Against Incorporating Politics into Medical Professionalism

Calls for political advocacy as essential to the medical professional mission have grown more frequent and insistent in the United States in the past 15 years. The author offers reasons why these calls should be resisted and a tentative diagnosis of the recent rise in their frequency. Especially in the past five years, professionals of many callings have embraced politics in their work. The author suggests that this embrace exhibits a utopian political moralism that has recently displaced a 20th-century "small-l liberalism" consensus among American professionals. While this moralism has provided a strong impetus for infusing politics into professionalism, it has not improved the cogency of arguments in favor of that course: arguments that professional politics are demanded by a social contract, by clinical ethics, by professional requirements to further population health, or by the alleged fact that "everything is political." Practical disadvantages of making politics part of the medical profession's identity include a continued decline in public trust and respect for the American medical profession.