First I want to thank Pamela for that presentation, it was very enlightening to see the undercurrent of the systems we built explained so well. Particularly what draws me is the way we organize, how we choose to organize either consciously or unconsciously, and how that affects things like quality of life, delivery of services, and outcomes and trends in society.
Following Pamela’s portion I want to talk about something closely related based on the idea that how you design your system affects how people within that system interact with one another. I want to use some examples from North America to illustrate further the principles we saw in Pamela’s presentation. I’m going to reference several sources, and show them up on the slides, but it’s quite possible it’ll seem like I’m brisking through them, they are available later if you want them.
The first thing to be understood is that this isn’t about saying politics should be this high-minded, august pursuit by modern-day Ciceros and Lincolns and Churchills. That’s a white-wash, and all three of those individuals had character failings. This is about saying that while politics has always been a kind of game, requiring persuasion, andbargaining of diverse views, the mechanisms of the system by which we engage in politics are not immutable, permanent things. These mechanisms are vulnerable to human intervention, and human frailties. We created them, give them meaning, act them out, but the rules are not set in stone. If we ever could call them good, they can go bad.
There were some very important elements of Pamela’s presentation I want to extrapolate from:
That structures and organizations can stop being about their founding purpose, and more about self-preservation. (Infograph of Big Union, Big Business, Big Party). This is because the people inside these groups change, and their motivations change, and humans state their values for a reason, to try and live up to them. The same goes for groups.
That so much of our politics is divided so cleanly by tribe that it is impossible for a government to correct itself, or in other words, to safely fail. So much of politics is about denying what makes us human, it hamstrings real progress. We know we can be wrong, we know we have to test things to see if they are right, but we’re all too easily denying that sense of humility in politics and that gives us what some call a “decree and defend” style of government. You decree the changes, and then you defend, because your mind and position are already made up, there’s no room for error, or admitting of error, and then there’s no room for self-correction. We see this with the mandatory minimums, we saw this with the scrapping of the long-form census. It went against experts’ best advice, but it was started and done anyway. (Mandatory minimums, long-form census, evidence based policymaking)
And this drives back to the structure of our politics, particularly how you win at politics. Because you can’t stay in power, stay at the top, if you’re admitting you’re wrong. Our idea of leadership is so twisted, it means to always be right. Which of course doesn’t translate into infallible leadership, just an impenetrable logic of what leadership is doing: they are always right they claim, and there’s always a communications strategy other than honesty if someone complains.
And a lot of the fault is human nature, politicians lie because they know people can’t handle the truth. Too much of our system is built on fables to start tugging at the strands. The subtext in politics is that honesty isn’t to be expected, it’s how we know promises don’t have meaning when they are called “campaign promises”. And yet still we elect people on their popularity, on how good they make us feel about them, and not their correct analysis of the evidence. This is because it would make for awful television, and you can’t have evidence-based policymaking without an evidence-based democratic system.
But I think if you were to teach human nature and politics at a younger age, particularly how to fool people, how to game human nature psychologically, then you’d have a smarter electorate that would be able to discern the half-truths and easy lies from the deeper realities we face. The problem isn’t any one particular side, it’s that because of their unhealthy competition these sides have raced to the democratic bottom, where good faith discussion of issues, collaborative problem-solving, and respect for the diversity of perspectives and interests are now unthinkable.
That because our politics is about winning, above all else, retaining power, above all else, that it stops being about the issues, and that’s what affects us little people, and that’s what we care about. We care about the things that affect us, however direct or tangent, and we care about values. Because politics has been corrupted by a narrow definition of “winning” and competition, it stops being about representing diverse views, and balancing diverse interests and measuring those against our values of an ideal society. There’s less principle, and more gamesmanship. And the only time values are mentioned, is to cover how badly families are doing when we say “family values”. To echo journalist Andrew Coyne, "We should be aware of course of falsely idealizing how politics used to be in this country, there never was any Golden Age, but we should equally steer clear of the lazy assumption that 'it's always been this way', it hasn't, it's worse now."
The last point I will be making, is that there is no shortage of ideas to fix the system, or make politics more constructive. There is a shortage though, of energy to force these changes through conventional means. Look at voter turnout, especially among young people.
