If policy goes bad in one of three principal ways, then are the solutions to errors as easily stated (and brought into effect)? (See, from yesterday, The Three Ways Policy Goes Wrong.)
Most of the time, there are.
If the errors are from bad information or bad ideas, then positive change isn’t so hard. One simply contends and contends again, with a marketplace of ideas gradually replacing poor information or poor ideas with better ones.
This is the most common problem of policy, and it’s (fortunately) most easily managed.
If the mistakes are from the rarer case of bad motives, then there’s a different approach. That’s because bad information or bad ideas can be overcome easily in currently-serving policymakers, but those who are mired in bad motives are resistant to change. These stubborn policymakers are best removed and replaced.
The most severe policy problems are of motive (and motivation), coming from laziness, a sense of entitlement, needy self-promotion, and excuse-making. A sense of entitlement will get a community the also-independent wrong of conflicts of interest. (Fortunately, few bad motives involve bigotry or outright theft, wrongs one sees only infrequently by comparison with other problems of motive.)
As for the problems of this third kind, there’s a longer slog against stubborn policymakers of junk policy and sub-par performance. Bad loses to good (or at least better) in a free society. That’s why one can, reasonably, be an optimist about policy in America.
But truly troubled policymakers (Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner among national figures of the moment) won’t go away. They’ll keep trying again and again as long as they’re ambulatory, and are beyond persuasion of fact or idea. If they retreat, it’s only to return again.
As they’re shameless, self-promoting, and gripped by their own outsized sense of entitlement, they’re simply resistant to ordinary reason or persuasion. Appealing to them, directly, is useless.
Instead, one commits to a long game, played each day, contending for a better way and critiquing rigorously the rotting produce of those very few that laziness, a sense of entitlement, needy self-promotion, or excuse-making has so powerfully and inescapably ensnared.
The supposed accomplishments of that ilk are, in any event, ephemeral, sham achievements. What they do rots and rusts, all the boasting in the world notwithstanding. Such is true nationally and locally.
That’s a commitment to a long game, but a winning one.