Process
I’ve recently started watching a YouTube/Nebula channel called Innuendo Studios that deals—among other things—with the rhetorical strategies used by the alt-right to suck vulnerable people into their dysfunctional way of looking at the world. One of the videos mentioned in passing that small-l liberals have a tendency to substitute inventing ‘fair’ decision-making processes for actually doing good in the world. The idea is that if you just have an open discussion process, free elections, and, some sort of representative decision-making system you don’t really have to worry about policy because people will invariably ‘do the right thing’.
I came across this idea in the Green Party when I first joined it. Whenever we had a large plenary session, for example, the importance of using consensus decision-making and radical inclusion always seemed to be considered ten times more important than actually getting anything done to save the environment or make the economic system a little more fair. To cite one maddening example, it was routine for a resolution to come before a group of people (who’d travelled many miles for a couple short meetings over a weekend) to vote overwhelmingly for a policy only to have it fail because one person ‘blocked’ the consensus. (And, since the party allowed non-members to join in—the person blocking consensus might not even be a member of the party!)
The people who attended these meetings never seemed to mind that this handed-over all the decision-making to the party Council which met between plenary sessions and pretty much consisted of whomever was foolish enough to want the job (a lot of vacancies were routinely filled by acclamation). That was because all the ‘niceties’ of the grassroots decision-making process meant that rank-and-file members in plenary almost never got around to making any decisions. As a result, a party that said it placed great emphasis on grass-roots decision-making probably had the most centralized decision-making culture in Canada.
Eventually the Green Party of Ontario saw how idiotic this was, and came up with a more practical system. (I don’t know what goes on now with the Green Party of Canada—I haven’t been involved in either for many years.) But those early years taught me that there are a lot of different ways that people look at politics. As near as I can tell, people generally bring one of three possible ways of making decisions: process, values, or, results. The Green Party of my time was obviously committed to process.
Values
Small ‘c’ conservatives, on the other hand, have a tendency to see the world through the lens of ‘values’. I don’t mean, of course, that no one else has any ‘values’ (although conservatives often talk as if this is true)—just that they use the term in an idiosyncratic way that is different from other political tribes.
I’ve always thought it a bit odd that so many people who are opposed to abortion, for example, are also opposed to helping single mothers financially, teaching sex ed, or, making birth control freely available. That was until I realized that the opposition isn’t based on an actual practical desire to cut down on the number of abortions. (And in fact, whether or not abortion is legal seems to generally have little influence on its frequency. It’s more about how safe the abortion one gets tends to be.) That’s because conservatives don’t really care about the public policy impact of abortion laws. Instead, they just want to punish individuals for doing something that they believe is immoral.
It’s the same thing with regard to the use of drugs. Right now we are in the middle of an opioid epidemic and exploding overdose rates. The problem is the illegal market has no quality control and the new artificial drugs Fenatnyl and Carfentanil are so extremely potent that many dealers mistakenly sell drugs that are far, far too potent to be safely used. This leads to many accidental overdoses.
The logical answer would be for the government to set up a system where regulated, quality-controlled opioids could be sold at-cost to addicts. (Just like we do with cannabis.) This would not only dramatically lower the rate of over-doses, it would also stop driving addicts into crime because they would no longer have to pay inflated prices for illegal drugs.
I could never figure out why conservatives fight so hard against this sort of harm-reduction strategy until I realized that they don’t really want to end overdoses or lower crime rates. Instead, what they genuinely care about is the fact that doing drugs is ‘wrong’, and they don’t want the government to have anything at all with this behaviour—except punishing anyone caught doing it.
Punishment isn’t a means to eliminate a problem in the public domain—it’s an end in itself. How many people continue to die of overdoses is irrelevant.
The observant reader will have probably noticed by now that there isn’t a hard and fast distinction between small-l liberals who are committed to a certain type of process and small-c conservatives who are concerned about values. The commitment to consensus building and inclusion at the price of practical considerations that I witnessed in the early Green Party is just another type of values-driven public policy.
Consensus-building and extended definitions of ‘inclusivity’ isn’t about broadening the pool of information used to develop policy—it is an end in itself. Whether or not that new set of information gets acted upon is irrelevant.
I’ve used a few pretty dramatic examples in the above discussion because I wanted readers to understand the unpalatable point I’m trying to make. Both sides of the political divide are wasting considerable amounts of time and effort trying to develop public policy based on shared values instead of simply looking for what works.
I decided to write this article because of some things I saw on social media and heard in an interview. All were related to the current Housing Crisis.
The first were posts by a couple members of Council—who would probably consider themselves ‘progressives’—to the effect that Guelph had done all the right things already and it wasn’t their fault enough new housing wasn’t being built. In fact, they said lots of permits had already been issued but developers simply weren’t building the housing.
This reminded me of an argument I used to hear from the Green Party during its bad old days: “you are asking too much of a volunteer-run organization”. I saw that as a cop-out then, but I lacked the words to explain my feeling. If someone said that to me today, I would have replied “no. You have created a decision-making system that asks too much of members. I am suggesting it should be changed to a more realistic one—so it will actually work instead of being a fiction that an altogether different system hides behind”.
