Policy writing is a particular kind of writing. It’s defined not just by its topic but by its orientation: What should government do, to address some agreed-on problem, or achieve some agreed-on goal? It is premised on a public debate, in which ideas are adopted based on their merits. It is addressed to no one in particular; it assumes we all have a say in the decision, and a stake in the outcome. It posits some shared values or ends, so that particular actions can be compared on a rational basis. It implies a vision of politics as conversation.
Is that sort of thing worth doing? Is it worth doing now?
Some people might not think this kind of writing is ever worthwhile. (One can imagine various reasons.) Obviously I am not one of them. I have written many policy pieces of this sort, mostly for the Roosevelt Institute. (For example here, here, here, and here.) I would like to keep doing it. The premise of shared problems and a political authority that is both attempting to solve them and responsive to the public, has always been false in some important ways, and effaced important dimensions of politics that are about organized conflict rather than rational debate. But it nonetheless seemed to me that, within its limits, “policy” was a useful framework for asking some important questions. (For example, the links above.)
But one might say: The US government is now in the hands of a clique whose defining purpose seems to be precisely the rejection of collective solutions to common problems and a public of equal citizens. Their immediate project is dismantling the systems through which any kind of rational policymaking operates. So hasn’t, now, the gap between the imagined world of policy writing and the real political world gotten unbridgeably wide? When the people in authority are actively ripping up all the efforts to, say, expand renewable energy, does it still make sense to propose helpful ideas about how to decarbonize? Or is that simply an exercise in denial? Or worse, does it legitimate a project that’s fundamentally hostile to that goal, and should be approached instead as an enemy to be defeated?
One doesn’t have to write about policy. There are plenty of other kinds of politically oriented writing. You can write poems, or fiction. You can write about books. You can write about history — perhaps especially valuable right now, as long as one approaches the past on its own terms and not simply as a negative space for whatever one wants to say about the present. You can do journalism. You can do practical work — write speeches, press releases, technical reports — provided you are part of an organization.
Most obviously, for someone who might otherwise be doing policy writing, there’s descriptive work, trying to understand and explain what’s going on in a clear and precise way. In this moment, simply documenting what is happening is extremely valuable. As time goes on, we will also want to understand the consequences of what’s happening. If a big increase in tariffs happens, say, we’ll want to be able to describe what happens to prices and trade flows and production in the US. This kind of work doesn’t require one to be proposing anything, in the way that policy writing does.
But let’s say we do want to do policy writing. How should we approach it?
That’s what I started writing this post to try to clarify for myself. The post got quite long as I was writing it. I wrote down 10 points in an outline, and I’ve only gotten through four of them. So this should be the first of a couple posts. In this one I’m writing about general principles; hopefully in the next I’ll move toward more specific questions.
These thoughts, I should emphasize, are not intended as directives for anyone to follow. They’re preliminary notes rather than developed arguments. They’re an effort to put down on paper some things that I have been thinking about, as I think about how to be useful.
1. There’s only a very loose connection between policy substance and electoral outcomes. It’s tempting to argue that a better program will help the Dems or whoever win elections, but I think we need to accept that this isn’t something one can say with any confidence. I don’t think people voted for Trump because of his platform, whatever that is. I’m not sure that a better or stronger position on climate or immigration or labor would reliably help win elections. The problem isn’t that voters don’t want that; the problem, from my point of view, is the implicit model in which voters have well-established presences on the whole range of issues, and pick the candidate who best matches them. You can win an election as strong opponent of immigration (obviously); I think you can also win an election as a strong supporter of immigration. What matters is having some substantive position, and connecting it to a larger vision and persona and program. It’s not a question of checking the right item off on a list.
Conversely, I am not sure that better substantive outcomes are mainly a function of better electoral outcomes. (There’s some connection, of course.) To take the immigration example again, Trump’s biggest impact so far has not been anything he’s done (so far!), but the extent to which leading Democrats have adopted his position. It’s not so many years ago that some of the most prominent Republicans were supporting legislation to legalize millions of undocumented people. Here in New York, we have a lot of horrible people in charge – I’m not sure if, considering them strictly as individuals, there is much to prefer about Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams over Donald Trump. Nonetheless we do get some nice things here from time to time, because the environment they operate in is so different from the national one.
Admittedly, this doesn’t make a big difference right at this moment. I put it first mainly to make a negative point, that “how will this help win the next election” is not a very helpful question as a guide to writing about policy right now (or ever, perhaps, unless you are actually working for a campaign.)
