The oddness of the political moment
Why is it hard to know how to feel?
I suspect we could all do with a break from politics, especially in Britain, so I thought I’d step back to reflect on something that’s been on my mind.
This is the hard-to-place weirdness of the times we’re in. The way it’s difficult, despite the headlines (in the UK at least) being quite clearcut, to know how to feel about the 2024 political moment.
Should progressives feel hopeful, or despairing? Is Britain at an inflection point like 1997, or 1974, or 1945, or none of the above? Why does politics feel somehow both incredibly high stakes, as if our lives depended on it, and yet also oddly disconnected?
Rather than try to resolve these questions, or get dragged into politics, I thought it might be interesting just to name some aspects of the weirdness, or some of the contributing factors. Why is it hard to put a finger on the political moment we’re in?
As a content warning, this is all quite far away from the dopamine hits of elections, and intentionally so. Still, to make sure it’s not totally indulgent, I’ll try to name some practical takeaways as we go.
1. The discourse is broken — and it’s thriving
If you want to understand why these feel like odd political times, a good place to start is with our information environment.
We talk a lot about our information environment being broken, but it seems increasingly that the truth is more paradoxical — the discourse is broken and thriving at the same time.
On the one hand, we’re drowning in misinformation and crappy, auto-generated content. We worry rightly about the ‘enshittification’ of political discourse on social media. We spend our time in fraught and polarising arguments, not engaging properly with each other’s positions, and absorbing information that confirms our biases. And it seems increasingly that even old mediums — like TV political debates — have been infected, taking on the same 45-second soundbite affordances of a Tweet.
On the other hand, away from daily politics, it also feels increasingly clear that we’re living in a time of unusual intellectual vitality. Notice, for example, the rise of slow/essayistic journalism, the boom in discursive mediums like podcasts, and resilient sales of long-form non-fiction. Plus we’re seeing the emergence of a kind of 21st century coffeehouse culture — a growing number of networks of intellectual or philosophical interest, often meeting in person.
Dive into any of these mediums and you’ll see a teeming diversity of ideas and arguments, often deeply curious and well-thought through. This includes well-researched contributions on core issues like climate, housing, or tax. And if anything, debate is even more vibrant around ideas that challenge the modernist settlement — a freshly heterodox economics, new flavours of humanism, a reprise in the wisdom traditions, and long neglected themes like care and the value of ritual and communion.
So the political discourse seems dead on the surface — covered with a thin layer of mould — while underneath it’s thriving.
This contributes, I think, to the hard-to-place weirdness of our political times, which seem both dead and very alive. Not least because many of us spend our time switching between the depths and the shallows.
It also raises practical questions for progressives about how best to reach beneath the dead surface of the discourse to the vitality underneath. I think it means, for example, that progressives should give special attention in this next period to the health the discourse, or to what we might wonkily call the ‘imagination infrastructure’, or the ecosystem of ideas.
2. Life is futuristic, but politics feels nostalgic
Another oddity of the moment is that the world is speeding up, so that it feels ever more like we’re living in the future — or at least in an episode of Black Mirror — while centrist politics feels ever more nostalgic, like watching reruns of Seinfeld or Friends.
I don’t mean that as a criticism of particular politicians or parties. I’m one of the shrinking band of people who still thinks politics is a noble pursuit in which people are mostly doing their best, often at great personal cost. So it’s an observation about the dynamics of the system, not the actors within it.
During a workshop I attended in the US recently, somone made the point that as politics gets more complicated, it undergoes a kind of gamification. To participate in politics, you need to follow an ever more restrictive set of rules that are dictated by the incentive environment. And, from outside, these rules, and the behaviours they prompt, seem ever more arcane.
I find this idea illuminating because it gets at how, when you watch politicians talk in the media or in Parliament, they often come across as quite strange, even when they’re not like that in person.
It reminds me of walking in on people engrossed in a complicated board game. The players argue passionately in a language that makes sense to them because the gameworld is internally coherent — it has its own vocabulary, aesthetic, and tightly-defined reward structures. This internal coherence does two things: it energises the players and it alientates outsiders, making the gameworld inaccessible. It’s why games are bubbles — they stay the same, while the world changes around them.
