This post seems to be founded on a background assumption that politics (i.e. voters, journalists, political threads on social media, etc), has anything at all to do with policy. As far as I can tell, this is mostly-false in today’s world. Politics and policy live in two separate magisteria. Every few months or years, a few very specific policy questions win the memetic battle for public attention, but they’re rarely the things-which-most-professional-policymakers-deal-with-on-a-daily-basis or the most-important-policy-questions in terms of peoples’ welfare, budget, QALYs, relevance to the state of the world in ten years, etc.
The people who make policy on a daily basis are mostly either bureaucrats at various agencies, or judges. Their policies aren’t published as bills on the floor of congress, they’re published in the daily updates to the Federal Register or in case law (at least in the US). This all receives approximately zero attention from people-doing-politics, and mostly happens autonomously according to rules which have little correlation with election cycles and the like.
By contrast, the process of politics is almost entirely a process of tribes fighting over Schelling points, mostly via signalling. The policy questions just aren’t that relevant in the first place; the meta-level is the main goal and the main point of the fight.
The main practical takeaway of this view is that, if you’re interested in “concrete” questions, then you are not really interested in politics at all. You’re interested in policy. And if you’re interested in policy, then politics is mostly a distraction. Politics isn’t way too meta, it’s just the wrong thing to pay attention to in the first place.
But elections determine who appoints the judges and bureaucrats who make most policy. And some areas of policy, e.g. tax policy, are mostly decided by elected officials, not appointed judges or bureaucrats.
Great points! In one small reply, you’ve explained a lot about Trumpism and the resulting reaction:
The red tribe was tired of being represented by blue-tribe meta-gamers who seemingly only cared about signals and not substance, so they hired a man whose meta was about smashing the meta.
The blue-tribe media realized they literally couldn’t afford a President whose substance matched his meta: ignoring the meta of politics and going for the meat of policy through consensus and win-win compromises. The only way to avoid that meta winning would be to prevent consensus and win-win compromises. So ensued five years of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, to convince the blue tribe hoi polloi that the prophesied Republican Hitler had finally arrived.
The result was a polarization that split Washington D.C. politics into two metas which no longer map to each other in even the ways they used to. And that’s scary.
I find it hard to imagine that you are right when you imply that politics hasn’t got anything to do with policy. ”...has anything at all to do...”
To take a recent US example, pulling out of Afghanistan. No matter how much we focus on the Meta level politics, (eg. “Trump started it but Biden finished it, so who gets the blame?”, “Will it embolden the US’s enemies my creating an image of weakness?”) it is still clear that an actual physical thing really happened, and that it would not have happened had the political landscape looked different in some key ways.
Here in the UK we left the European Union. That was discussed and voted on primarily through the lens of political issues (Typical conversation starters might have been: “will it help Boris unseat Cameron so he can launch his own leadership bid?”, “are we the kind of country that is welcoming to foreigners?”, “But surely we identify collectively much more on the level of a nation state than some kind of united states of Europe?”). But it happened, we have legally left. And the practicalities are slowly fitting into place.
Politics is not the same as policy, there are steps in between. But the suggestion that they have literally zero causal connection seems to be an obvious nonsense. I think this illusion possibly forms when the actual policy never touches you. The median voter is not a migrant, so migration policy feels fictional, only read about. The median voter is not a soldier (or a foreigner), so foreign wars also feel abstract. Most people have not been accused of a crime, so criminal policy again follows the pattern. Same with so many other things. When the COVID lockdown kicked in and for the first time in my life I actually felt a policy change “hit me” it was a bit of a shock. So, in typical times, it feels like politics doesn’t effect policy—because almost all policy is targeted at a minority that probably doesn’t include you.
This post seems to be founded on a background assumption that politics (i.e. voters, journalists, political threads on social media, etc), has anything at all to do with policy. As far as I can tell, this is mostly-false in today’s world. Politics and policy live in two separate magisteria. Every few months or years, a few very specific policy questions win the memetic battle for public attention, but they’re rarely the things-which-most-professional-policymakers-deal-with-on-a-daily-basis or the most-important-policy-questions in terms of peoples’ welfare, budget, QALYs, relevance to the state of the world in ten years, etc.
The people who make policy on a daily basis are mostly either bureaucrats at various agencies, or judges. Their policies aren’t published as bills on the floor of congress, they’re published in the daily updates to the Federal Register or in case law (at least in the US). This all receives approximately zero attention from people-doing-politics, and mostly happens autonomously according to rules which have little correlation with election cycles and the like.
By contrast, the process of politics is almost entirely a process of tribes fighting over Schelling points, mostly via signalling. The policy questions just aren’t that relevant in the first place; the meta-level is the main goal and the main point of the fight.
The main practical takeaway of this view is that, if you’re interested in “concrete” questions, then you are not really interested in politics at all. You’re interested in policy. And if you’re interested in policy, then politics is mostly a distraction. Politics isn’t way too meta, it’s just the wrong thing to pay attention to in the first place.
But elections determine who appoints the judges and bureaucrats who make most policy. And some areas of policy, e.g. tax policy, are mostly decided by elected officials, not appointed judges or bureaucrats.
Great points! In one small reply, you’ve explained a lot about Trumpism and the resulting reaction:
The red tribe was tired of being represented by blue-tribe meta-gamers who seemingly only cared about signals and not substance, so they hired a man whose meta was about smashing the meta.
The blue-tribe media realized they literally couldn’t afford a President whose substance matched his meta: ignoring the meta of politics and going for the meat of policy through consensus and win-win compromises. The only way to avoid that meta winning would be to prevent consensus and win-win compromises. So ensued five years of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, to convince the blue tribe hoi polloi that the prophesied Republican Hitler had finally arrived.
The result was a polarization that split Washington D.C. politics into two metas which no longer map to each other in even the ways they used to. And that’s scary.
I’m curious about your thoughts on what happens next. Where will this divided reality lead us, near and far?
I find it hard to imagine that you are right when you imply that politics hasn’t got anything to do with policy. ”...has anything at all to do...”
To take a recent US example, pulling out of Afghanistan. No matter how much we focus on the Meta level politics, (eg. “Trump started it but Biden finished it, so who gets the blame?”, “Will it embolden the US’s enemies my creating an image of weakness?”) it is still clear that an actual physical thing really happened, and that it would not have happened had the political landscape looked different in some key ways.
Here in the UK we left the European Union. That was discussed and voted on primarily through the lens of political issues (Typical conversation starters might have been: “will it help Boris unseat Cameron so he can launch his own leadership bid?”, “are we the kind of country that is welcoming to foreigners?”, “But surely we identify collectively much more on the level of a nation state than some kind of united states of Europe?”). But it happened, we have legally left. And the practicalities are slowly fitting into place.
Politics is not the same as policy, there are steps in between. But the suggestion that they have literally zero causal connection seems to be an obvious nonsense. I think this illusion possibly forms when the actual policy never touches you. The median voter is not a migrant, so migration policy feels fictional, only read about. The median voter is not a soldier (or a foreigner), so foreign wars also feel abstract. Most people have not been accused of a crime, so criminal policy again follows the pattern. Same with so many other things. When the COVID lockdown kicked in and for the first time in my life I actually felt a policy change “hit me” it was a bit of a shock. So, in typical times, it feels like politics doesn’t effect policy—because almost all policy is targeted at a minority that probably doesn’t include you.