2. Good ideas are worth arguing for on the merits. This is the converse of the previous point. The reason to argue for good ideas is because good ideas do not get adopted, or even come into being, without people arguing for them.
The reason to talk about welcoming migrants rather than driving them away, is because welcoming migrants is better than driving them away, not only for them but for the rest of us as well. Arguments for better regulation of food safety or power plant emissions will, over time, result in safer food and cleaner air. Defending the rights of trans people expands everyone’s freedom to exist in our bodies in different ways regardless of what sex we’re assigned. Again, I don’t think that one should count on any immediate electoral payoff from preferring good ideas to bad ones. The reason to argue for good ideas is that arguing for good ideas makes good ideas more likely to be adopted. But I do think that, over the long run, organizations and politicians that consistently hold positions on the merits will be more successful than ones that tack to the prevailing winds.
I feel like arguing for good ideas on the merits has gotten a bit undervalued lately. When, let’s say, Ezra Klein says that we should pay less attention to “the groups,” what he’s rejecting is the exact thing he himself used to do — assessing policy ideas on the merits. He’s saying that politicians should listen less to people who have devoted themselves to studying some problem and to coming up with ideas to deal with it.
There’s another reason to focus more on arguing for good ideas because they are good. It’s a useful form of self-discipline. It’s easy to get too clever, and think that something that is bad on the merits will lead to something better down the road, when those further steps are tenuous or uncertain or just assumed. It’s easy to get too angry, and base all your arguments on being against people who are wrong. Wrong they may be! But there are many ways to be wrong, and the opposite of a bad idea is often another bad idea. Focusing on making positive arguments for things you believe in is a way of avoiding these errors. Politics is always a mix of moving toward a distant destination and starting from where you are. But when your immediate surroundings are especially treacherous or confusing, it becomes more important to keep yourself oriented toward that ultimate goal.1
3. Professionalism is worth defending. The disinterested desire to do one’s job well, and the norms and institutions that go with that, are, it seems to me, both essential to the routine functioning of society (more so than, for instance, markets) and an important base for socialist politics.
This is something I’ve thought for a while, and written about occasionally, but it seems especially relevant now. It’s not just that this administration is beginning with an all-out attack on professionals and professional standards in the federal government. (Although that is a central fact about this moment.) It’s also clear that for many of the billionaires who the administration answers to, the labor problem that concerns them most is the relative autonomy of their professional employees. Listen to this from Marc Andreesen:
Companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.
He is not talking about the cleaning staff here. He is talking about technicians, engineers, low-level managers who are using their relative independence and lack of replaceability to assert their own values and priorities, against those of their bosses. A bit later in the same interview, he complains that
you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. … all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, “Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda.” What people say from the outside is, “Well, you should just fire those people.” But as a C.E.O., I can’t fire 80 percent of my team.
It’s very clear, when you read stuff like this, that complaints about “DEI,” “wokeness” and so on are in part complaints about workers who are not obedient, who reverse the natural order of things by berating the boss, and who can’t be replaced and who’ve been spoiled by a college education.
A purely negative, reactive criticism of these attacks on professional employees is not enough. What’s needed is a positive argument for the values of professionalism — of technical expertise, credentials, the autonomy of the professional to do their work according to their own standards. The post-Luigi controversy about insurance companies limiting anesthesia services was a nice teaching moment for these values. The backlash reflected people’s concerns about being denied care, but it also reflected a broader sense that certain decisions — like how long a patient needs anesthesia for — should be made by the domain expert who is doing the work.
Or think about strikes by teachers or journalists, which are motivated not only by demands for better pay — which god knows they deserve — but also by demands to be able to do their job properly. Something that’s very needed in this moment, I think, is a positive defense of why professional civil-service jobs (and their private sector equivalents) are important. Air traffic controllers, say, need job security not just for fairness, the way all workers do, but even more so because that’s what frees them to focus on doing on their work according to their own professional norms.
There are endless examples around us, which we normally don’t even think about. I watched a video with the kids the other night about postal codes, which talked about Ireland redesigned theirs from the ground up so a single 8-digit code specifies any mailbox in the country.2 That didn’t happen because people voted for it, let alone because there were market incentives. It happened because the people with the responsibility for organizing the postal system, who had the relevant expertise, took their jobs seriously and were given the freedom to do them right.