This isn’t unique to politics. As societies advance, all professions get more complicated, and more gamified, so what I’m describing is a general feature of the social technologies that are modern institutions. Think, for example, of the occult vibe you get from highly specialist branches of law, or from professions like risk management or internal audit, with their intricate gameworlds of language, ritual, and procedure.
The difference with politics is, of course, that it’s the game we use to decide who controls the state, which is one of the main ways we make our lives better together. This makes it especially important for politics to be legible — it needs to make sense, and to seem ‘normal’, from the outside.
It’s also especially important for politics not to fall prey to a dynamic that worried the great 1960–70s critics of technocracy — writers like Jacques Ellul, or Langdon Winner. They warned that technologies — including social technologies like institutions — undertake a sleight of hand in which means are swapped with ends. We forget we created the institution for something and its customs become ends in themselves, and then we flex the original ends in order to stick to the customs. We get lost in the game.
Anyway, the takeaway is emphatically not that the game of politics doesn’t matter. The takeaway is the opposite: politics matters so much that we need mitigate the downsides of gamification, like disconnection and stasis, and work actively to counter them. Which is hard because governing a modern society is unavoidably complicated, so simplification isn’t an honest option.
The cost, if we fail to de-gamify politics, is essentially what‘s happening now, which again speaks to the value of the metaphor of the game.
The times when we interface with the gameworld — i.e. democracy, and specifically elections — become ever more infuriating. They’re both ever higher stakes and ever more dysfunctional as an act of human communication and a mechanism for discussion and decision-making.
That, in turn, gives rise to a phenomenon we always see when we have an unresponsive democracy, namely demagoguery. And the demagogue offers their tried and tested formula: they refuse to follow the game’s language and rules, and instead they channel the everyman directly through sheer force of personality, promising to wreck the game.
So, what are the takeaways? For one thing, I suspect this underscores the need to go big on what has come to be called ‘everyday politics’. Finding ways to ground politics in measures that mean something outside the game, e.g. around living standards. And, to do that authentically, I suspect we also need ways for politicians to spend more time outside the game. (I sometimes wonder, only half-jokingly, if MPs second jobs shouldn’t so much be banned as required — not lobbying, obviously, but making sure all politicians spend regular time working in frontline roles like teaching assistant, or in a small business, or as a Special Constable.)
Beyond this, though, it feels important to get to the relational heart of the problem. i.e. to get serious about deliberative mechanisms that, at their best, can rehumanise the way we engage with political choices, while still being honest that these choices are complicated. I wonder, for example, if better than National Service would be a big push on deliberative democracy, akin to jury service, so that over time everyone got direct personal experience grappling with tough policy choices. We could reinforce this with new capabilites in collective intelligence, so that we can gather rich insights from people about their lives, or pool the insights of frontline workers.
3. There’s more energy in ‘how’ than in ‘what’
The third thing that I think adds to the oddness of the political moment is that there’s more energy in debates about the ‘how’ of government than the ‘what’ of policy.
I suspect this partly explains the sense of stasis in politics because it means there’s honestly not all that much new being said about the ‘what’ of policy. Notice that lots of recent policy announcements can be categorised as either (1) something that’s been promised before and not delivered, (2) something that a government did in the past that was later reversed, or (3) really just a signal without substance.
What’s interesting and tricky is that people are right to be focused on the ‘how’ of government, i.e. it’s not a lack of policy ideas (although there is some of that going on).
For reasons I’ve unpacked elsewhere, I think it’s now quite clear that the next big gains for the human condition won’t come so much from ‘doing new things’, i.e. making new ‘policy choices’, but from developing new and better capacities for collective action.
I say ‘new’ capacities, because the types of state capacity we need now are different to the ones we inherited from the 20th century, i.e. it’s not about making the current system more efficient, or about resuscitating deliverology. We need, at minimum, a broader toolkit for governing. And really I think we need to go further and adopt wholly new modes of procedure, with an example being mission-driven government.
