““The fear of his face encouraged the suspicions of the crowd which is always ready to believe that only the guilty dread it’s judgments..”

Anatole France would certainly have known the famous remark of Robespierre, « Je dis que quiconque tremble en ce moment est coupable ; car jamais l’innocence ne redoute la surveillance publique (On applaudit). » – “I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public scrutiny. (Applause)”

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I thought the following excerpt from Anatole France nicely touches on the irrational and cruel element in crowds and democracies and the way in which treating the voice of the People as the voice of God warps justice: (A crowd in a bread-line in revolutionary France mistakenly accuses an old man of stealing, baring their bigotry against the religious in the process by scenting he is a monk, though in secular garb. And then…) 
“The fear of his face encouraged the suspicions of the crowd which is always ready to believe that only the guilty dread it’s judgments, as though the reckless haste with which it comes to them was not sufficient to terrify the most innocent.
Brotteaux had made it a rule never to oppose himself to popular feeling, above all when it showed itself at it’s most illogical and cruel, because, at such moments, he would say to himself, the voice of the people was the voice of God. But Brotteaux now proved inconsistent…”

-Anatole France, The Gods Will Have Blood, pg. 77.

I also cannot think of any “statesmen” or “stateswomen” in our country today. Maybe that is a determination made in retrospect, but I don’t think so.

The problem with rights is that, as Rousseau foresaw, “Each man alienates, I admit, by the social compact, only such part of his powers, goods and liberty as it is important for the community to control; but it must also be granted that the Sovereign [the People] is sole judge of what is important,” for “ if the individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.”

There is nothing essentially undemocratic in saying that the determination of a candidate’s merits and deservingness as as a statesman, or potential statesman, is not a matter which one should surrender to polls and the popular vote. There is a style of taking democracy as the moral determinant but this is something that reeks of the deification of democracy. Your notion of deservingness would seem to contradict the following statement recently quoted in First Thoughts: “I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
What you propose seems to me merely counseling surrender to the supreme collective will. Burke was wiser in warning against the tyranny of the majority. The People always oppress the littler People, such as in the Vendee rebellion or with the earlier collective will in support of slavery. There must be wisdom and moral criteria above the State and the individual, as Antigone trusted there was, a thought in which many slaves found consolation in their slave morality  (Nietzsche, whatever.)

Some of my thoughts were prompted by having to teach ON THE SOCIAL CONTRACT (for the first time in years) this morning. Rousseau’s rich and nuanced attention to the “cultural” preconditions to general willing makes almost no actual decision the result of a genuinely general will. He also makes it clear that the formation of a people capable of having and expressing a general will depends upon the actual (accidental) presence of a legislator, whose character of course is extraordinary.

And while I’ll concede the masterless character of the people as sovereign, Rousseau’s statement on the general will have (for better or worse, mostly for worse, I’d judge) given birth to formulations like Kant’s categorical imperative and Rawls’s veil of ignorance as attempts to “operationalize” what he had in mind.

Stated another way, for Rousseau the real people are unlikely ever really to rule themselves and for his successors the general will can be formulated in terms of what some might inartfully call a decision rule.

This reminds me Charles Taylor who observes that moderns have occulted their moral sources. It seems that, abhorring the deliberative navigation of the moral dimension after such climatic failures in recent history, contemporary man begins to rely on such things as democratic process to substitute for moral discernment in his self-willed moral myopia, even though it is obvious that the good must provide the content otherwise it is a moral vaccuum. All there is is technique and process  once you bar moral deliberation from respectable public status.  ”…the constitutional form in popular psychology today is republican. Each impulse may invoke the Bill of Rights, and have it’s way if the others will let it” (Walter Lippmann). Instead of the summons of wisdom to maturity we substitute an egalitarian approach to all mankind’s impulses. For instance, in sexual impulses, we adopt what Lionel Trilling called a democratic sexual pluralism. Because there is no summons to maturity, because the static against moral deliberation has overwhelmed, it is essentially an adolescent ethics that takes the field, perfectly suited to a  culture of narcissism and adult children.

It seems there are some who would like to turn our thoughts into memes,  or irrational buzzing, that bypasses our reason and possesses it rather than engaging it. It is the kind of public carrying on and emotionally manipulative, disingenuous rhetoric which Socrates scorned in the Apologia.

“We have to ask in this–as, I might add, in every–case whether the victory was deserved. “ 

This reminds me of how T. S. Eliot says of criticism that it is as inevitable as breathing so why not do it well. We need to read politics, as well as books, well. Excessive scorn for critics and for pundits alike easily becomes a diminution of the human critical faculty. It seems President Obama among others often refers to pundits as a group with scorn.