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The Grim Politics of Saving Face
Why “I was wrong” has become the rarest phrase in our democratic conversation
Here’s a scenario that’s not easy to conjure: It’s inauguration day. Your new president is being sworn into office. Unlike their now disgraced (and, dare we speculate, incarcerated) predecessor, they’ve worked at various levels of government for years, steeped in the intrigue and conventions of Congress. Yet for all their investment in the system, they’ve canvassed on the promise of change. Instead of blarney and bluster, they spent the campaign diagnosing a malignant political landscape that you have long believed to be broken. You haven’t really bought their Damascene conversion. How could you? Politics, to pull an evergreen quote from Orwell, has always been “a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”
But then they step up to the lectern to deliver their inaugural address, and to the surprise of everyone present, it goes something like this:
“Good people of America, it is my duty, as your newly elected president, to state plainly that many of the policies pursued by this government in recent years have been immoral, stupid, and wrong. For decades, the people representing you in these assemblies have allowed political expediency to get in the way of their moral judgement, and because of that, thousands of people have died in needless wars, millions of people have seen their standard of living diminish, and hundreds of our towns have entered an era of terminal decline. Politics demands tough choices, but the era of ass-covering and buck-passing has to end. In a just world, some of the men and women behind me would be in The Hague.”
It is no exaggeration to say that humans are almost universally terrible at admitting when they are wrong.
“A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything,” writes Kathryn Schulz in her 2010 book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, “about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are…