This is why the ‘how’ of governemnt is central to what I’ve come to think of as Second Quarter Progressivism — the project as it runs from 2025 to 2050.
SQP will be quite largely a project to develop— architect, codify, spread, institutionalise —new types of collective capacity, as opposed to new policy per se. (This is, by the way, something the project has in common with the early 20th century progressivise project, which built the institutional capacities of social democracy.)
I won’t unpack the substance of the new ‘how’ here, because I have an essay in the upcoming edition of Renewal that crawls pretty far down this rabbit hole. (In summary, I think we’re finally past the point of writing requiems for New Public Management and ready to estabish its replacement, which is a mix of missions, relational practices, and internet-era methods.)
Anyway, the point I’m making here is just that the emphasis on ‘how’ over ‘what’ adds to the weirdness of the moment, because we haven’t yet found a political language in which to talk about ‘how’.
Politics is almost entirely a language of ‘what’, which is to say it works through policy promises. Hence that awful Whitehallism, ‘the announceable’, and the recurring panic dream of politicians: ‘but what will I say in the speech?’ And hence, in turn, that recurring real life nightmare of civil servants: having to rush to invent a new policy in days, just so that it can be announced.
This reduction of politics to ‘making announcements’ is a problem in general, and it’s sharpened by the way media discourse has come, in the last few decades, to equate progress with spending, so that often what’s being ‘announced’ is that millions of pounds will be spent on a thing.
I suspect this is partly a hangover from the Brown-era — ‘and so today I can announce twenty bowllions of new investment’. But it’s also, more fundamentally, a symptom of the left having narrowed its sights to a fairly technocratic Fabianism, which rules out a broader language. (Notice, for example, how refreshing it is when politicians go beyond this language, such as when Ed Davey talks about love and care.)
Beyond even this, ‘politics as announcements’ seems to be a symptom of the way we’ve narrowed how we conceive the role of politics in general. Which is why it has infected all political parties, not just on the left.
So, what’s the takeaway? Ultimately, I suspect it’s that we need to change our mechanisms for political accountability, since the behaviours we’re getting are the ones we‘d expect from the system (or the game).
It feels vital, for example, to close the gap between policy and delivery. To get beyond a world where the modus operandi of politics is basically to announce a thing, and instead build the theatre of public accountability around facilitating the delivery of outcomes. Not least so that politicians also get recognised when they enable successes, as didn’t really happen with historic successses on outcomes like rough sleeping or teenage pregnacy.
This is why, for example, I’m a little obsessed by the idea of bringing back one of the most quietly radical innovations of the Covid pandemic, which is the outcome-based press conference. Instead of stopping these press conferences, I wonder if we could have formalised them and broadened them into other areas of policy.
That could mean naming some top tier outcomes or missions that we want to achieve as a society, and then holding monthly press conferences, with a Minister flanked by experts. Each one would start with an outcome-based presentation of the data, before turning to the politician to explain how they’re adapting policy in light of the evidence, followed by open questions. Thereby incentivising outcome-based, iterative policy-making. I can see politicans blanching at the idea, but the reality is that they’ll get attacked in the media either way, so surely better to focus the heat on outcomes.
Beyond this, it seems increasingly clear we need people whose day job it is care about the infrastructure that underpins accountability and the associated discourse. Along with institutions with a mandate, resources, and technical capabilities to improve this infrastructure. (An example would be platforms for deliberation, participation, and collective intelligence, as well as thinking hard about functions like fact-checking.)
Also, of course, we need political leaders to take responsibility for their part in this, accepting that they’re locked in a dance that is infuriating to watch. Which really just means politicians catching up with leadership styles in the wider economy — acknowledge complexity, learn from mistakes, change tack openly, don’t try to claim credit for everything. Which again I know will sound scary, but I suspect offers rich rewards for whichever politician/party is brave enough to lead the way.
4. We’re worried, but we want to be hopeful
One last aspect of our odd political times is that no-one seems to know how hopeful to be.
Among progressives, there’s a deepfelt sense that fundamentally, despite the UK political polling, the glass is half empty. Or at least that it’s a dangerous world, so the emphasis should be on stability and security.
