The Tragedy of the Geopolitical Nerd: Politics as Usual
The title of this post refers to an old and much-beloved (but since deleted) post by Lynn Rees that I often reference. I have written a series of posts under that heading about the problem with nerds, wonks, strategists, and others frustrated by “politics as usual.” Though we may talk about technical and often highly esoteric aspects of strategy and security and like to think of ourselves as objective and rational, us strategic hipsters need to examine ourselves and our own self-defeating tendencies every once and a while.
Imagine your friend is about to make a decision you view as not just practically stupid, but fundamentally distinct from your system of values. You tell them as much, and they turn around and criticize you for not being constructive. “You should have helped me do X thing you find so abhorrent better, not criticize it!” You would find this odd — you are under no obligation to make him more efficient at a task that you view as fundamentally wrong or misguided in the first place.
I raise this hypothetical to talk about something I find somewhat annoying about policy discussions in general: confusion of politics, policy, and strategy. Policy is the output of an often messy and crude political process, strategy the realization of it through instrumental means. I don’t self-identify as a “wonk” (chalk it to the eternal enemy of the PhD student, imposter syndrome) but I know others may consider me as such. The broader clas of people who like to talk about national security and defense policy certainly do self-identity as wonks to varying degrees. Wonks enjoy policy but they hate politics. And many errors flow from the confusion of all of these things.
One of them I have examined in the past is the problem of the “policy-strategy distinction,” in which a policy is conflated with a strategy that implements it. Someone will announce “we need a new strategy for X” when they are really saying “I disagree with established policy about X, we need a new policy for it.” Over the last couple years, though, I’ve seen that conflation manifest itself in a different way that gets to the core of what Rees meant with his original “tragedy of the geopolitical nerd” post. To refresh, I quote the most salient parts:
[The geopolitical nerd] suffers from a contradiction: he can see the narrow slices of reality that he specializes in exquisite and even excruciating detail. Unfortunately, he sees the world outside as a mixture of his tiny area of expertise writ large and a land populated by large bright shiny ideals that he can see in all of its fine shades. Based on this perception, he can formulate responses perfectly calibrated to exploit his unique domain knowledge to remake the world in the image of his vision. However, the nerd’s intentions suffer from a major defect: they are usually fatally out of sync with the means available to achieve that vision.
As I have noted in the past, a key temptation of the nerd is to blame politics for this failure. The policy was so brilliant and well-formulated, but it would never fly politically. Politics — crude, messy, ugly, ideologically charged, and bitter — is the process of by which political power is imperfectly matched with preference in this country. But nerds and wonks hate it and often want to insulate themselves from it. I think that’s dangerous — both for the quality of wonks’ analyses and the success of their actual policy work.
For many wonks, politics is vulgar, disingenuous, and annoying at best. It is practiced by that most loathed of individual, the politician. I inherited this prejudice myself from watching documentaries like No End in Sight, full of bitter wonks complaining about overly partisan officials that disregarded their warnings of avoidable problems with the planning of the Iraq War. It was, after all, a time when the phrase “reality-based community” was used unironically to refer to those that believed themselves outside of the circle of charlatans responsible for the Iraq disaster. Many wonks have the attitude of wanting to be kept away from the icky politicians and those passionate about them or politics in general — despite the fact that wonkery ultimately serves the despised electoral political master (who derives his or her power and legitimacy from ordinary non-wonks).
And it is hard not to sympathize, given that much of politics does amount to various ways of trying to “fool all the people some of the time” and “fool some of the people all the time” and is populated by individuals after power in some shape or form. Not coincidentally, many I know enjoy TV shows like Game of Thrones (or House of Cards) that depict dueling dynastic factions engaging in all manner of skullduggery, backstabbing, and treachery. Why do they like, say, the Mother of Dragons or Frank Underwood but don’t want to be reminded at all of their real-life equivalents in DC? I cannot speculate, but one thing about this widespread fandom that disturbs me is the outpouring of enthusiasm for Game of Thrones/House of Cards on Twitter combined with a similar disgust or distaste for electoral politics. Both shows (Game and House) depict a world in which politics is solely about scheming figures backstabbing others to get to the top; ideology is mostly absent altogether. Frank Underwood does not really believe in anything but Frank Underwood, and Game of Thrones is a dynastic war.
