I think talking about political feasibility should never ever be first thing we bring up when debating new ideas.
I think this is much closer to the core problem. If we don’t evaluate the object-level at all, our assessment of the political feasibility winds up being wrong.
When I hear people say “politically feasible” what they mean at the object level is “will the current officeholders vote for it and also not get punished in their next election as a result.” This ruins the political analysis, because it artificially constrains the time horizon. In turn this rules out political strategy questions like messaging (you have to shoe-horn it into whatever the current messaging is) or salience (stuck with whatever the current priorities are in public opinion) or tradeoffs among different policy priorities entirely. All of this leaves aside enough time to work on fundamental things like persuading the public, which can’t be done over a single election season and is usually abandoned for shorter term gains.
I think this is much closer to the core problem. If we don’t evaluate the object-level at all, our assessment of the political feasibility winds up being wrong.
When I hear people say “politically feasible” what they mean at the object level is “will the current officeholders vote for it and also not get punished in their next election as a result.” This ruins the political analysis, because it artificially constrains the time horizon. In turn this rules out political strategy questions like messaging (you have to shoe-horn it into whatever the current messaging is) or salience (stuck with whatever the current priorities are in public opinion) or tradeoffs among different policy priorities entirely. All of this leaves aside enough time to work on fundamental things like persuading the public, which can’t be done over a single election season and is usually abandoned for shorter term gains.