In the same vein, I’d reply to the Council members I saw on social media like this: “No. You have created a series of hoops that developers have to jump through that doesn’t take into consideration their need to make a profit. To that end, they are going through the motions to get the approvals, but are then waiting until conditions change to the point where they can make what they consider a decent rate of return on their investment. Your job is to create the conditions where they are willing to build housing NOW—not some time in the future.”
The point I’m trying explain is that the job of Council isn’t to come up with an ideal system according to a set of values—it’s to actually get enough housing built to get people off the streets. By definition, if you ‘cross all the ‘t’s and dot all the ‘i’s, and the developers still won’t built housing—you simply haven’t done your core job.
Getting the housing built is the job—not getting a checklist of secondary priorities done. Creating real incentives in place that actually gets housing built should be the most important design criteria!
The other issues I heard raised came from my recent podcast interview with Rodrigo Goller. In it he pointed out that Council’s hands are tied by the fact that it can’t experiment with individual projects around things like the building code because that is managed by the province, and the rule is that you cannot allow special exemptions for individual projects. (Strictly uniform application of the rules is yet another ‘value’—one that is enshrined by the legal system. If it means that cities can’t experiment with new things, too bad. Values are more important than housing.)
This came out when I asked if it could be possible for the city to shoehorn more density into existing areas without having to do hugely expensive upgrades to infrastructure by saying that new construction in that area has to follow enhanced efficiency standards. What I meant was—how about only allowing low-flush toilets, high-efficiency showers, and, grey water in an area? That way city staff could calculate the ‘slack’ in the existing infrastructure, and allow new housing that could be built around it—without having to make expensive, time consuming changes to sewers and water mains first.
This robotic commitment to total uniformity also means that a city cannot allow a developer to experiment with new building methods—like the use of factory-built components that get assembled on-site—until they have been approved by the provincial building code. This means Council is stuck waiting on the province—which seems to perennially have its thumb up its butt about the housing issue. (Except as an opportunity to reward cronies with lucrative changes in Greenbelt zoning, and, as a means of getting into yet another fight with the federal government.)
This raises another point that Goller made. He said that some of the people on Council believe that it is not their job to deal with the Housing Crisis. This isn’t because they don’t want to help, it’s because they believe the province has refused to give Council enough power to actually make any meaningful change. If they try to get more housing built—so the argument goes—they are doomed to fail. In doing so, they will just hand the province ammunition to shed all the blame on the municipalities instead of where it really belongs.
In effect, these members of Council is playing a game of ‘chicken’ with the province to see who blinks first and stops the crash from happening. The only problem with this is that the people who suffer from the collision are not the ones who are making the decisions. Almost all politicians both on Council and in Queen’s Park have nice places to live already—when they drive housing policy into a car crash, it’s other folks who will end up homeless or pouring all their money into an over-priced apartment or mortgage.
Unfortunately, I think if you called these elected officials to task for this behaviour, they’d refuse to accept any blame. That’s because the whole nature of political partisanship is aimed at the necessity of krafting a strategy for re-election. And joining up into teams of ‘conservatives’ versus ‘liberals’ currently makes the machine of representative politics work. It’s the gasoline that forces the engine turn over. But it’s also extremely draining to consciously live in this world while realizing that it is just a ridiculous game. It’s a lot easier to actually believe in the sort of Kabuki theatre than to see it for what it is. For this reason, I suspect most politicians honestly believe the nonsense I’ve pointed out above.
Results
Take a look at the following excerpt of a speech that Franklin D. Rooseveld gave to the 1932 graduating class at Oglethorpe University. He gave it after he’d been elected President for the first time, but before he took office. Think about what he is saying. He’s telling the people of the USA that he literally doesn’t exactly know how to solve the problems facing the country, but he’s willing to look at the facts objectively and experiment to find something that works.
Let us not confuse objectives with methods. Too many so-called leaders of the nation fail to see the forest because of the trees. Too many of them fail to recognize the vital necessity of planning for definite objectives. True leadership calls for the setting forth of the objectives and the rallying of public opinion in support of these objectives.
Do not confuse objectives with methods. When the nation becomes substantially united in favor of planning the broad objectives of civilization, then true leadership must unite thought behind definite methods.
The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.
We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young. Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you. May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking!
Franklin D. Rooseveld: Oglethorpe University Address, May 22, 1932
He doesn’t talk about ‘values’ at all, instead he says that he’s looking to fulfill some objectives—namely getting people back to work. And he doesn’t have an ideological or spiritual checklist he needs to follow to do this. Instead, he admits that he doesn’t already have the answer—he’s just willing to try out a few suggestions he’s heard just to see if they might work.
When was the last time you’ve ever heard a professional politician say something like this?!!!
IMHO, this is the only way we are going to deal with the problems our nation is facing. We need leadership that is based on experimentation and the pursuit of objective results—no matter what violence the means we use to get them do to our most cherished ‘values’. We need to stop passing all public policy through a sieve that sorts out anything that doesn’t jive with cherished beliefs about ‘parental rights’, ‘personal responsibility’, ‘private property’, ‘the invisible hand’, ‘personal privacy’, ‘legal precedent’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘consensus building’, and so on.
We also need to allow our political leaders the freedom to sometimes fail at pursuing their objectives. Our political classes have become tremendously risk-averse, which means that they are tremendously afraid of innovation and taking responsibility. In life never failing isn’t evidence that you are doing a good job, it means you aren’t trying hard enough. Political parties and voters need to recognize this and vote accordingly.