The unrealism of House of Cards in particular lies in the absence of actual political preferences as an motivating factor of importance. People don’t believe anything; they can be bought for the right price. If that is how the American political system worked, it would probably function more efficiently than it does now. Compromise would be the motto of the day, people could step across the isle to make bipartisan deals, and as long as everyone’s interests were taken care of things would be fine. In a way, its a cynical inversion of the cloying idealism behind The West Wing. Ezra Klein voices this below:
Peggy Noonan described the show as a “liberal’s wet dream,” and John Podhoretz termed it “political pornography for liberals.” And maybe it was. But if this is smut, then my, what earnest, studious, fair-minded smut we favor. Because what The West Wing presented wasn’t a world where liberals won every war or triumphed in every battle, but a world where policy mattered, where intentions were good, and, most of all, where the vast majority of characters busily striding through the halls of power were good, honest, well-intentioned folks.
Shorn of the moralizing and partisan overtones, this describes the appeal quite well. Government is just a game composed of people with an incentive to ultimately cooperate if offered the sufficient bribe (House of Cards) or the right Aaron Sorkin speech (West Wing). It is not hard to see why wonks enjoy this. People that are part of a professional community governed by technical norms of excellence (as opposed to showmanship, charisma, or appeal to preference) dislike the idea that policy may not matter as much as politics. They themselves work hard to solve complex problems, and see themselves as problem-solvers whose underlying sincerity may be negatively contrasted with the vulgar vices of the politician-demagouge. They are the real professionals, everyone else is “playing politics.” Less idealistically, the only people in House of Cards that have strong convictions are exploited by those who do not. Strong priors and ideological commitments are understandably and accordingly associated with weakness or bias. And wonks also know, deep down in their hearts, that the most brilliant policy or position paper in the world can be derailed by an effective, demagogic politician.
The problems with this viewpoint are legion. Wonks have political and cultural opinions themselves, and many inter-wonk debates I observe on Twitter break down along partisan and ideological lines even when the issues of contention might be interpreted by an disinterested observer either way. It is very easy to conclude that you and your like-minded buddies are the ones interested in solving the policy problems and your opponents (which just conveniently happen to be wonks from the other party) are unserious hacks. This is not an unreasonable supposition, given that much wonkery these days takes place online and users cluster in such forums based on ideology.
It is also, to bring back the opening anecdote, very easy to cast core disagreement over preferences as disagreement over the policy details. This takes up productive energy as wonks debate and sometimes fetishize the nitty gritty details in arguments that will never advance simply because policy preference, not implementation details, are really what divide the two sides. It may end the argument to say that there is no possible way you will ever accept the opponent’s policy preference, but it also wastes less time for both individuals involved.
My own political and policy opinions ought to be plain to most that have followed my writings consistently (some of which contain frank admissions of my voting record, 2X Obama) and I would be the last person to cast myself as a neutral observer. However, I also have found Julian Sanchez’s recent note on “epistemic closure” persuasive in elucidating the dangers of communities composed of ostensibly objective people that cast themselves in opposition to an crowd of opponents that lack seriousness:
Over time, it creates a feedback loop that looks something like this: Within any political or ideological group, however reasonable and noble its aims might be on the whole, some percentage at the margin are going to take a good idea further than is reasonable, whether out of authentic zeal or because being the most hardcore is an easy way to distinguish yourself in a crowded intellectual marketplace. The more these moves prove effective in shutting down an argument, and the less the relevant audience seems to care how well they fit the specific facts of the case, the more tempting it becomes to deploy them whether they do or not. ….
