Weirdly, I found this post a bit ‘too meta’, in the sense that there are a lot of assertions and not a lot of effort to provide evidence or otherwise convince me that these claims are actually true. Some claims I agree with anyway (e.g. I think you can reasonably declare political feasibility ‘out-of-scope’ in early-stage brainstorming), some I don’t. Here’s the bit that my gut most strongly disagrees with:
A good test is to ask, when right things are done on the margin, what happens? When we move in the direction of good policies or correct statements, how does the media react? How does the public react?
This does eventually happen on almost every issue.
The answer is almost universally that the change is accepted.
***
This is a pure ‘they’ll like us when we win.’ Everyone’s defending the current actions of the powerful in deference to power.
I agree this is a good test. But I have the opposite gut sense of what happens when this test has been carried out. In general, I think there is backlash. Examples:
After Obama was elected, did the people who were not sold on a Black person being president disappear ‘in deference to power’? Not exactly.
After Trump was elected on the back of anti-immigration statements and enacted anti-immigration policies, support for immigration rose.
In the UK, there has also been a sharp rise in support for immigration since 2010 (when the Conservatives came to power with a mandate to reduce immigration), including during the Brexit referendum campaign and Brexit itself; i.e. while the UK’s effective policy on immigration has been becoming tighter, public opinion has been moving in the exact opposite direction. While I don’t have the data to hand, I’m fairly sure the opposite happened during the high-immigration years of the 2000s; as public policy got looser, public opinion got tighter. So this is a case where regardless of whether you think the good policy is ‘reducing immigration’ or ‘increasing immigration’, it seems clear that your favoured path being taken did not lead to a virtuous cycle of more support for the good thing.
A less talked-about example: some politicians in the UK traced the Brexit vote to a conservative backlash after the legalisation of gay marriage; this is the clearest ‘good policy/right thing’ of the bunch in my personal view, and yet still it was not accepted once implemented.
***
There are more examples, but you get the idea. I’d be interested in any attempt to make the opposite case, that people do generally fall in line, on the object-level.
I have noted this happening a lot with COVID specifically, but I considered it an anomaly that probably has something to do with the specifics of the COVID situation (at a guess, the fact that it hasn’t been going on for that long, so a rather large number of people don’t have settled and hard-to-change views, instead they just go along with whatever authority is doing), rather than a generalisable truth we can apply in other areas.
Weirdly, I found this post a bit ‘too meta’, in the sense that there are a lot of assertions and not a lot of effort to provide evidence or otherwise convince me that these claims are actually true. Some claims I agree with anyway (e.g. I think you can reasonably declare political feasibility ‘out-of-scope’ in early-stage brainstorming), some I don’t. Here’s the bit that my gut most strongly disagrees with:
I agree this is a good test. But I have the opposite gut sense of what happens when this test has been carried out. In general, I think there is backlash. Examples:
After Obama was elected, did the people who were not sold on a Black person being president disappear ‘in deference to power’? Not exactly.
After Trump was elected on the back of anti-immigration statements and enacted anti-immigration policies, support for immigration rose.
In the UK, there has also been a sharp rise in support for immigration since 2010 (when the Conservatives came to power with a mandate to reduce immigration), including during the Brexit referendum campaign and Brexit itself; i.e. while the UK’s effective policy on immigration has been becoming tighter, public opinion has been moving in the exact opposite direction. While I don’t have the data to hand, I’m fairly sure the opposite happened during the high-immigration years of the 2000s; as public policy got looser, public opinion got tighter. So this is a case where regardless of whether you think the good policy is ‘reducing immigration’ or ‘increasing immigration’, it seems clear that your favoured path being taken did not lead to a virtuous cycle of more support for the good thing.
A less talked-about example: some politicians in the UK traced the Brexit vote to a conservative backlash after the legalisation of gay marriage; this is the clearest ‘good policy/right thing’ of the bunch in my personal view, and yet still it was not accepted once implemented.
***
There are more examples, but you get the idea. I’d be interested in any attempt to make the opposite case, that people do generally fall in line, on the object-level.
I have noted this happening a lot with COVID specifically, but I considered it an anomaly that probably has something to do with the specifics of the COVID situation (at a guess, the fact that it hasn’t been going on for that long, so a rather large number of people don’t have settled and hard-to-change views, instead they just go along with whatever authority is doing), rather than a generalisable truth we can apply in other areas.