The Thursday Question 2:37: Doge-ing it

Politics, partisanship, and mistakes

Organizations make mistakes. Make them all the time. We all know why. Human reason is fallible. Facts are hard to discern. Internal debate is never perfect, and it gets shortened under the pressures of time or suppressed altogether by hierarchy and role expectations. A successful organization finds ways to recognize mistakes and either write off the impact as the cost of doing business or invest time to correct course.

It is hard for an organization to recognize its mistakes, but it is especially hard for political organizations to do so. And that goes double for an opposition party. The mistakes of an opposition are usually mistakes of omission - missing opportunities - and it’s hard to see when an opportunity has been missed. Mistakes of commission are usually no more than ill-considered comments. They generate an uproar on Parliament Hill and Twitter for a few hours. No one else even notices. An opposition party can get into a lot of trouble before it realizes it has to correct course. Just look at the NDP under Mr. Singh. Missed opportunity after missed opportunity.

Government mistakes get noticed quickly and forcefully. Government actions affect people, and when they cause real pain, someone expects the government to make up for the mistake. Governments can resist recognizing a mistake. They might not think the mistake is politically relevant to them. But outside actors have ways of making any mistake that hurts them politically relevant for the governing party. Time moves faster in government than in oppositions. Opposition parties rarely hear from the interests that they offend or aggrieve. Governments hear right away, and every complaint is made with the amp turned up to eleven.

Dealing with government mistakes is the business of issues management teams. No government can or should respond to every mistake it makes – if it did, it would never get much done. Government by issues management is government by reaction rather than action. To put it more crudely, in government the weather forecast is always “Raining sh—“ and if you run around trying to stop the sh— from hitting the ground, all you do is cover yourself in sh—.

Partisanship plays a role here, both for good and for ill. Just as herd animals use the herding instinct to protect their weakest members, the partisan instinct to rally in the face of external criticism protects a political party from having to respond to every complaint about every mistake they make. Governments wouldn’t accomplish much if they ran around correcting every misstep. Partisanship lets a governing party work on the big issues and dismiss the minor ones as mere partisan sniping. Since everyone screws up eventually, eventually everyone gets protected by the partisan herding instinct. Party discipline, or party unity, is not a mystery if you concede that most government action is a mistake of some kind or another.

And yet, as anyone who has visited the magnificent buffalo jumps of the Alberta foothills knows, the herding instinct can sometimes drive the herd off a cliff to its demise.