Politicians Never Have Public Debates About the Stuff They Think Is Really Important

You don't have to tell them "you can just do things" - they already knew that

I want to use this article to highlight a political phenomenon that I’ve noticed many times but never seen defined, which is that the importance the status quo places on a cultural change, and their determination to make it, is inverse proportion to how much time they take in discussing with the public. This has been thrown into particular relief by recent events in Ireland which I’ll get into in a moment.

In the era of Trump’s second term, frustration at the inability to translate populism into results is often summarised online with the meme “You Can Just Do Things” (example above), which highlights the necessity of governments taking bold action when the public demands it, and the phoniness of the barriers preventing that. The phrase reflects that we often think of governments helmed by traditional mainstream parties as being staid and risk-averse, scared of their own shadows and terrified of taking big steps to solve big problems.

But I think that the opposite is true; the only reason we think otherwise is that the commitment to cultural radicalism is so deep that they always act on their radical plans without discussing them if at all possible, because doing so only slows them down. Extensive public discussion is reserved for the changes the public really wants that the system really doesn’t. The point of a long public discussion, which is often presented as having a “National Conversation” or “National Debate” on this or that fraught topic, is not to decide which change to make but as a calculated way of delaying the change or hopefully not making it at all.