The Culture That Is Politics

Assimilate or fail

This is a typical encounter I have over coffee:

I’m seated across from a well-compensated, well-credentialed, socially mobile professional. After we’ve completed introductory pleasantries, they will vent their political frustrations at me—often because I’ve asked in a pleasant “let’s have it!” sort of way.

Why does the city still have trash problems? Why can’t we build housing? Why can’t we build anything? Why is the NYPD that way? Why are public schools that way? And so on. (They also describe federal political issues, but I’m not going to focus on those specifics here.)

After taking all of this in, I ask what they’re doing to address any of these problems, especially at the city level. And that’s where things get interesting. There are broadly two kinds of reaction:

1. Often they’ll admit that they don’t do anything, sometimes with good humor, sometimes sheepishly. They know they’re complaining about problems while also doing nothing in their power to remedy them. These people are typically getting coffee with me because they want to take a class and learn what to do, or at least become familiar enough with the system to evaluate whether action is possible.

2. But sometimes they get sharply defensive, and say that they vote, protest, and still nothing changes! They resist the idea that they should have to put in much effort to achieve political results; they especially resist the idea that they should have to learn how the political system works. In the end, most come to agree with me when I say: if you don’t know anything, then those tactics won’t really do much by themselves. Those tactics are intervening after 99% politics has already happened, and then getting upset that 1% is less than 99%.

My recent advice to someone in either camp is to first internalize this idea: politics (besides being technically sophisticated) is a foreign culture. It is filled with intertwined personal and professional webs. It has its own histories, heroes, and villains. It is a lifetime career for many people, and a money machine for many others. It is power, and a contest for it. It is a whole world, with its own evolving shibboleths, customs, and manners. You can exist in its periphery, all the way down to its core.¹

If you haven’t seriously tried to understand this world, or assimilate to its norms,² you will find yourself on the outside looking in. You will yell at it, but it will shrug you off. And why wouldn’t it? You don’t speak its language, but insist on yelling, demanding comprehension.

Assimilate or fail

The solution here is to learn more about the foreign culture. Learn its language, learn its customs, learn its institutions, learn about its people, and learn what is possible within it. Maybe later learn how you can alter it, and change what is possible. Be open to the idea that it might change you.

This is exactly why I teach.

Kind, smart, ambitious people who embrace a politics of abundance and state capacity need to understand how ill-placed they are to affect any kind of political change, and why that is the case. Next, they need to completely alter that state of affairs.

If the only thing you ever do is vote or attend the occasional protest—and you still expect some kind of grand political result from this—you are politically solipsistic.³

You deny the whole reality of political culture. Of the whole political world. Other people live there though, and they will almost always outflank you as a result. You won’t even know why, or realize it’s happened.

This Bane quote from 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises comes to mind: “Ah you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it.”

However, while I like the quote, I don’t endorse analogizing political culture to darkness. Politics is for the good and noble, and they must embrace it if they want a good and noble world.

So instead of Bane ruling over some kind of underworld, just imagine that you were plunked down in a random spot on Earth. You’re in a city, but you don’t speak the language. You don’t have a phone, money, or food. No one looks like you, but everyone is eyeing you. You see some things that make you question what year it even is.

What is the best option? Do you start yelling? Do you break down, frustrated that you don’t understand? Or do you accept reality and take small, compounding steps to increase your situational awareness and understanding?

Ask yourself what your goals are, and apply effort commensurate to their achievement.

Who knows. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find a guide.

You don’t have to write a whole book about political culture as you explore it, but others are definitely expending that much effort.

1. It is definitely possible to exist within the core of the political system and still not understand it. People mistake getting a job with the government, or for a prominent politician, for their own knowledge of the political system all the time. This phenomenon is not unique to politics.

2. You can also change those norms, but that either requires tremendous skill, a black swan, or both. That chance and opportunism can work occasionally is not an escape hatch for anyone to say “perhaps I can do nothing and put forward no effort, and still get what I want!”

3. I don’t contend that anyone has to do anything in particular. It all depends on your goals. But: if you really want to have a big impact on politics but won’t do much, you only have yourself to blame.