How power enslaves rulers

Here’s a story about someone roughly my age. He (call him a he) grew up in a close family whose parents and family friends were fascinated by politics, both academically and practically. He inherited this love of politics, and read the subject at university. To him, a political career was a vocation, just as someone born into a musical family might become a musician.

He also inherited his parents’ strong sense of social justice, and support for the underdog. And he grew up in an inner city whose economy was ravaged by the Thatcher recession of 1980-81, where the police recklessly attacked innocent people, and whose democratically elected council was shut by Thatcher. He naturally joined the Labour party at a young age, and found his friends there.

But by the time he became an MP, the party had changed. The party he joined was that of the underdog and civil liberties. It became the illiberal mouthpiece of plutocrats.

What should he do? Should he abandon the vocation he’s had since childhood? Leave the party he’s loved for over 20 years? Should he speak against the trend the party’s taking?

These would be self-indulgent egotistical gestures - which would be out of character. They wouldn’t improve the life-chances of any of the people he joined the Labour party to help. They wouldn’t, in themselves, change the party’s course.

So, he bides his time, suppresses his true opinion, and works with the party. He might, he figures, be able to ameliorate, at the edges, some of the party’s worst excesses. And he signals his distance from the party, by, for example, publicly worrying about the growing gap between politicians and people, or by drawing attention to the convention of cabinet collective responsibility, thus showing that he’s bound by rules he hasn’t internalized.

I don’t know if this story describes any New Labour minister, or several. But it could.

What it does describe, but for details, are eastern European communist regimes. Even quite senior figures repressed their doubts about the system, preferring to work within it. Such preference falsification, says Timur Kuran, helped to sustain communism. As everyone repressed their true opinion, everyone thought that everyone else supported the system, when in fact few did.

But this could not last. Eventually, some tipping point caused the doubts to surface. And once everyone knew it was safe to speak the truth, Communism collapsed amazingly quickly.

Maybe there is a parallel here with New Labour. Maybe it’s sustained by the preference falsification of quite senior figures. If so, it too could, like Communism, collapse suddenly and unexpectedly.

I’m not making a forecast here. I’m making three points.

1. Power doesn’t merely corrupt. It enslaves. Many rulers are not as free as we think. This, in a different context, is one message of Xenophon’s Hiero.

2. What matters in politics is not the particular individual occupying any office. Office determines character more than character determines office.

3. There’s something deeply dysfunctional about political institutions. The great thing about markets is that they cause bad people, acting for bad motives, to do good things. Our political institutions cause good people, acting for good motives, to do bad things.

Comments

[dearieme]

"Office determines character more than character determines office": that's an interesting one. How about "For the sort of weak or perverted characters who nurture great political ambitions, office influences character to make it even worse"?

[Luis Enrique]

this is interesting stuff.

I like this: "Power doesn’t merely corrupt. It enslaves. Many rulers are not as free as we think."

But how different is what you are saying from the (more generous version) idea that politicians have to make an awful lot of compromises and they are under an awful lot of constraints that aren't obvious from the outside?

What do you think could be done to improve our political insitutions in this respect?

[Sam]

Isn't exactly the same thing happening with Cameron's conservatives?

[Sunny]

However. If the negative externalities are not fully accounted for, even a market can ultimately fail (as in the case of pollution).

[FishAreFun]

Extremely thought-provoking. I agree with almost all of your points, but at the last moment...

There is indeed something deeply dysfunctional about political institutions as they exist now. I suggest that one substantial reason for this is the subjugation of most political goals (what are the institutions for, if not to advance towards an explicit set of goals?) to the dogma of liberalised markets. This trend has been going in only one direction since about 1980. It's not a direction that I'd characterise as good (and I suspect neither would you, if I read your words correctly).

Is this the reason why mainstream political parties are now so unattractive to the voters they should exist to serve? Politics has become primarily a business of getting power, rather than advancing goals (or interests).

I also think your last statement is a dangerous generalisation: markets certainly do sometimes make bad people acting for bad reasons do good things, but they also provide a dogmatic justification for good or bad people to do bad things to other people (the lowest-common-denominator effect, illustrated by incentive to pollute).

Why dangerous? If no improvement to the political institutions is suggested (other than downsizing or removing them), and we rely on the alleged property of markets to produce good outcomes, what is left to stop a society fragmenting into tribal and clan allegiances? For example, Afghanistan's government is small and impotent - I don't think that produces a good outcome (not by my criteria anyway).

[Marcin Tustin]

In reply to FishAreFun, I would suggest that it is not the trend towards liberalised markets that is the problem because liberalisation has indeed been weak, and arguably been pursued by incorporating political control in such a manner that we achieve the worst of both worlds.

Instead, the problem seems to be the fetishization of the private sector by politicians. To often the argument is "by involving the private sector we can gain the benefit attributable properly only to markets" without realising that it is not private ownership but the market that provides the benefit, or the argument that "this feature is present in the market/private sector, so introducing it in isolation will make the public sector better".

[FishAreFun]

Marcin Tustin,
I agree; it was my own lazy shorthand, combined with economic illiteracy, to use 'liberalised markets'. I need to follow up more of the links provided in the posts, and learn some of the basics.

Your phrase 'fetishization of the private sector by politicians is an accurate description of the phenomenon to which I was referring.

My opinion FWIW is that markets, operating within a democratically-mandated framework, are often the most efficient mechanism to achieve good ends. A better understanding of how markets work, and what the effects of the framework (environment) are on how they work, is badly needed.

My disillusionment with political institiutions stems from the fact that they seem to ignore the qurestion of the framework entirely, for example the phrase 'you can't buck the market'. Technically, in a narrow sense, indisputable, but can we not hope to set the parameters which define the operation of markets, hopefully to achieve stated, desirable ends?

[Laurent GUERBY]

Markets are a political institution.