I dressed up as Michael Dukakis³ and ran a political blog.⁴ I collected old pins, signs, and memorabilia from Presidential campaigns and imagined my last name on a yard sign. I imagined myself giving my convention speech and how much I wanted to hear the roar of a crowd and a country putting their faith in me. I still do.

Saying you want to be President at my age elicits a range of reactions from “grim shock” to “amused chuckle.” It feels absurd. Along with astronaut and firefighter, President feels like a job you hear from a third grader whose knowledge of the employment field revolves around their parents’ work and the big red trucks that drive by and make loud noises. There are twenty-nine astronauts in space right now, which is twenty-eight more than the number of Presidents in office. To add onto the grim statistics, there are many like me who are far wealthier and far more well-connected that have similar political aspirations. Yet, I don’t care. I want to be President of the United States. I probably always will. I quite literally dream of sitting behind the Resolute Desk, of seeing “President Andrade” on a letterhead, and of helping the people in this country and world that need it most.

I do not credit my ambition to anything other than my powerful fear of dying and non-existence. I can’t wrap my mind around simply not being. This fear impacts every aspect of my life in complete totality. My fear of death far outweighs my fear of embarrassing myself. Much of American society, and society as a whole, is based on avoiding the topic of death until the last possible moments. Even doctors, those we entrust to tell us the truth, frequently fail to tell ailing families about the seriousness of their terminally ill child.⁵ Ernest Becker, author of the tremendous Denial of Death, called this the “tranquility of the trivial,” or put simply the practice of filling your day with the innocuous annoyances or pleasures at your immediate disposal. Social media is an obvious example of this pacification, but I treat it as more of a symptom than the disease itself. If anything, social media may magnify just how much a part of our self tries to pull us into controlled uselessness.

Denying the inevitability of your death, and the death of the world you know, can lead many to think that nothing matters. And sure, maybe nothing “matters,” and your actions may be ultimately inconsequential, but this is, in my opinion, another excuse to pacify your mind. If you truly and dutifully believed that this is all meaningless, then you would not be alive reading this. You are genetically engineered to believe that things have meaning and purpose, and rightfully so! Why would you pretend that the relationships you have and the things that inspire and draw awe from you are not inherently amazing?

Some are able to acknowledge the urgency of life but can’t ever seem to “find the time” to reorient themselves to their true meaning. Waaiting around for the “right moment” or pretending that the on-ramp to your dreams is magically unveiled at X age is asking for a dull and depressing life. Acting with vigilance and fervor in the face of death’s looming unpredictability but undoubtable certainty is a difficult task. If you treat every day as its own vacuum that has no relation to any other day, you will do no more than those that ignore death in entirety. Rather, you must always be moving towards your desired goal. Always. Every day.

An early death would not mean that I was robbed of the chance of being President; I most likely will never be. In fact, an early death, if lived with purpose and with passion, would be far more enriching than many who lived twice as long in a cognitive cage of their own creation. The ability to find your meaning and harness your ambition is a truly modern phenomenon of which we should take with far more apprecation than we currently do. Over a billion people on Earth make under a dollar a day. These are people with the same capabilities to dream and to love who will never have the chance to try. If you cannot find a spark to harness your ambition, and you cannot see the good in trying at all in the face of cosmic insignificance, then you must at least try for those that want to but never will. Holding the torch of humanity for the billions who were lucky enough to be born into this wonderful world but damned to the unforgiving cruelty of our slow ascent to modernity.

Live your life with the self-confidence of a long-shot Presidential candidate. Sleeping on a shitty mattress in a Manchester, New Hampshire Hilton Inn in the hopes your 1% can double to 2% to qualify for a debate that few will watch and fewer will be moved by. The rational and risk-averse will rightfully point out the absurdity of these operations, and yet, it never stops. In four years, more hopefuls will crowd the stage and truly, earnestly, believe that they are the chosen one. Yet when all is said and done, there will be no question as to what could’ve been. You ran. You tried. That is the point and the fulfillment of true, earnest ambition. Finding freedom and not fear in death, and constantly engaging in the dreams and goals that push us to get out of bed.

“It is far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” - President Teddy Roosevelt

1. Until 2020, almost always men.

2. A bit of a self-own here.

3. Big reaction from older neighbors.

4. Substack’s existence should, in a fair world, save dozens of thirteen-year-old boys from the horrors of SEO Optimization.

5. A wonderful and heartbreaking piece on this societal failure