Institutional Paralysis Is the System Working
We can still do stuff, we just need people to agree to want to do it
I subscribe to an oddball collection of newsletters through Substack and other platforms, which leads to the occasional moment of worldview whiplash in my inbox. For example, yesterday, I got the email versions of James Pethokoukis’s paean to the promise and possibility of new technology:
hard on the heels of Timothy Burke’s lament about the failure of the institutions of liberal democracy:
I mean, that’s a hell of a one-two punch.
As a matter of personal temperament, I am more aligned with what Pethokoukis is trying to do, so while I don’t entirely agree with his piece, I’m mostly going to let it be for now. I did want to poke a bit at something Burke said, though, because I think it inadvertently gets at a core problem with a lot of progressive political discourse.
The specific passage that brought me up short is toward the end of this (kind of a lengthy quote, sorry, but it feels necessary for context), as one example of a modern failure:
[…]The Cold War always had a horrific stench of hypocrisy around it, but most mainstream liberals and conservatives at its height could still reasonably assert that liberal democratic societies were better foundations for human flourishing than the East Bloc’s regimes and that progress towards liberal democratic ideals was still possible and even likely in the US and Europe. European empires were ending, the civil rights movement was leading the way towards internal reform followed by feminism and other social movements, social democracies were taming the excesses of capitalism.
In the 1980s, however, Reagan and Thatcher turned their backs on that vision of progress, and then “Third Way” liberal-progressive parties in the US, UK, Spain and elsewhere followed in that direction in the 1990s. As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, the consequences of that abandonment are brutally clear. Nobody believes in progress any longer, no political leadership has a vision of a future where human beings are freer, happier and more secure than they are today. The best we get from most political parties and leaders is a vision of holding on to what we’ve got with a few modest incremental improvements around the edges. The entire global economy is strangling under the weight of runaway inequality and shadowy wealth accumulation that is beyond the ability of any nation to regulate or control. Democratic governance is threatened at every level, from school boards to national leadership. The entire planet just performed a resounding pratfall in the face of a global pandemic and almost no government is willing to honestly and thoroughly commit to the scale of response needed to face climate change.
(Emphasis added.)
That’s a pretty common sentiment online, but I don’t really buy it. In a number of important ways, the global institutional response to the pandemic was actually pretty amazing. We developed remarkably effective vaccines in a fraction of the time being suggested by relative optimists in March 2020, and delivered vast numbers of shots in an impressively short time. Especially in the early days, people changed their behavior to a degree that I would not have thought likely, in ways that really did slow the rate of spread. And on the politics and economics side, the measures enacted to stave off collapse have, if anything, turned out to be a little too effective, aggravating the inflation that has everyone all pissed off right now.
More to the point, I’m not sure there was ever a plausible route to a dramatically better set of outcomes, and I’m not sure that’s actually a Bad Thing. I remember back in the very early days seeing a clip of a public health doctor on a news show giving an admiring description of the contaiment measures China was implementing, and recoiling from it. The measures he described— spot-checking people in public spaces and immediately whisking anyone who showed a hint of a Covid symptom off to involuntary quarantine— certainly seemed like they would be effective at quashing the pandemic, but they were also the kind of thing that’s only possible when you’ve got a large and well-developed apparatus for disappearing people who piss you off. I’m not sure I want anybody to have access to that kind of power, and I was especially queasy at the thought of establishing such a regime while Donald Trump was still President. And yet that clip kept getting shared into my timeline by people who had had “#Resistance” in their profiles in 2017, to the point where I think I blocked the account that originally posted it in order to make. it. stop.
To be sure, there were aspects of the response that were less than exemplary—a lot of the public health athorities turned out to be sclerotically bureaucratic, and there were some absolutely horrendous failures of messaging— but by and large I think that the large formal institutions of society have functioned about as well as they might reasonably be expected to. “Covid Zero” was never really on the table in the kinds of large, interconnected, and free-wheeling societies that we have in most modern liberal democracies. The “best case” scenario from a narrow public health perspective would’ve required actions and capabilities for action that we’re simply not set up for, by the nature of our societies, but we’ve avoided the worst case scenarios thanks to collective action, and that shouldn’t be dismissed.
There have definitely been large-scale problems, chiefly in the widespread resistance to free and life-saving vaccines, but those are fundamentally not failures of institutions so much as they are failure of individual preferences. The resistance to vaccines and masks and other preventive measures is not indicative of an inability to Do Stuff, it’s reflecting a difference in what people want to see done. When politicians and the public are doing things that public health authorities and other parts of the public don’t like it’s a reflection of the fact that those people have different priorities, and regard certain kinds of activities as more essential than others. There’s a sense in which that ends up looking like a kind of institutional paralysis, but that’s because the institutions of our society are set up to be responsive to what people want, and different people want different things.