Iterated over time, though, that means the people who do object in particular cases are increasingly from out-groups. …..Now the incentives are even worse for in-group members. Because now being the one to say “hey, wait a minute” in a particular instance doesn’t just mean conflict with an ally, it means associating yourself with those assholes. Increasingly the objections are coming from people who just don’t care about the good opinion of the in-group.
The danger to wonks generally comes from the following two problems, which are actually (interestingly enough) exact opposites:
- Partisan ideologues are more open about the ideological grounding of their political preferences, and care less about the details of policy. The purpose of what they do is to signal beliefs to likeminded individuals, express political identity, and attempt to realize it. Wonks care immensely about the details of policy, but what Sanchez describes is actually a process of coming to care less and less about the “specific facts of the case” and more about how much a response conforms to priors.
- Wonks will find themselves eternally frustrated when attempting to make policy and strategy of various sorts because, as Rees noted in his original post, so-called “geopolitical nerds” can see the details of their narrow area of expertise with great nuance but lack any similar understanding of the political terrain in which such policy and strategy will be formulated, debated, or implemented. What they may consider technical or neutral may be from the standpoint of the implementation of their deep identity and preference, but not from someone’s else’s.
While these are conceptually distinct problems, I used Sanchez’s quote largely because it illustrates the importance of arbitraging various groups’ blind-spots in analysis. No human (certainly not me) is going to sit back and rationally evaluate the pros and cons of each option, but it helps to at least make an effort whenever possible to arbitrage the blindspots of varying communities, factions, and groups.
Assume complex issue X exists. There are different groups that feel very strongly about it. You understand, however, that each group has an analytical tendency to privilege certain aspects and ignore others. To be clear, you aren’t going in with the assumption that the truth is “somewhere in between.” That in and of itself is a problematic assumption on a lot of issues. But rather, that you might find a good viewpoint by seeing what each group gets right and wrong, and what insights may be gleaned from examining their blindspots. If all else fails, finding blindspots may be sufficient as an exercise in and of itself for reconsidering one’s own stance.
The trick is to find the right arbitrage mechanism. There are many ways to do this, but one mechanism I’ve found personally useful is finding effective opponents.
In theory, rabid opponents of a given policy (formed by politics they dislike) should be the worst at finding implementation flaws that might be used to make the policy more successful. After all, what’s the point if the policy itself is the problem? In practice, though, the opposition sometimes is sufficiently incentivized to hunt down flaws, oversights, and bugs that friends of the policy do not see or cannot voice publically. Perhaps the reason is that, as per Sanchez, only the outgroup is looking for problems in the first place. But sometimes a motivated search for dirt can be successful. This is not a matter of listening to “reasonable” opponents (too subjective of a determination) as much as effective ones.
So how to do that? I don’t have any systematic insight, given that I’ve only really been arguing with people on the Internet since 2006–2007. It’s not as if I have a career’s worth of pearls of wisdom to bestow upon readers of Rethinking Security and I will not pretend as much. Check back when I’m 50+ and we can talk. That said, I can relate at least one anecdote about how I improved my own analysis.
When I started out as a blogger on defense issues, I lived in fear of Joshua Foust (ironically so, given that I now consider him a friend and chat with him when I’m procrastinating on work about once every week or so). I did not always agree with Foust, but I also knew that he was remarkably effective at “Fousting” an sloppy opponent that ventured into the areas that Foust had both academic and experential knowledge of. Foust’s skill at finding elaborate ways to demolish opponents on, say, Af-Pak or Horn of Africa counter-terrorism suggested that I should pay attention to what he said even if I disagreed vehemetly — if only so that if I wrote on those subjects in the future I could anticipate a potential weakness in my argument by seeing in which areas Foust was most successful at attacking his debating partners.
