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Politics dirty little secret: Nobody really knows what they are doing
Interesting article which expresses some of the views I have been coming to for some time about the state of politics right now.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15701583.Chris_Deerin__Why_we_should_look_to_the_US_for_a_template_for_public_service/
A FEW years back, a senior politician let me into his trade’s dirty little secret. “When I started out as an activist I really had no idea what I was doing, but I presumed the people above me did,” he said. “Then I started working full-time for the party. I still didn’t know what I was doing, but I was sure those running the place had a handle on things.” Then he was put in charge of the party. “Still no. I thought the MPs, at least, must know what was going on.” He became an MP. “Nope.” Then a Cabinet minister. “Not even around that table.” He watched the PM in action. ‘Oh dear…’ This was his tongue-in-cheek confession: nobody knows anything; everyone is making it up as they go along. If they pretend otherwise – and most of them do, at least in public – they’re bluffing. They have principles, beliefs, ambitions for the country and for themselves, but really they’re just hoping to get lucky. We know from our own jobs and colleagues that this is almost always true. We know that those who lack the self-awareness to understand as much – those who are full of passionate intensity – can be the most dangerous and destructive. It’s just that in politics the stakes are abnormally high.
It could be argued that today, for all our instant access to information, we know less than we ever have. The world is a tangled, confusing place. The financial crash of 2008 introduced us to credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations and unblinking physicist quants who devised trading systems of dazzling speed and complexity that even they barely understood. We watched aghast as everyone from finance ministers to central bankers to economists, all of whom had previously touted a mystical wisdom about how things worked, displayed the unmistakable signs of bamboozlement. Yet again, it turned out nobody knew anything.
Voters are many things, but they aren’t stupid. They have come to see the architecture of the modern public realm for what it is: jerry-built, patched up, fly-by-night – in other words, a cowboy job. And they have looked at those who shape and inhabit that architecture and they see one thing: cowboys.
This, to a significant degree, is why we have Brexit, President Trump, and populists of the lowest character weighing votes across the West. All ostensibly offer simplicity and disentanglement – less immigration, less globalisation, less compromise, power brought closer to home and wielded by people who speak the same language. You can call this unwinding a dubious attempt to turn back the clock or you can see it as a rational response to a global experiment that got out of control. It’s probably a bit of both.
It could be argued that today, for all our instant access to information, we know less than we ever have. The world is a tangled, confusing place. The financial crash of 2008 introduced us to credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations and unblinking physicist quants who devised trading systems of dazzling speed and complexity that even they barely understood. We watched aghast as everyone from finance ministers to central bankers to economists, all of whom had previously touted a mystical wisdom about how things worked, displayed the unmistakable signs of bamboozlement. Yet again, it turned out nobody knew anything.
Voters are many things, but they aren’t stupid. They have come to see the architecture of the modern public realm for what it is: jerry-built, patched up, fly-by-night – in other words, a cowboy job. And they have looked at those who shape and inhabit that architecture and they see one thing: cowboys.
This, to a significant degree, is why we have Brexit, President Trump, and populists of the lowest character weighing votes across the West. All ostensibly offer simplicity and disentanglement – less immigration, less globalisation, less compromise, power brought closer to home and wielded by people who speak the same language. You can call this unwinding a dubious attempt to turn back the clock or you can see it as a rational response to a global experiment that got out of control. It’s probably a bit of both.