Attacks on professional norms, it seems to me, are a central part of the Trump project, and defense of those norms are one of the central grounds on which that project is being resisted. When the California Department of Education announces its refusal to comply with Trump’s orders banning LGBTQ materials in the classroom, they are not doing so (just) out of self interest, or even out of concern for the kids it would harm. They are doing it because government is not a monarchy, there are rules that assign certain specific authorities to certain roles, and domain-specific decisions — say, what textbooks to use in the classroom — are assigned to the specialists in that domain. It’s these specifically professional norms that are the organizing principle for collective action here.
And of course there’s another reason why an affirmative defense of professionalism is important now. It’s what allows government to do all the other policies we might want it to. Bhaskar Sunkara has been urging socialists to reject “professional-class” politics and focus on working-class issues like Medicare for All. I also am a big supporter of universal public health insurance. But I am not sure how it is going operate without professionals or managers. I certainly see the appeal of “anti-PMC” politics, and there may be contexts where it is called for. But what we need right now is exactly the opposite. We need a program that moves from the defense of specific groups of professionals (like teachers or air traffic controllers) to a broader argument in favor of professional norms and civil service protections in general.
4. Our program needs to be argued for in a principled, positive way. Many of the actions this administration is taking will make the lives of many people much worse. But is that the best grounds to oppose them on? I am not sure it is. I think that in most cases, in both the short and long term, we are better off arguing for what we think is right, rather than that what they are doing is wrong.
Take the case of deportations. A negative critique can just as well be that he is deporting too few people as that he is deporting too many. The only solid footing from which one can oppose the administration’s actions on immigration is a clear principled position on what immigration policy should look like. The same goes for trade policy: 25% tariffs on Canada seems very crazy! But is the counterargument that free trade is the only correct policy, or is it that deglobalization should be a more cautious and gradual process, or is it that steep tariffs should be imposed on enemies but not on allies?
The answers to these questions are not easy, and not everyone on our side (for any reasonable value of “our”) is going to agree on them. But one way or another, opposition to this set of policies is going to require an affirmative case for a different set of policies. And that is going to require articulating some general principles about how society should be organized. If the Trump administration was wrong to put people on planes to Brazil and Colombia, does that mean that those people should have been allowed to stay in the USA? Does it mean they should be allowed to return? Does it mean that other people in those countries should also be allowed to travel to the US, and live and work here? I personally think the answers to these questions are Yes. You don’t have to agree with me. But you are not going to be able to oppose Trump’s actions towards migrants unless you have a substantively different immigration policy to offer in their place.
The problem — or perhaps the opportunity, depending on how you look at it — is that the state of things pre-Trump was not the application of any particular set of principles. It was just the way things had worked out. So any kind of principled argument against what’s happening now, is necessarily going to be an argument for something quite different from what we are used to. Take the very basic principle of one person, one vote. If you are going to oppose current efforts to roll back the franchise on the grounds that every person has an equal right to choose their government, then you are going to have to oppose other long-standing features of American politics, like the malapportioned Senate or felon disfranchisement or Democratic primaries that let some states vote before others, or limiting the franchise to US citizens. And this goes even more when we are talking about mobilizing people and not just making arguments. If you expect people to fight and bear costs and take risks, it is going to have to be for a positive program.
(A related problem, with immigration particularly, is that almost no one has any idea what the existing policy is. Under what conditions can someone from Mexico legally immigrate to the United States? Unless you are a specialist in immigration law, or you or someone close to you has been in that position, I would bet you don’t have any idea.)
This point is stronger now than it was before Trump was elected. “Trump will be a disaster, better to stick with the safe status quo” obviously was not a winning argument, but at least it was an argument. Now there is no status quo to stick with.3
That’s enough for now. I will put up a second post continuing this discussion in the next week, I hope.
ETA: Michael Kates on Bluesky helpfully points out the passage from the Republic I was trying to remember:
Glaucon and the rest entreated me by all means not to let the question drop, but to proceed in the investigation. They wanted to arrive at the truth, first, about the nature of justice and injustice, and secondly, about their relative advantages. I told them, what I really thought, that the enquiry would be of a serious nature, and would require very good eyes. Seeing then, I said, that we are no great wits, I think that we had better adopt a method which I may illustrate thus; suppose that a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to read small letters from a distance; and it occurred to some one else that they might be found in another place in which the letters were larger—if they were the same and he could read the larger letters first, and then proceed to the lesser—this would have been thought a rare piece of good fortune.
How good an analogy this is for the relationship of long-run goals and immediate tactics I was talking about, you can judge for yourself.