I only believe I argued with Foust a couple times seriously, but merely the fear of him served to create a sort of shadow debating partner/intellectual boxing coach that helped my writing and thinking improve. And the most valuable part was that the practice of trying to Foust-proof my arguments made me realize sometimes that doing so was impossible — the facts really were on his side, and the cost of changing my mind was less than continuing to struggle in vain to rescue my argument. Sometimes that happens as a result of being directly defeated in a policy argument as well, but I’d prefer that I’d do so as a result of losing to a make-believe opponent in my head than a real one in public.
I’m not perfect at doing this; readers that follow my own work know that my opinions about the Snowden affair have, if anything, become more virulent and negative over time and less nuanced than they were a year or so ago. I believe that’s due to both new information and better ways of looking at the matter than I had in the past; others may see it as proof of my bias. You decide. That said, even if I haven’t come around to the views of many technical folks about the NSA I have found other areas where I think they are right to criticize the government on liberties grounds. Such as, for example, new cybersecurity regulations or government antagonism towards cryptography (see the reference to that buried in the prior link). And most of this came from generalizing the Foust-proofing method to other people that I saw as successful in demolishing other people’s hot takes on opinions that required a lot of detailed knowledge.
You may be asking now, “gee Adam, can I rent Foust somehow so that I can step my natsec analytical game up? What does he charge per hour? Does he accept Visa, Paypal or Bitcoin?” Unfortunately, you can’t. Foust himself, though hardly disengaged from the defense and public policy sector, does not blog or write for publication in the same way he used to. I’ll respect Foust’s privacy in terms of the reasons why (though if you follow his writings you probably will understand), but you’ll have to generalize the principle to someone else.
In closing, wonks ought to pay attention to the problem of conflating the technical and analytical work they find so fascinating with the politics they find so dirty. They are human beings and they will do it no matter how objective they convince themselves they are. That’s hard work and often involves fairly unpleasant realizations and about one’s own analytical process and self-checking. But in lieu of having superhuman metacognitive abilities, the same function could be potentially accomplished simply by having a healthy respect for politics.
Above all else, the problem with treating politics as just noise to be ignored is simply that its the way that the preferences of the public (not elites that live in DC) are aggregated in various ways. I’m not going to glamorize the US political system or claim that it is efficient or really represents the “the public interest” (whatever that means). Absent a switch to Plato’s philosopher-king framework, this is how our Republic works.
And, to be honest, wonks and the hoi polloi they dislike that respond to such partisan cues are alike in one major way — they have deep, unfalsfiable beliefs about policy areas they do not have great knowledge of. When I see fellow natsec analysts tweeting their opinion of cultural or political matters, I really doubt that they (or I, for that matter) have the same depth and granular familiarity with those issues that they do on the area of their training, expertise, and interest. Chances are, someone’s opinions about hot cultural or political issue or aren’t going to be as well-researched or considered as their opinions about the future of war in X or Y area.
Sometimes this is hilarious. I have some familiarity and knowledge of police history, doctrine, and command and control components due to time spent working with John P. Sullivan and others that either work in law enforcement or help provide services to law enforcement. I still would not rate my knowledge of such matters as particularly high relative to other areas I write about, but it’s at least far greater than that of many people I see on Twitter that suddenly become greater experts on LE tactics and operations than fellow Angeleno Sid Heal when a hot-button political issue comes up. Ditto to North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, etc.
But that’s just part of life. There’s nothing bad about it. People should have opinions about critical areas of public policy and people should have strong normative preferences. It’s a free country, after all, and if the issue concerns you or things you care about, maybe you should have an opinion even if you might not be able to back it up if someone knowledgeable about it challenged you. There’s really little that separates wonks from the partisan ideologues they mock because wonks are low-information partisans on many issues that they don’t happen to work on in their day jobs.
Jay-Z said it best. It’s politics as usual. The game may be played crookedly, but until we find a better way to play it we’re stuck with it, and we might as well respect the function it serves. Not only because it helps wonks be better tied into the nature of the polity they hope to influence, but also because it may (to borrow from another rapper) help them check themselves before they wreck themselves. And that’s always good, no matter what your politics may be!
