Yglesias is doing a tweetstorm of “Confess Your Unpopular Opinions” (141, one for each fav he got), and I agree with more of them than I disagree. But I wanted to draw attention to the political trap we’ve fallen into with one.
Almost every smart person agrees with this, and what more, thinks most other people don’t. “Other people” are the ones who care about some big symbolic matters that can be captured in soundbites. We care about the complicated details that get resolved behind the scenes. Right?
Ideally for us consequence-oriented technocrats, this should mean basing elections and voting on substantive policy details.
Instead of bringing enlightened policy focus, this makes a problem.
The really important stuff can’t be campaigned on in a soundbite.
Therefore the really important stuff MUST NOT BE what’s campaigned on with soundbites. It must be in the details that are worked on behind closed doors. Definitionally, the public doesn’t know about them.
So what you actually have to do is make sure your guys win, and so people you trust are making these closed doors technical decisions, instead of the other side.
So even if the other side promises things like “We won’t execute you with death panels” or “We won’t touch Social Security”, you just can’t trust what they’ll do with the details of the policy that the public isn’t paying attention to.
So you have to signal to your less-educated allies “ignore the policy compromises they are making publicly, it won’t matter. All that matters is getting your guy - no matter how personally dumb or cynical he is - in power so his assistants can be the one solving these boring technical aspects.
So the ideological elites crank UP the symbolic campaign agitprop, and ignore any attempts at proposed compromise.
So the campaign is entirely about blunt symbolism.
The people actually governing… only have blunt symbolism to guide them. In fact, voters on both sides seemed completely uninterested in policy and middle ground.
The people governing base all their management details on what looks good in the simplest terms to the base.
Which is, you know, like the Republican Parties entire response to Obamacare and every bill afterwards. “This policy might sound conservative, but it’s so complicated that a Democrat running it will screw us over. <Enter Trump> And now that we’re in charge, we don’t even know what to do to make this work.”
(Edit: Readers of this blog know: Every extremist trend in the Republican Party, like this, the Democratic Party is only 5-15 years behind on then they’ll be doing it too.)