Young people are in the middle of a conversation with themselves, and the conclusion has already been arrived by the older folks who actually vote. The conclusion is, you can’t afford to sit out. You can’t afford to stay out of a conversation whose consequences shape your future. But I don’t blame young people for finding politics dirty and corrupt, I share their views. But the point is to not be paralyzed by your cynicism. And besides, abstaining from voting doesn’t give the intended message that politics is out of touch. Democracy will always be about those who organize and show up.
Their apathy is result of many reasons, but one of the reasons we can address structurally is that we stopped raising citizens a long time ago. Voters are no longer citizens, they’re consumers, or a sub-type of it anyway. They have a hard-fought currency called a vote, which they get to spend only every few years, to send people to the helm of the ship, to place trust in those individuals’ leadership. Where people the world over are dying to spend theirs and dying to just obtain this currency, we squander it.
It takes a lot of initial effort to learn about politics and government and what it does. Our schools, for all the pressures on them, teach our kids how our political system is supposed to work, and we don’t teach how politics really doesn’t work, how the system is dysfunctional. And then we complain when young people go out in the world, find out how badly things are, and then don’t show up: it’s because we didn’t teach them that systems can be corrupted, and most importantly, we didn’t teach our young people how to take back the system.
And wasteful governments and unscrupulous political operatives have gained by that ever since.
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Now this talk is about the Canadian and BC context, but you might recognize elements currently happening in the US. It’s also about stressing the things that shouldn’t matter if you’re on the left or right of the spectrum, because while your views are different about any particular issue, it should be the same on the topic of how we come together to deal with those issues, and when that isn’t addressed, our problems are magnified. You can’t fix what’s broken if your tools are also broken, and we need to fix our broken politics. In my mind, our politics should be constructive. It should make use of disagreements, make use of the evidence, and should be reasoned, and honest about values and practicalities.
And we can have that system, the ideas are there, but it requires reconfiguring the structure and rules to cultivate those changes.
What’s the difference between a brainstorming session, and a shouting match? What makes them different, what is a brainstorming session? And how do you change one to the other? Well you do so by changing the rules, or throwing them out entirely. You do so by changing your approach, by becoming frustrated, and adversarial, and very stubborn about your position.
The structure, the rules, the approach, matters. If you come into a room and told to sit next to someone and you have a problem put on the table in front of you and you’re asked to figure it out, you are more likely to collaborate on how you would solve the problem using your respective experiences and judgment. But if you come into a room and you’re sitting across from someone, and you’ve been playing the righteously indignant card about their positions and you claim more legitimacy with the people on yours, well, I think you can see how well those problems will be resolved, ie, they won’t.
So it goes.
If you turn politics, with its rules and structure, into a war between left versus right, or party versus party, and you give the players weapons like television attack ads and PR campaigns, when you stop caring or funding civics or making the voting public smarter, you create more or less a real war, and prove that old adage true: that (war isn’t about who’s right, it’s about who’s left). The people who excel at shouting matches are not the same people who excel at brainstorming sessions, and yet the former are the ones who are voted in time after time. (infograph of Pierre Poilievre) They are the ones who “make it” in our political system, to the detriment of all of us. The more you say “politics is about winning” the more you allow the degradation of a public interest, of a civil discourse, of a shared destiny in this land.
The structure, the rules, the approach all affect one another, it’s not fair to say there’s a chicken or egg here, in faulting opportunistic politicians or the party, it all relates. But the case has been made over and over that by changing the electoral system, you change the behaviour.
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Look at the modern political party and how it behaves. It doesn’t matter if it’s a liberal or conservative party, they are an organization and all organizations can be corrupted. Parties forget their purpose as engines for policy ideas and engagement, and mobilizing support for those ideas. Organizations stray, the energy for the founding purpose wavers and the players change with changing motivations.
It would be a perfect world, if every organization lived up to their vision and mission statement when they were founded. “All men are created equal”, to use a good example. But no, that’s not how the world works. Self-improvement, the pursuit of perfection, just like the pursuit of happiness, is a pursuit for a reason. It’s a struggle, and never attainable. That’s why the ability to be humble, to admit you’re wrong, to say “hey, let’s work together on this, you have claim to your nugget of truth, as I do mine, and we can join that in dialogue to find an equitable solution”, is so valuable in this world. And that is exactly what’s wrong with the modern party.
