Consensus By Attrition

A system of rule by a coalition of the annoying

Annoying planning board meeting

Matt Yglesias did a post last week with the headline “Community meetings aren’t democracy”, which starts with a story about trying to do home renovations:

I decided a few years ago to put solar panels on my roof. Because I live in a historic district, I needed to get permission from the Historic Preservation Review Board. I was advised that such permission would be more likely to be granted if the proposal was endorsed by my local Advisory Neighborhood Committee. The solar installer and I couldn’t get ourselves on that month’s meeting agenda, and I had to be out of town on the evening of the following month’s meeting, but the month after that we schlepped over to a meeting and presented our plan. As it happens, none of the tiny handful of citizens who happen to have showed up that evening had any objection, so the ANC endorsed us and then the HPRB endorsed us at their next meeting, so the solar panels went forward with nothing more than three months’ delay and some wasted money.

From there, it mostly goes off in a different direction, talking about the historical backstory of how we got to a place where Federal policy is almost completely determined through lawsuits. Which, you know, may or may not be the correct read on the whole business; the bit that resonated with me, though, was the bit about being forced through a series of public meetings, rather than, in Yglesias’s words, “entrusting elected leaders with the authority to make decisions on subjects of public concern.”

Yglesias’s story is a relatively short and happy one; there are no end of other examples of perfectly reasonable projects being dragged down by busybody neighbors. We had one of these by us, when one of our neighbors set up a temporary pool in their yard during the summer with tight Covid restrictions (when the public pools were inaccessible). We got a letter inviting us to a meeting about whether they should be allowed a variance so their kid could cool off; we couldn’t make the date of the meeting, but sent a letter of support. They were shot down, though, by one of Those Guys, a fussy neighbor who maintained his yard like it was the 18th fairway at Augusta National. He objected strongly, and at least tried to recruit other folks on the block to join him (not us, probably because he rightly regarded us as a lost cause given how infrequently I trim the bushes in front of our house), and the variance was denied after the meeting.

(The folks with the pool had the last laugh, because the order denying the variance gave them 30 days to remove the pool. Which they used every single one of, taking them to basically Labor Day, when they didn’t need the pool any more…)

There are a whole ton of these stories on social media, mostly around issues to do with housing in big city neighborhoods, because that’s an obsession with a certain segment of the pundit class. I don’t really care much about that— I might actually consider paying money for a LLM-based Twitter plugin to parse my feed for people whining about life in the Bay Area and automatically mute those threads— but it does reflect a broader problem, one that afflicts a lot of other policy-making.

That is, the solar-panel thing wasn’t a big deal for Yglesias, because he’s rich and works in media. It’s not that hard for someone like him to take an evening or two to go to meetings and craft a pitch for his minor renovations that will go down well with the local committee. For other people, though, speaking at a public meeting could be a major impediment, in terms of both time/money and the stress of presentation. It was more annoying for our neighbor with the pool (he was a cop of some sort), but still not a huge deal, in part because they said “Screw it,” and gave up after one round; they probably could’ve dragged the fight out more, but it wasn’t worth the time and effort for a seasonal pool. (They moved out before the next summer.)

And while neither of these is remotely a big deal, they’re sort of emblematic of how a particular sort of person wins in this sort of community-meeting-based politics. They don’t need to achieve any broad consensus, just to make the process annoying enough that everyone else gives it up as a bad use of time.

This kind of consensus-by-attrition is a hard problem to get around, too, because the people who use it can draw on some reasonably powerful rhetorical tropes if they (temporarily) lose. A decision that goes the “wrong” way represents a failure to adequately consider the wishes of the community, and all that. And there’s some real basis for wanting the community to have a chance to give input to the process.

At the same time, though, the noble ideal of soliciting community input can very easily be weaponized into “We need to keep having meetings until everybody agrees with me.” Which is rarely achieved through persuasion, but mostly through repetition: making essentially the same arguments over and over until those who disagree decide they have better things to do with their time and bow out. Rhetorically, the process is extremely inclusive, almost to a fault, but in practice it reserves power to whoever can make participating in governance maximally irritating for their opponents.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, or even if there is a solution. Any individual case can be won by persuading the relevant governing body (whether legislative, executive, or judicial) to take a firm stand. But the core of the problem is a kind of cumulative effect: you may win one fight, but at enough of a cost in time and stress that you’re less willing to step up the next time around. Until eventually, the only people participating in the process at all are annoying cranks, and reasonably normal people want nothing at all to do with governing.

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There’s some old-man-yells-at-cloud content to start the week. Here’s a button if you liked it:

And if you’d like to attempt to bring me around to a different view by just endlessly restating it in slightly different words, the comments will be open:

(For a while, at least…)