This docks into a wider argument that governing should focus mainly on getting safely/competently through the crises that will inevitably keep coming. It also implies that the offer to the electorate this time is less of a promise — ‘things can only get better’ — and more of a warning — ‘things could get (even) worse if the country doesn’t change course’.
This in turn fits a wider take on the progressive project in the early 21st century, which sees the work as principally defensive — protect the institutions of social democracy and win back some yards lost in the 1980s.
This view is understandable and indeed it’s pretty persuasive. Certainly whoever wins the UK election will find governing relentless. After so many years of underinvestment — essentially off-balance sheet borrowing — there is no resilience left in Britain’s public institutions, or in much of society beyond them. This is true financially, in terms of public/household balance sheets, and emotionally, in terms of mental bandwidth/burnout.
What this means, practically, is that there’s a terrifying amount of risk sitting in the system. As grim as it is to say, the seeds of new crises — including appalling human tragedies — are already planted, and some will germinate in the next five years whoever wins the election. And that’s not even getting into the fragility of systems that run beyond Britain’s borders, from ecosystems/climate to the volatile global security situation. So a focus on security, competence, and responsibility feels appropriate.
Still, here’s what I find discombobulating. If we stop doom scrolling for a moment, and look around more carefully, what we see is a stunning amount of latent potential in and around our systems of government.
There are all those fresh intellectual currents. There’s a whole new generation of practices — relational services, internet-era methods, and disciplines like policy design, systems science, and contemporary behavioural science — that are mature and well-evidenced but not yet scaled across the system. There are wholly new agendas, like mission-driven government. And of course there are many powerful new technologies that we haven’t come close to harnessing.
It’s this latent potential that makes me personally more glass-half-full than glass-half-empty. Because I think increasingly the defining feature of our times is that we’re operating far below our collective potential — we’ve not come close to putting our best insights, technologies, and talents to use supporting human flourishing.
This, for me, is why the second quarter progressive project is less about defending an old settlement, and more about building a new one, or least enhancing or broadening the old one. Which is why I think the character of the project, when you get into it, isn’t one of making the best of a bad situation, but one of renewed confidence and a hopeful kind of diligence.
I say this partly because in the medium-term (and I know all sensible people realise this), it’s not enough to stop bad things happening. One of the clearest insights in politics is that voters don’t do counterfactuals. No government has ever been thanked for making things less bad than they would otherwise have been— just ask Gordon Brown after the Great Financial Crisis, or Jacinta Ardern after Covid.
The point that’s relevant to this post, though, is just that this adds to the confusion of the moment, because reasons to worry and hope are both quite compelling. Yes, people want security. But people also seem to want — maybe just as much? — permission to hope. In fact a sentiment I notice intriguingly often in public debate is that people want things to feel fun again, or to catch a break from the grind. Or, as one questioner put it in this week’s TV debate, to ‘work to live, not live to work’, which again is a really common sentiment. So I do think our wary flirtation with hope adds to the oddness of the moment.
Finally, then, is there a practical takeaway on this one? I guess maybe it’s just that progressives need to budget adequately for hope and imagination.
Make sure that a focus on security, and on competently managing and mitigating crises — which is understandable — doesn’t take up all the attention, and protect space for building the new thing. Which in practice can be done partly by carving out headspace with major reviews and commissions, but must also mean creating space for changemakers who are already working to reform the system.
Because it’s vital to remember that most of that latent energy for change doesn’t sit at the centre or the top of the system but out at the frontline, or in pockets of exemplary practice, or in local communities.
Those are just some reflections on the oddness of the moment. Intended partly as a break from the doomscrolling of an election, and partly because I think one of the most important and difficult things to do in weird times is to try to make sense of the situation we’re in.
As ever, all shared in a spirit of thinking in the open, and because I test ideas by writing. I’d be interested in thoughts and critiques.
To stay in touch with my writing you can follow me on Medium or Blue Sky or support my writing on Substack. And if you’d like some big picture reasons to feel hopeful, amidst the grind of an election, there’s always my book, End State.