And this, I think, is where the flaw in Burke’s larger argument about the Cold War and its aftermath lies, which is a flaw shared with a lot of broader progressive political arguments. That is, the problem isn’t that “human flourishing” and “progress towards liberal democratic ideals” aren’t possible, it’s that we don’t agree about what those things are. Or, put another way, it’s not that all progress has stopped, but rather that we’ve stopped moving in the direction of a particular vision of what progress looks like. Because, as it turns out, that particular vision is not a goal that is universally shared.
To put it a little harshly, the failure here is not really a failure of capability to do things on a societal level, but a failure of the general public to want to do the things that political progressives think they ought to want to do. And also a simultaneous failure of the general public to want to do the things that many right-wing extremists think they ought to want to do. I don’t think there’s anything especially nefarious at work in either direction— the idea that either corporations or Satanists are secretly manipulating people’s desires just isn’t that plausible— it’s just that people by and large aren’t on board with any of the dramatic visions on offer.
And, you know, that’s kind of the essential problem of politics in a world of liberal democracies: if you want to make dramatic progress in some particular direction, you need to convince a lot of people to also want that. We just haven’t had a broad consensus on the direction we should be moving for a few decades now, which has led to a lot of wheel-spinning or water-treading or whatever frantically active but nevertheless stationary metaphor you like.
That’s also what makes this particular moment in politics so frustrating, as both sides of the argument seem to have abandoned any attempt to build a consensus by persuading the public to see things their way in favor of a variety of “fire up the base” strategies that involve taking ever more extreme positions with ever narrower appeal. The response to people not sharing the political goals of one side or the other is all too often “Well, they’re Terrible People, we don’t need them,” rather than making any attempt to bring them around. There’s a real “a pox on both your houses” feel to a lot of politics these days, particularly as conducted on social media, where I don’t particularly want to be associated with the louder voices even on my own side of the political spectrum.
In the end, I still believe that progress is possible, mostly because it’s actually happening. In the wake of some incredibly stupid remarks around the confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, a lot of people have been re-sharing graphs of polling about interracial marriage and gay marriage, both of which have in my lifetime gone from tiny minorities approving to substantial majorities (sub-30% to over-90% approval for the former). Hyperbolic claims to the contrary aside, discrimination and harassment on the grounds of race, sex, and disability are vastly less accepted today than even twenty years ago. Cars and houses are substantially safer, more comfortable, and more energy-efficient than when I was a kid, and the growth in renewable energy over the last ten years or so is nothing short of astonishing. All of that represents real progress in the lives of real people, and it’s all been happening while we’re mired in partisanship and indecision.
To wrap this back around to the start, I keep hoping for something like Pethokoukis’s “Up Wing” to emerge, with an optimistic vision that can help create a consensus around a shared goal. I believe that as a society we’re stll capable of doing amazing things— probably more capable now than at any point in history— but we’ve forgotten how to get people to want to do them, and that’s holding us back.
So that’s this week’s demonstration of why I’ll never hold elective office. Here are some buttons:
and if you want to try to throw cold water on my optimism, the comments will be open.
I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you intend to be advocating a more optimistic line of thought than Burke did; I think you have had the opposite effect on me.
Optimism here requires the belief that people can be convinced to want to make and hold on to positive changes, and (from this article and from years of reading your previous writings) you seem to believe this is possible. The effect of the last few years on me has been to damage that belief (in me and many others) nearly beyond the capacity to repair. How do you convince people to make positive change when they have demonstrated an active and pervasive hostility to the notions of first-order logic and consensual physical reality? How can you convince them to care about other people when they literally deride empathy as a weakness? Saying, "We just have to find a way to convince a strong majority of people to make positive change," sounds far too much like, "We just have to find a way to make cheap batteries with an energy density greater than that of hydrocarbons;" yes, it's not theoretically impossible, but I sure don't see a path to it.
I used to be optimistic, and I want to be again, but I see no way forward on far too many issues.
Whenever I read someone like Burke complaining that "we" aren't doing enough about pandemics or climate change I have to wonder. Why didn't HE go to med school? Why didn't he study chemistry so he could work on vaccines? Why didn't he go to engineering school so he could push the envelope on power plant design? All he's doing is sitting around clacking a keyboard. Get up and do something, man.