Last week I had an exchange with
; I was skeptical about the this passage from his post“Biden’s too old” is just the particular semantic reformulation of recurrent misgivings about that uncharisma. Hillary Clinton’s too distant, bureaucratic and synthetic (and yes, female); John Kerry’s too programmed, cerebral, and uninspiring; Al Gore’s too cold, methodical and calculating; Bill Clinton’s too sleazy, patronizing and sexually predatory; Mike Dukakis is too geeky, intellectual and unfeeling. The central controlling synonyms down at the bottom of the word tree are essentially: too professional, too inauthentic, too remote. Too much like people who’ve climbed up the ranks with no profound sense of vision of what a society should be. Whose answer to “what politics should we have?” is “well, what politics will get me the job?”
Our organizational worlds spill over with missions and mission statements, with visions, but none of them really uncover the driving values and sensibilities underneath. … [N]obody climbs to seniority constantly infusing a deep idea into the bones and blood of the organization, because that’s not an item that goes on a resume. It’s all about the deliverables. The small ones, a capacious grab-bag full of them, none of them sharing the same underlying ideas or aspirations.
I think Burke is overstating the role of “vision” and that, in this context, it just becomes an idealied foil used to find the present reality lacking. With the prior back-and-forth and some additional time to mull it over, I can hopefully explain my position. I do have mixed feelings. I studied Political Philosophy in college and, as Leon Rosselson sang, “I love those who come in the passion of a vision / Like a child with a gift like a friend with a question.” But I think I can draw a distinction between how we might use the term vision in our personal lives and how it gets applied as a standard to politicians.
For friends and colleagues, we respond to people who have different ways of seeing; who have a sense of what is could be possible or how to imagine the world that prompts us to challenge our assumptions or think differently about the world, regardless of whether that person’s vision would be directly possible to implement. But for politicians I think there is a demand that it be possible to act on thier vision.
It rightly raises suspicions if a politicians talks about an elaborate sense of how to reimagine society and then votes to raise (or lower) the gas tax by 20c. We, correctly, wonder whether the vision actually matters, or whether it’s just a distrcation (and this problem becomes worse the greater our desire to find and support politicians with vision; that creates an incentive for them to fake it, and develop a line of patter that may or may not be connected to legislating — there is the risk that vision becomes a victim of Goodhart's law)
If I’m correct about that, then it’s worth seeing “vision” as having some similarity to luck in the old adage, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” We praise politicians for their vision not as a purely inate trait (some people have vision and others don’t) but as a reaction to circumstance — do they find fertile conditions for their ideas. You can see this in Burke’s latest comment in our conversation:
When elected leaders have a vision of governance, it’s usually because the party or movement they represent has a vision. When a movement has a vision, it’s usually because the movement has roots in a wider population, group or community who recognize and respond to that vision—or defend what it does to and with governance.
God help us, but the GOP after 1998 and arguably since 1976 has had that sort of vision. So merely having a vision is not in and of itself a good thing, but they do demonstrate how powerful the political outcomes can be, often controlling the overall character of the political system even when they lose elections or lose votes or ostensibly fail at pursuing their aims.
If the idea of vision is meant to stand in contrast to electoral opportunism, I don’t think that’s quite right. I would specifically say that the Federalist society and anti-abortion activists had a clear set of goals that weren’t tied to a specific election, and had the good fortune of being well positioned to push for those ideas. I don’t know that you can say that about the broader GOP, except by seeing successes as evidence, by themselves, of vision.
Beyond that, I think calls for “vision” often represent a desire to escape being trapped in unsatisfactory compromises, which is understandable, but more fantasy than reality. I don’t think Burke is inclined towards that in general, but I do think he’s indulging in that tendency here. What unites Clinton, Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, is that they are all, “uncharismatic, technocratic, managerial, incremental, in a historic conjuncture where that’s plainly inadequate to the circumstances they (and we) find themselves in.” That implies the possibility of a politician who is charismatic, inclusive, radical and capable of rising to the challenges we face. But is that a believable claim? The two presidents often listed as the greatest in US history were FDR and Lincoln, both of whom were inclined to be incremental, but found themselves in circumstances in which steady persuit of their goals drew them into increasingly bold action. We can say, after the fact, that they successfully rose to the challenges, but that is a reflection of the fact that through action they both ended up doing things that they would not have envisioned in their first campaigns?
To make an analogy; in my day job I’m a programmer working on fairly unglamorous tasks. I have worked for a small company that has built an application used by a small number of large clients. When I first started out we had the fun of being able to raplidly evolve our software and, over time, an increasingly high percentage of our effort is spent making sure that we maintain all of the existing functionality for our clients and each new feature requires more time to test and validate.
I sometimes think about this short and insightful essay about software development by Joel Spolsky, in which he discusses what he calles, “single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: [deciding] to rewrite the code from scratch. “
There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:
It’s harder to read code than to write it.
This is why code reuse is so hard. This is why everybody on your team has a different function they like to use for splitting strings into arrays of strings. They write their own function because it’s easier and more fun than figuring out how the old function works.
…
It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.
The old mantra build one to throw away is dangerous when applied to large scale commercial applications. If you are writing code experimentally, you may want to rip up the function you wrote last week when you think of a better algorithm. That’s fine. You may want to refactor a class to make it easier to use. That’s fine, too. But throwing away the whole program is a dangerous folly, and if Netscape actually had some adult supervision with software industry experience, they might not have shot themselves in the foot so badly.
Those observation have a significant amount of applicability to politics as well. It’s true that the current system is a mess, and that there’s all sorts of accumulated cruft, and we are all to aware of the messy compromises and half-measures involved. But that doesn’t mean that we would do any better trying to re-imaging a solution following some bold new vision.
We should want politicians who are thoughtful, have meaningful beliefs about the world, ethical principles, and a process which includes feedback from the community. We should want politicians who have experience and understanding of the problems that they are trying to solve, and the obstacles in their way. We should hope for people who understand that they are part of a much larger project than their own leadership and are ready to hand off responsibility when appropriate. Those are all difficult traits to find, and rare in one person. But, all to often, that is not what people have in mind when they talk about the desire for vision.
I think most complaints about politicians are bad faith reformulations of a single core complaint: they're not perfect(ly in synch with my fantasy scenario).
The personae they are complaining about aren't even real. They're creations, mostly of hostile media, that may or may not have a kernel of truth at their core.