The biggest lie politicians tell themselves

We tell ourselves stories in order to govern. But the biggest one goes unquestioned.

We tell ourselves that governing is like steering a ship. It’s really a bit more like playing QWOP.

Our brains were not built for mass society.

Even in a relatively small country like New Zealand it is impossible to really comprehend the sheer number of people making individual choices that add up to public life. We can use the magic of polling to ask very specific questions at very specific times, like who exactly people will vote for, but this knowledge is limited: We understand a single stated output but nothing like the mass of large and small inputs that fed into it. We are given a murky snapshot of a single peak several days ago, and as pundits or political tragics we sketch in the rest of the mountain range, based on our own preoccupations, something we saw online, or the highly-selective range of people we talk to. Other data like election results or the use of certain Government service is similarly limited. It illuminates but only with the thinnest of rays of light.

And yet mass society is in fact governed and talked about by a group of people with regular human brains, making regular human decisions. This is only possible through the use of political fictions.

Political fictions are a somewhat more developed form of “legal fiction”. A legal fiction is essentially (I don’t have law training) a rhetorical device used in order to help make a complex judicial decision. The classic one is “the man on the Clapham omnibus” - a supposedly reasonable and right-thinking man who one can use to think through how ordinary society might perceive something.

This one jumped right on over into politics and lives under a variety of names, from the “Waitakere Man” to “the median voter” to the “swing voter”.

There is no one median voter, completely in the middle of all political spectrums. Talk to voters for any length of time and you will find them seriously heterogeneous, with a bundle of views typically associated with one party but then other views far to the left/right/up of another.

That this median voter does not exist does not make the concept useless. It makes sense for politicians and pundits to try to think through how someone who might jump between parties thinks of issues, although breaking these voters down into distinct groups is probably more useful. I’ve done it myself! But it is a fiction. And it is not alone.

Here are some more political fictions that play a large role in New Zealand public life:

• The Budget. The workings of the state are so variable and complex and responsive that the actual “appropriations” of money legislated for are never what is actually spent. Projects go over or under, more or less tax revenue comes in, greater or fewer kids go to school or adults turn 65. Most of it is extremely informed guessing and planning. It is undoubtedly very useful.

• The beltway. There are undoubtedly issues that matter more to people involved in public life than those who don’t read political news closely. But that group of people is amorphous and there are plenty of issues that get labelled “beltway” (or “fringe”) before gaining greater prominence.

• The “X party base”. I use this one a lot as it is very useful as a term to describe something a bit more than the party membership but a bit less than everyone who voted for a party at the last election. In reality these bases are not as stable as they might appear, and will always be shifting if only because older voters are always dying and younger voters are always turning 18.

• “Evidence-based policy”. There is this imagined paragon of policy that is non-political and just takes the facts as they are. Certainly, some policies based on more evidence than others, and this might even make them better policies. But the process of gathering evidence is far from a neutral process and different sets of evidence can often disagree.

• “The family home”. Now, obviously family homes do exist. But a brief look at New Zealand’s tax battles over the past decade shows the wider concept of “the family home” is something more than the literal house a family lives in. What if said family rents it out when they move overseas for a few years? What if it is held in a trust? What if it is part of a farm? These questions are not unanswerable and IRD try with their “main home” exemption, but it’s clear the wider concept is not so certain.

• “Mum and dad landlords”. Given that landlords are generally older people, many of them will have children. This does not materially change anything about their behaviour as landlords.

• The “working class”. New Zealand has very few manufacturing jobs left, but some kind of male manual worker is still what most people think of when describing the “working class” - looking less at income levels and more at a set of other social signifiers. In reality the group of people who work for a living in non-professional jobs are more likely to be cleaners or carers or some other type of service worker.

This is a non-exhaustive list, and I’m open to accusations that this definition of “political fiction” is a bit too broad - that I am taking in things that are simply useful concepts like “swing voters” and mixing them with the real business of governing.

But it is that business of governing where I think the biggest political fiction exists of them all: The notion of infallible governing competence.

Governing as a game of QWOP

I started to think about this post after attending a very interesting lecture from the LSE’s Abby Innes, about her provocatively-titled “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail”. Innes sets up Thatcherite/New Labour/Brexit Britain and Soviet Russia as twinned opposites: Closed political movements that are so committed to some kind of materialist utopia that they fail to adapt themselves to reality and instead decay. There are clearly differences between neoliberalism and full-bore totalitarianism, but Innes was more interested in the quite funny commonalities, like the constant need to set dates five years or so in the future where everything would be worked out.

This is not an endorsement of her entire analysis or anything, but one commonality that Innes hones in on does seem particularly useful: A belief in infallible governing.

