Missing Planks

One of the podcasts that I listen to regularly is "The Rest is Politics" with former English politicians Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell. While on "opposite sides of the aisle" as we would say here in the United States, both men were expelled from their former political parties for an unwillingness to walk as far out on the wings as said parties wanted them to.

In a recent episode, Messrs. Campbell and Stewart were speaking about a report, from the Resolution Foundation, that lays out what's currently wrong with the U.K. economy, and how to fix it. They note that there are a lot of things that politicians should be doing, such as avoiding either a nostalgic take on a past that never really existed (MAGA, anyone?) or looking forward to a version of the nation that doesn't yet exist, being realistic about the current strengths and weaknesses of the economy (and playing to those strengths), helping second-tier cities catch up to the top tier, focus on the long term, realism about trade-offs and the like.

When "realism about trade-offs" was raised, Mr. Stewart said: "I would wish that somebody would take this report and lay out the really blunt, brutal implications of this." And those blunt, brutal implications basically came in the form of noting that there are certain things that people want, but that they can't have, and that creating the future will entail pain for certain people, who are going to be asked to bear more of costs than they will directly receive in benefits.

It's all fine and good, but the reason why politicians like Mr. Stewart end up wishing for this sort of straight talk from politicians, but rarely getting it is that it's pretty much always a losing strategy in an election. People want what they want, and simply noting that it's economically infeasible will, more often than not, simply create an opening for someone else to come along and declare that, in fact, it is possible to have one's cake and eat it, too. People tend to want to believe that even serious, long-standing problems have solutions that are straightforward and don't cost them anything. One can chalk this up to ignorance, wishful thinking or what have you, but it's a general fact of politics, and one that needs to be acknowledged. It may be satisfying to complain about people's sense of entitlement, but it's a side effect of the idea that people have rights, which is nothing more than another word for entitlements. In other words, once one opens the idea that there is a way the world should be, it's impossible to dictate to people the contours of "should" that they must stay within.

This is why crises tend to be dealt with only after they have occurred, even when they've been seen coming from a long way off; the teeth of a clear and present crisis tend to dictate what needs to happen, and thus cuts out all of the arguing that otherwise takes place.