Try Not

There is a quote from The Empire Strikes Back that gained rather remarkable longevity: "Do, or do not. There is no try." It's a pithy saying, and Yoda is a memorable character, and that might be why it's lasted for so long, but like a lot of otherwise mundane things, there is some wisdom in it. But I didn't get that until decades later when my girlfriend and I were watching a Tony Robbins video. I could always take or leave Mr. Robbins, but my girlfriend was a fan, and so I watched. A woman in the audience was telling Mr. Robbins about some or another problem she was having, and, when he gave her an action to take to work towards a resolution, she said that she would try. Mr. Robbins stopped things and spent a bit of time doing a deep dive on "trying" until he basically came to the point that setting out to try to do something was different than setting out to actually do it. Trying, he noted, was putting forth enough visible effort to shield the person from blame if they failed, and they often expected (if not planned) to fail.

It was an interesting point, one that hadn't occurred to me before, and it stuck with me. I started evaluating my own actions in terms of trying versus doing, and paying attention to the world around me in those same terms.

There is, I've noticed, a lot of trying in politics, where failure is often seen as a sign of incompetence, regardless of how unrealistic the task at hand might be. And so avoiding blame can sometimes seem to be the singular goal of office holders. It's a side effect of the sort of promises that are expected of people who run for office, at all levels of the ladder. Including, it turns out, the President of the United States.

I think that the Trump Administration has set out to try to improve the economy, and Americans' material prospects, because it really doesn't matter if they succeed at it. It's the nature of partisan politics; one's supporters will always be willing to make excuses for failure and one's critics will offer no credit for success, so expending political capital on genuine effort to make change comes across as pointless.

So the Administration embarks on prosecuting the Culture Wars instead, while it's surrogates and spokespersons insist that trade wars, declaring Biden Administration programs fraudulent and dismantling federal agencies will somehow spark lower prices for domestic goods and create a booming job market. And the fact that financial markets, not to mention large swaths if the general public are starting to look askance at this is chalked up to politics, rather than an understanding of economics.

It has the hallmarks of an attempt to avoid the blame for failure, rather than working to succeed. To be sure, this isn't a situation that's unique to the Trump Administration; they're just, in being more nakedly partisan than earlier presidential administrations, dialing it up to 13. Because, I believe, President Trump still cares about public opinion. Although perhaps "Republican opinion" is a more accurate term. So long as Republican voters never get to the point of seeing him as incompetent, he'll be able to retain his role as de facto owner of the Republican party, even if he's no longer eligible for the office of President. And he's likely to need that, because if Congressional Republicans ever come to see him as a liability, they're likely to sacrifice him to their own political ambitions, if not simply survival. And so he has to appeal to his base of voters. Because, try as he might, he still needs them more than they need him.