When it comes to the mechanics of government, both systems justify a near identical methodology of quantification, forecasting, target setting and output-planning, albeit administrative and service output-planning in the neoliberal case and economy-wide outputs in the Soviet. Since the world in practice is dynamic and synergistic, however, it follows that the state’s increasing reliance on methods that presume rational calculation within an unvarying underlying universal order can only lead to a continuous misfit between governmental theory and reality. These techniques will tend to fail around any task characterised by uncertainty, intricacy, interdependence and evolution, which are precisely the qualities of most of the tasks uploaded to the modern democratic state. […]

For all their political antipathy, what binds Leninists and neoliberals together is their shared fantasy of an infallible ‘governing science’ – of scientific management writ large. The result is that Britain has reproduced Soviet governmental failures, only now in capitalist form. When we understand the isomorphism between Soviet and neoliberal statecraft, we can see more clearly why their states share pathologies that span from administrative rigidity to rising costs, from rent-seeking enterprises to corporate state capture, from their flawed analytical monocultures to the demoralisation of the state’s personnel and, ultimately, a crisis in the legitimacy of the governing system itself. This time around, however, the crisis is of liberal democracy.

Essentially, Innes argues both systems drink their own Kool-Aid. They believe that through the right type of goals-based measurable governing one can build a utopia, they just have different ways of getting there: Pure planning or pure markets.

A lot of Innes’ argument is specific to the UK, where the state does appear to be in more visible disarray than in New Zealand.

But I think there are things to take from this idea. A lot of the discourse surrounding Government suggests there is generally a “right option” to take and that knowing this is as simple as reading the advice correctly and taking the right soundings. Innes argues that Governments actually need to do more experimenting - to try things and throw them away if they don’t work. But doing this would require politicians to be honest about the fact that they are not perfect creatures capable of always divining what is right. It would require them to admit that sometimes they barely know what is going on in Government, because modern states are giant leviathans constantly doing thousands of things at the same time. And it would also require the media acknowledging this complexity.

Consider KiwiBuild. It was a policy seemingly built on the supposition that once in Government Labour would simply be able to turn a tap named “new houses” and shoot out 100,000 in ten years. In order to keep the dream alive and quantifiable once in Government a target of 1000 in the first year was set. It gradually became obvious that this would not be possible.

KiwiBuild was rightly critiqued as an embarrassing failure. But I have no doubt that the lessons it taught both Phil Twyford and the wider public service were probably useful ones - indeed, ones that might have been carried over into the more successful state house build or the zoning law reform Twyford pushed for. This doesn’t mean the colossal fuckup of KiwiBuild was “worth it”- it just acknowledges that things aren’t always so simple.

Another good example of this complexity surrounds the upgrade of the Interislander ferries, a project cancelled by Nicola Willis soon after taking on the role as Finance Minister. I have no idea if that was the right decision or if the binary option of “right and wrong” is useful here. I doubt anyone does. Officials who have thought about this far more than you or me certainly have a view, but they are not super-human. I don’t think Willis being a Stephen Hawking-level genius would make any difference to the fundamental series of choices she had to make when cancelling the project.

Procurement for these large-scale projects is where you get to see the really pointy end of governing hubris - the kind of thing that saw Jacinda Ardern promise light rail in an impossible timeframe. Governments constantly write or commission detailed analyses of projects and what they should cost, only to be proven wildly wrong by the complexity of reality - or perhaps just taken for a ride by contractors who underbid, or can’t really conceive of complex projects themselves. Said states write very detailed contracts that private actors fail to comply with, and the state responds by simply writing even more details into the next contract. It becomes harder and harder to admit that neither side really has any idea how to build big things efficiently any more.

Part of this is a failure of imagination. We talk about the “ship of state” as if new ministers can turn the rudder one way and see the ship go left or right. But really governing is more like that “QWOP” game where you have to make someone run by controlling all their limbs individually, only instead of pressing a key to make a thigh move forwards you have to write a Cabinet paper. The levers you push and pull always take months to take effect and the impact they make is almost always is hard to sort from the noise. It is very hard.

This notion that politicians could govern perfectly but simply don’t feeds into two ideas that I think are harmful: That politicians are all corrupt and/or idiots, and that there is some kind of AI could be trusted with their job. Worse, politicians themselves seem to occasionally believe it, especially while in Opposition.

If we were to let go of this idea of infallible governing, we could retain the very useful notion that governments and ministers can get things wrong, and that they can get things right. But we could stop pretending that some kind of perfect politician exists who could get it right all the time, and we just need to elect them. We could stop buying into the intellectual arrogance that presupposes that a few measurable goals came make public servants suddenly achieve outcomes they couldn’t before. And we could talk more honestly about what can be achieved in three years of governing.

It is hard to imagine breaking out of this paradigm. But not so long ago the main political fiction was the divine right of kings. Things change.

Recommended reading:

• It’s been a long time! I have written two longer reads for Stuff I think readers of this newsletter will enjoy: This one on whether we have too many public servants, and this one on whether we have too few MPs.

• James Meek with a very clear-eyed take on where things stand in Ukraine. Goes well with this older piece that explains that Russia can build a shell for about one tenth of the price the West can manage.

• Ezra Klein making the most cogent case I’ve seen for the “dump Biden and replace him at the convention” argument.

• Joel MacManus has been doing fantastic work on the NIMBY panel trying to stop Wellington get more housing.

• This new Patrick Radden Keefe story about a mysterious death in London is completely unputdownable.

• Isaac Chotiner has been doing unmissable interviews on Gaza, including this one with a pediatrician which I will never forget.

• The ABC series Nemesis on the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government in Australia is great. ABC iView seems to work everywhere.