Risk

Before returning to some of the nuts and bolts of critical thinking as it applies to the upcoming US election, some final thoughts as to why this exercise might be relevant even to those most certain of how they will vote next year.

If you think back at the last few elections, you might have perceived a certain sameness creeping into your experience. Some of this derives from the consistent rules of the game in which candidates are winnowed down in one or two primaries, only to face one another in a national election featuring standardized elements such as party conventions and debates. And aspects of media coverage have also become canonized, from endless horse-race polls published by newspapers or broadcast on radio and television (coupled with self-flagellation by these same media sources for relying on such polls) to computer-animated state-by-state coverage on election night.

But similarity with regard to the last several election cycles goes beyond simple mechanics. TV campaign ads, for example, may have become more numerous (choking off all other commercials in contested states), but the imagery, tone, even narrator voices used in such ads varies remarkably little. Commentators have noted for years that debates have devolved into joint press conferences in which candidates skillfully talk past each other and attempt to avoid mistakes, with moderators trying desperately to catch a candidate in a gotcha moment (or, at least elicit something spontaneous from the debaters – usually unsuccessfully).

This is no accident but instead represents the professionalizing of political campaigns as statisticians, debate coaches, media advisers and strategists work tirelessly to ensure that their candidate does not succumb – even briefly – to an unpredictable moment. This is why presidential campaigns, for all intents and purposes, only take place in one third of the country (since statisticians and strategists know which states are already “in the bag” for each party and allocate their campaign resources accordingly). This is why most campaign events take place in front of pre-selected audiences (since media advisers know the perils associated with unscripted moments). And even when something spontaneous does manager to occur (such as Obama’s “Joe the Plumber” moment), this quickly becomes co-opted into familiar memes and storylines.

This phenomenon is not paranoia or conspiracy theory, but simply the observation that political campaigners (like military campaigners or business planers) want to be able to select a strategy and stick with it, leaving it to opponents/competitors to deal with the unexpected. And we voters find similar solace in stability, which is why we gravitate towards things such as party identity and charismatic leadership to help us navigate (or avoid) complex decisions.

But the stability both the campaigns and the voters desire is illusionary, or at least only holds within highly limited boundaries. This was brought home to me several years ago when reading an extremely interesting piece in a now-defunct blog (read the entry entitled “Yeah, but can he hit” located about a quarter way down the page) in which the writer compares our fetish for political stability with a similar desire to remove all risk from the world of finance.

In economics, sophisticated tools are used to keep economic growth within a beneficial but predictable range, meaning that with regard to stability too much growth is just as bad as too little. But as we learned in the 2008-2009 economic meltdown, once you leave this narrow range that’s been defined as “stable,” there are no guardrails, just “sheer cliff.” In fact, it’s no accident that the sophisticated devices that brought the economy down were supposed to be “risk mitigation” products, tools that allegedly commoditized (and supposedly reduced to near zero) risk itself.

Similarly, our politics is being managed (both by professionals and by voters themselves) to stay within comfortable boundaries, to the point where something truly unpredictable emerging (such as a Ross Perot or large numbers of undecided voters) leaves us bewildered, and often hostile.

Such unpredictability forces us to confront the fact that the world is a complicated place, containing many things we’d rather not think about. And so our choices are to either make ourselves think about them (even if this causes psychic discomfort) or, alternatively, simply deciding “where to stick our finger” by cheering on those virtuous political forces we support while sneering at the savage ignoramuses running against them.