In BC,“out of 32,328 votes cast 2001 and 2012, just 80 or 0.25 percent were cast by MLAs voting against their own party.” This is not a system that stresses working together, or giving credit where credit is due. Political parties are one of the main causes of inefficiency, when they don’t have to be. They also cause apathy, which causes so many other problems. Look at how they behave, look at all the things that turn people off of politics or make them cynical, it’s a result of an unhealthy competition, which many argue convincingly is a result of First Past the Post.
This narrow idea and this model of competition,rather than being a healthy respect for the diversity of opinions, cultivates counter-productive arguments, zero-sum negotiations, and cutthroat elections. It also feeds into what we see as the "permanent campaign", where everything coded through "how will this affect us for votes?" and forcing all negotiations between different interests to be zero-sum, not a collaborative balancing act which is so necessary for successful public policy.
Our future depends not only on those in power being able to be flexible enough to admit when they're wrong and change course, but also on the ability of different players being able to collaborate on what to do productively to address our problems. Let’s not forget we elect all of them, all our MLAs, all our MPs, to an institution that originally had no parties. They are all there to work for all of us generally, and their constituents in particular. But there’s no job description, which might surprise people, but there’s no table of expectations to measure our elected representatives with, and yet we hand them all this money and power.
And because an elected official is only elected because they push the party brand, and are chosen by the leader of the party, so of course their behavior will be stilted towards the interest of that party. This feeds into that Permanent Campaign as well. No job description, party influence, these are structural, not left or right.
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This human nature element though, is very interesting, it makes it so we can’t admit fault or mistake even when the odds and the evidence are stacking against us. This extends so far as what we see with the LNG provincial issue, which I'll pick on, as partisan as that might seem, but it illustrates on our points nicely. I like the idea of economic strength, and getting people jobs, but I don’t agree with the approach, and that doesn’t mean I’m against a strong economy, does it? The approach, that says basically “this, and pipelines, is our economic salvation”. This approach incurs an opportunity cost, meaning because you spent your capital on one option you can’t spend elsewhere. This, because the governing party has staked their political future on one fixed path towards a strong economy and admitting being wrong, at all, means the other parties will tear them down. I think that’s wrong, to put yourself in a corner is wrong, and to not be able to say “we might be wrong” is wrong, and then crucifying someone for admitting they’re wrong, is wrong. But this is how our politics works. Zero-sum, unable to admit fault, and unable to self-correct. That’s why if you object to the approach, you object to the economy. It’s easier to give that message then to really address and reform our systemic issues.
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People will point out that you have to win at politics in order to enact change and provide leadership. This is how the system works, if you don’t like it, you don’t understand the system, and more, you’re not very good at it. But people affect their system, change the rules, often to their own benefit. To simply say “that’s how the system works” is like saying “it’s always been like this.” No, it hasn’t, and it’s lazy at best and tragically short-sighted at worst to claim that.
In the recent US Supreme Court decision of McCutcheon v FEC, which further deregulated campaign financing by saying that money is political speech and there are no limits on speech, the Supreme Court’s Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, “We have said that government regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford. “Ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption.”In plain language, money is speech, speech is a freedom, there should be no limits on freedom, so there’s no limit on money, and by the way we don’t consider the political access that money grants as being corrupt.This even though it’s proven over and over that politicians are of course influenced by money (Martin Gilens, Princeton Infograph), and that in 85% of US elections the candidate who spends the most money wins the election. (Infograph of research) In a study done by Princeton researchers, they found that the economic elite’s preferences for policies almost always came ahead of the preference of average income Americans.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that the system isn’t working, it’s that it’s working perfectly, but its rules have become so twisted it’s unrecognizable placed next its founding principles. This is how our politics looks today: largely irrelevant shouters exploiting the dwindling number of voters for the chance at the helm. There’s exceptions of course, like Michael Chong, Joyce Murray, and Elizabeth May. But the people who get into politics are reshaped into a particular mold, they first have to be chosen by a leader, that’s the law, then they mature into a culture of partisanship, and follow a party line often against their own constituents’ wishes and the informed advice of experts. From top to bottom, the rules have been manipulated to give more and more power to those at the top of the party system. Those on the inside at the top.