Some things are left unsaid in political discourse because they are taken for granted. Some propositions, such as that individuals and groups of individuals have identifiable interests, are considered so obvious that they go without saying.
Another class of propositions, equally obvious, are left unspoken because they disrupt the atmosphere of political theater. They deflate sentimental assumptions and discredit comforting narratives. The neglect of these propositions is not universal; they are occasionally expressed by individuals and political commentators, and are readily observable by the average person, yet they are ignored or dismissed in mainstream discourse. The pretense that these observable phenomena are insignificant or nonexistent does not make them go away. They will eventually, as Kipling warned about the gods of the copybook headings, have their say in our political affairs, whether they are acknowledged or not.
There are many such slighted propositions, and an exhaustive list is likely not feasible, but certain examples are ready at hand. A brief sample includes the following.
1. The government is really bad at spending money.
Governments at all levels are consistently bad at realizing value for the money they spend. Examples of this principle abound, from green energy boondoggles to high-speed rail fiascoes to the bottomless pits of seemingly counterproductive education, drug treatment, and homelessness spending.
In keeping with the theme of obviousness, the reasons for this governmental wastefulness and incompetence are easy to notice, if not widely publicized.
There are structural limitations to governments’ fiscal stewardship. Government has a lack of incentives for spending efficiency that does not affect other enterprises. Bureaucracy, which inevitably infects public spending, is inherently inefficient, with conflicts of interest, inertia, and institutional dead weight. Politics inserts its own inefficiencies. Special interests, like public employee unions, exacerbate deficiencies in spending discipline and sometimes produce, as in the case of some inner-city schools, negative returns on monies spent.
Graft and corruption, as well as a lack of a rigorous system of accountability, are always threats to the responsible use of public money. The outright theft of taxpayer money is always a possibility.
2. People with untreated thought disorders generally cannot function unsupervised in society.
A person whose basic faculties of perception and reason are impaired cannot effectively manage day-to-day interactions. The normal constraints on irrational and potentially violent behavior may be absent, with a psychotic break posing a significant threat to people who are simply going about their lives. A person who is unable to determine if his perception of reality originates from his senses or from cognitive pathologies poses severe risks to himself and others.
It is irrational, immoral, and irresponsible to address serious psychological disorders by “compassionately” permitting them go untreated or unrestrained. People with florid thought disorders push innocent people in front of subway trains, set them on fire, stab them, mutilate themselves, get shot by law enforcement while attacking them, and succumb to any number of horrors that mental illness might provoke. The ideological pretense that “understanding” is a substitute for institutionalization benefit no one other than the ideologue. It is, to the contrary, quite compassionate and understanding to prevent people with severe mental illnesses, through no fault of their own, from seriously harming themselves or others.
Institutionalization is not perfect and is not benign. Directly observed involuntary drug therapy is an imposition on the person who is treated. But both may be necessary for the welfare of not only the patient, but innocent people as well.
3. Emotions are bad counselors in matters of policy.
Emotions are useful in personal relationships. They shape our relationships with others and allow us to understand what is meaningful to us. But emotions also produce lynch mobs; road rage; and any number of other regrettable, impulsive actions. They can make people do silly things.
When used as the basis of policy decisions, emotions can produce disastrous results. They make policymakers needlessly vulnerable to sympathetic anecdotes. They compete with common sense and enable cynical manipulation. Imprudent reliance on emotions interferes with the ability to make essential distinctions, such as that between the smiling eighth-grader in his graduation hat and the adult criminal that he grew into before being shot while committing a crime.
Emotions provoke impulsivity, and impulsivity provokes recklessness. Policy decisions based on emotion often result in treating the exception as the rule, with statutes and judicial rulings that do not function well in unsentimental reality.
4. Not all cultures are compatible.
A workable system of multiculturalism relies on one tenuous assumption: that all cultures within a society demonstrate at least a minimum common respect for other people and cultures. A culture that condones abuse of other people who do not share the characteristics that define that culture — for example, religion, country or region of origin, socioeconomic class, ideology — cannot maintain a sustainable coexistence within a heterogeneous society. A culture that condones and encourages the sexual abuse of young girls because they are of a different religion, or that excuses predation on strangers because of their race, is defective. It is ultimately incompatible with a healthy society.
The variety of cosmetic enrichment often used to extol multiculturalism — cuisine, fashion, art, etc. — is irrelevant if cultures and subcultures do not have a least a minimum respect for the dignity of others outside those cultures. Cultures that do not share this common respect are incompatible, and no amount of ideological theorizing or narrative manipulation can change this.
5. The models that “experts” use to guide policy decisions are often not very good. A Danish proverb, sometimes attributed to Niels Bohr notes that “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Policymakers attempt to deal with this inescapable fact of human existence by enlisting experts to divine the future by use of academic models. These efforts are sometimes disastrously unsuccessful.
Common examples of modeling failure are the effects and spread of COVID, climate change, and economic forecasting. When predictions prove wrong, as with the perennially impending climate catastrophes, experts and their patrons resort to dodges, such as that although the models were specifically and quantitatively inaccurate, they were qualitatively, if irrelevantly, correct.
The process of modeling is subject to numerous sources of error, including ideological corruption, arrogance, stupidity, ignorance, and perverse incentives. Policymakers often ignore these sources of error if the models provide predictions that are congenial to other interests.
It might be helpful if boards, councils and legislatures that spend public money and make policy would acknowledge these factors. If they can find time for land acknowledgments and such, they might to well to find an additional thirty seconds to acknowledge the stubborn realities that separate good policy from bad. Or maybe they could say, “We acknowledge that ideology and hubris do not usually produce good government.”
Some things that affect our political life are obvious but often ignored. What is also obvious is that these obvious things, among others, are not even discussed. The reason for that is that cultural and political elites prefer manufactured narratives to inconvenient observations, no matter how obvious.
Image via PickPik.