Partisan Politics

We are told that we are in a time of partisan politics. We hear people saying, “It’s not about left and right; it’s about right and wrong.” The very word politics appears to have dirty connotations. Some people want to do The Right Thing, but other people undermine them through politics. How are we to interpret all this?

Politics

Politics is the term for the activities involved in determining what a group of people are going to do as a collective. It can be conducted well or badly, for high principles or base motives. Politics itself is neither good nor bad, it just is. To have collective action, the individuals in the collective must have some means of determining whether the collective should engage in that action or not.

There has to be a process that everyone buys into in which the decision is made and everyone who didn’t agree with the decision accepts it. Otherwise, the group flies apart the first time a contentious issue has to be resolved. The group can anoint someone king and do whatever the king says. The group can create a central committee, where committee members represent various constituencies. There are different ways of categorizing the governance of a collective, but all have varying strengths and weaknesses in confronting a common and repeating set of problems in the collective life of the group.

Beyond Politics

In the Age of Reason, people sought to work out great questions on a rational basis. One of the great projects of the period, also known as the Enlightenment, was: How do we govern a nation, which is a collective, and work out collective goals equitably and from rational principles? People were no longer willing to accept governance on the basis of either divine commands or natural law derived from religion. There were too many religions, and people recoiled from 150 years of Europeans killing each other over choice of religion.

Ultimately, Enlightenment philosophers hoped to work out a single optimal way to determine how everyone ought to live, both individually and collectively.

An example of a plan for the individual was Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus. The zenith of the plan for the collective was described in 1878 by Friedrich Engels, the collaborator of the more famous Karl Marx. Although writing well after the Enlightenment ended, Engels captured the nut of the aspiration for society:

State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out.

The government of persons takes in politics, law and systems of justice. According to Engels, they become superfluous because we know the one right answer to questions such as How should we live together? Then life is simply a matter of implementation. We wouldn’t need politics if we all had unity of thought, arriving at the same answers to such questions. All citizens would unanimously agree on the answers to what are now contentious political questions, and we could just use techniques from decision science and operations research to figure out how best to get from here to there.

If you are reading this and thinking that this is not going to really happen before the Second Coming, I agree with you.

Progressivism

I have resisted calling the people on the American left Liberals. I consider it far more justified to identify them as Progressives, because of their faith in capital-P Progress.

In terms of making a better life for everyone, I am entirely invested in progress. Progress has worked child mortality down in the US from over 46% in 1800 to under 1% lately. I invite anyone who doesn’t like progress to have oral surgery the old-fashioned way, with a jug of hard liquor. However, many Enlightenment thinkers went farther than considerations of material welfare. They hoped that progress would reveal the one truth that would realize the vision Engels articulated, so that we would know the Right Answers to political questions.

That hope is never gone away. It is why they talk about being on the right side of history. If history is going in a particular direction and events will prove that theirs is the path to more harmonious living and greater human happiness. But events never prove anything; if they did, people would not be talking about democratic socialism, which has always been the gateway to totalitarian socialism. Jonah Goldberg created a short video demolishing the “wrong side of history” argument.

The Non-Partisan Expert

Walter Lippmann was an early thought leader in Progressivism, a co-founder of The New Republic. In 1922 he wrote Public Opinion, which many people still study today. Chapters XXV and XXVI of the book called for a separation between knowledge processing and policy formation. Lippmann envisioned a government organized so that non-partisan experts would study issues, analyze alternatives and present policy makers with alternatives, “not caring, in his expert self, what decision is made.” He called for a hard wall of protection around the experts, with no political accountability and no avenue for the policy makers to cut off the funding for the experts when the experts tell the policy makers what the latter do not want to hear.

However, the expert who was totally indifferent to what decision is made would be a crazy person, not suitable for employment. Experts are people, too, and citizens at that. They have their own points of view. When the experts are in control of the generation of alternatives, the policy maker gets the alternative the expert wants the policy maker to have. The expert has the real power here.

Lippmann praised the British Foreign Office as the organization “in which the divorce between the assembling of knowledge and the control of policy is most perfect.” In actual practice, this degenerated into the character of Richard Wharton, the Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office in the British satirical television series Yes, Prime Minister. Wharton judges the readiness of other persons to make foreign policy based on mastery of details, such as the capital of Chad and the national religion of Cameroun. He explains to another civil servant how he manages the elected foreign secretary:

[Bernard] was concerned that the FO produces only one considered view, with no options and no alternatives.

In practice, this presents no problem. If pressed, the FO looks at the matter again, and comes up with the same view. If the Foreign Secretary demands options, the FO obliges him by presenting three options, two of which will be (on close examination) exactly the same. The third will, of course, be totally unacceptable, like bombing Warsaw, or invading France.

One further option is occasionally used: encouraging the Foreign Secretary to work out his own policy. The FO then shows him how it will inevitably lead to World War III, perhaps within 48 hours.

The experts don’t have to be malicious. They don’t even have to conspire. Simply draw your experts from a consistent pool with the same background, such as well-connected top graduates of top-tier universities. You will get a group of experts who all consider the same set of alternatives out of bounds, completely unsuitable for presentation to the policy makers. It’s called groupthink.

The experts are not wrong for having viewpoints and opinions of their own. Something would be wrong with them if they didn’t. However, it is totally unrealistic to expect pallid, indifferent behavior from them. If you turn them loose and leave them in control of the alternatives that the policy makers see, the experts assume control of policy.

The Public Interest

Another evergreen approach to get “above politics” is to invoke the public interest. What I want is in the public interest; your objections are because of your special interest. How do we differentiate these? The public can’t speak for its collective self. Even polls are of limited value. They are dependent on the question being asked and the alternatives presented, which would make the pollsters the experts as previously described (this is, by the way, a problem that direct democracy can’t overcome).

To have a public interest, you must have a priestly class capable of interpreting it. We have many persons offering to shoulder this onerous burden, but they don’t agree with one another as to what the public interest is. At least some of them must be false prophets who would seduce, if possible, the very elect. I am suspicious that all of them are. There is an old rule in business that when two managers who report to you call each other idiots, you should believe them both.

Taking the Politics out of Politics

Hannah Arendt, writing in The Human Condition, divided all human activities into labor, work and action. Labor includes all the repetitive tasks needed to stay alive and maintain the condition of clothing and shelter. Work is making things, and leaves behind durable work products.

Action is activity directed at influencing others. She shows how the ancient Greeks formed the polis to allow free men to assemble and take action to influence the community. The process by which these actions occur is politics. Arendt notes that tyrants, who wanted to deny political participation to the people, would conspire with the artisans to turn the agora from an arena for politics into a bazaar for buying and selling. [pp. 159-160]

When people make statements calling for setting politics aside and solving problems, they implicitly assume that the solution to the problem is known, as if someone had the answer key somewhere. This is a call to take the politics out of politics. People may believe that they know the solution; that is well and good. They must persuade the rest of us, and that takes politics.

Arendt showed that actions result in chains of further actions from other citizens in response. A person can open an issue, but cannot unilaterally close it. Thus, autocrats and oligarchs try to limit the combinatorial explosion of actions in response to their actions. Xi Jinping Thought attempts to limit the field of public discussion. More traditional tyrants try to restrict entry into the agora.

There is no “above politics.” Everyone has their own point of view. To prevail upon a nation to accept that view, a person must either take action and engage in politics or have and use coercive force.