I’ve Had My Fill: Of Limited Faith or Interest in Contemporary Politics

Image Source: Unsplashed

1.

I don’t care about politics. This wasn’t always the case. I used to care. I cared so much about politics and policy that I enrolled in a graduate program in public policy, moved to Washington, DC, interned at a think tank, and started a career in economic policy, all the while spending a lot of time reading about and debating politics on the internet. The latter has not been the case for a few years now.

I do still care about public policy. I care about policy a great deal. More to the point, my policy concerns are the reason that I no longer care about politics. The two have become separated in an unreconcilable manner. Divorce is immanent. Maybe more than divorce. There is a dystopian future in which all meaningful policy decisions are made by some combination of appointed bureaucrats and AI algorithms, while elected officials mostly shout at each other on the internet. We are not there yet, but we inch closer every day.[i]

Here is my basic view of contemporary domestic politics: due to a bunch of long-term structural issues, politicians have limited ability to make meaningful improvements to the status quo. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Moreover, people refuse to make the trade-offs necessary to tackle the structural issues. Unwilling or unable to confront their constituents with these basic facts, politicians have resorted to giving us culture war. The larger political and media ecosystem has followed suit. For the most part, we the people have eaten it up and come back for seconds.

As for me, I’ve had my fill.

2.

There are three basic reasons why politics is no longer an interesting or fulfilling topic.

1. Political arguments tend to focus on yesterday’s conflicts: Yesterday’s conflicts provide the basis for today’s political organization. Take labor unions. There is a history of American workers successfully agitating for rights and compensation through collective bargaining. Does that mean that unions are the right way or only way forward? Can service sector unions replicate the past successes of industrial unions? Do public sector unions have an undue influence on public policy? I don’t have answers to these questions, but they are the important ones. Yet, our discourse on unions tend to degenerate into an anachronistic “union good/union bad” dichotomy, which mostly centers around where unions sit on the political spectrum. Is this best for American workers? Again, I don’t have an answer, but this is a question that our contemporary political debates have largely ignored.

2. Political arguments trend towards second-order abstractions: This point flows from the first. Political power resides in legacy organizations, in existing government programs, and in well-staked political positions; so, politicians and the politically minded explicitly defend those positions, often to the detriment of the underlying policy issue. To continue with above example, I don’t care about labor unions per se. I care about maximizing the welfare of working people. Contemporary politics has become quite adept at using the bait and switch to make people believe that support for a particular institution or government program equates to support for their stated outcome. It is understandable that teachers’ unions want you to believe that what’s best for them is best for students. It’s understandable that police unions want you to believe that what’s best for them is perfectly in alignment with optimal criminal justice policy. But how can that be? How can these things line up so perfectly? It is these questions, these tensions, that contemporary politics too often pushes to the side in favor of some flavor of culture war.

3. Political alignment has become sub-optimal heuristic. Too many people derive their beliefs from their identities. ‘I am progressive. I support public education and support teachers; therefore, I am with the teachers’ unions in opposing charter schools and vouchers.’ Or, ‘I am conservative. I believe in law and order and support the law enforcement officers who maintain it; therefore, I stand with the police unions in opposing bail reform.” These are phenomenally stupid ways of forming policy positions; yet they are the norm.

The long and the short is that I no longer care about politics because I care about outcomes. All the other stuff is window dressing. Unfortunately, political arguments have become dominated by a focus on tribe and identity rather than on the practical matter of fixing what’s wrong. This will change eventually because it must. But the present situation can persist for quite a long time. I fear that it will.

3.

I sometimes look around and think that we live in the dumbest timeline. Then I catch myself. Many things are getting better, maybe even most things. But politics is not one of those things. In regard to politics, we are most certainly living in the dumbest timeline. Partly, this is because, while politics has gotten dumber, the demand to become political has increased. These two things are related, though who can say in which direction the causality runs.

There is a paradox here. On one hand, our problems are deceptively simple; on the other, the solutions are almost impossible, at least in the short term. Consider the so-called housing crisis.[ii] Housing is expensive because we chose to make housing expensive, because we decided that single family homes on large lots in exclusively-zoned neighborhoods was the only socially acceptable aspiration for a country of America’s wealth. From there, everything that followed was a matter cause and effect. That is the simple part. However, no single person or group of people made this decision. It is the outcome of a bunch of individual actors doing what they thought was the right thing. For this to change, something dramatic will have to happen.

What is more likely, though, is that these trends will continue to play out. We will make adjustments on the margins. Some places will be better at this than others. But we won’t make any large-scale meaningful reforms. The chips will fall will where they may and individuals will make adjustments as they can. Welcome to the future.

4.

There is a view out there that to not care about politics is a privilege. This is a stupid idea. Full stop. More than stupid, the idea is easily falsifiable. Go investigate for yourself. Go to Washington D.C. Go to Capitol Hill. See who composes the bulk of congressional staff. Talk to them. Where did they go to school? What are their parents’ professions? Then walk down K Street. Go into the lobbying firms and the think tanks and the non-profits and NGOs. Ask the same questions of the people who work there. You can repeat the same experiment in state capitols and in the city halls of America’s largest metropolitan areas. The people who congregate around the levers of power are privileged, by any meaningful definition of the word.

The importance of politics might be true in an aspirational way. There are certainly marginalized groups who need to seek reform through the political process. But even that is true only in a propositional way, meaning that it could be true or it could not be true. Now ask yourself: for how many groups is this still the case?

I offer a counter proposition. If you find yourself in some way marginalized, then odds are that politics is no longer your first best option for how to improve your lot. This connects directly to the idea that we are mostly fighting over the past and not the future. The future belongs to those who create it. This is true whether or not we want it to be true. So, ask yourself one final question: to what extent do you have faith in contemporary American politics to create an equitable, appealing or sustainable future?

5.

I don’t want to end on a negative note. It is not my intention to just shit on politics and leave it at that. Things are bad, in some ways worse than we know. That said, the basic machinery of liberal democratic governance continues to function. Emigration to the United States would be a net benefit for the majority of people on the planet. We should work to keep this true.

It is not my intention to say that politics or government has no role to play in the future. Quite the opposite. My intention is to point out that future will be determined by the quality of our policy solutions, not by the tenor of our politics.

Some of this will appear contradictory. I know. But I mean this to be a beginning, not an end, the first in a series. I want to highlight a few examples, a few policy areas where the political debate has become sufficiently abstracted that it bears little resemblance to the underlying issue. And beyond that, I hope to offer some suggestions on how we might move forward in a more sane and purposeful manner.

[i] I wrote that before seeing this: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/reclaiming-her-time-helena-andrews-dyerr-eric-thomas?variant=32204578291746. You can decide for yourself how close we are to dystopia.

[ii] The proliferation of crises is another sign of how unserious our politics have become. People label things as a crisis as a way of implying urgency, yet people’s behavior very rarely signals a crisis. We have a “student loan crisis” and yet you are at brunch, eating avocado toast, posting to social media on your newly-financed iPhone?