How to DO Politics
A better way to look at how politics works
It’s 2024, a presidential election year.
Like most presidential election years, politics will be more pronounced than normal. Many politicians will be making soaring and searing speeches. Talking heads on TV will be spewing hot takes to get people riled up to keep watching. The people you follow on social media will most likely share articles and thoughts trying to make a difference.
In the end it may feel, no matter the result, that things won’t be all that different. No politician lives up to their big promises, nobody is ever able to “go fix things”.
It’s easy to get the feeling that people involved in politics just don’t care about the needs of people. To us individual citizens it feels obvious what needs to be done. The correct thing shouldn’t even be political, isn’t the truth the truth after all? There shouldn’t have to be a big long process for the right thing to be done, it's the right thing. If only the politicians and everyone involved were just better at getting things done. They’re supposed to be the ones who get things done, so why aren’t they doing it?
But here’s the truth – actually doing politics, not just being involved but actually being active and making progress, is extremely hard.
So how would someone actually go about doing politics effectively?
First we need a suitable definition of what politics actually means. I could use the dictionary definition, but I’ll give my shorter working definition: Politics is the activities, discussions, and negotiations around how power is used. In its general usage, politics is how disagreements, debates, and negotiations about government power are settled.
I want to be upfront with a strongly held belief of mine – there will forever and always be politics. There will always be disagreements about what to do with power, therefore there will always be politics. Politics will never go away. Politics is forever part of humanity, even when there are periods when it doesn’t seem too important, it’s still there.
That’s part of why politics is followed by so many. Being an informed citizen is for sure an important public virtue. But the stakes are real, and there can be a thrill to it. Following and participating in political discussion feels like you are contributing, like you’re participating in something bigger than you. But if that’s all you’re doing then most likely you are a political hobbyist, a phrase we get from the book “Politics is for Power” by Eitan Hersh.
If you actually want to effect change in the world you need to do more than simply follow politics and react to it. As a normal citizen this is hard to do but there are avenues. But from what I see, most politicians aren’t all that great at doing politics either. While politicians may have more say in matters, most are just reacting to what’s happening and aren’t skilled at actively getting things done.
Doing politics is a skill that most people don’t have. Most don’t have the instinct for the true practice of it. Even for those who have the skill it is tough on the mind and soul.
Writers over the course of human history have given us some insights on the practice of doing politics. “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu from 2500 years ago provides basic guidance in negotiating battles. Politics is indeed a battle so the references have been used by political figures for centuries. This includes info that feels so generic now such as “pick your battles” and “timing is important”.
“The Prince” by Niccolò Machiavelli published in 1532 is still relevant and widely read today. His main insight was that sometimes you must do something bad in order to achieve something good. Sometimes to do good in politics and governance, you must do some bad to make it happen. This is where the trait of being “Machiavellian” comes from, the idea of someone who is willing to do whatever is needed to achieve their goals. The ends justify the means.
“Politics as Vocation” by Max Weber published in 1919 provides further guidance. There was an emerging class of folks for whom politics was their life’s vocation, the idea of the professional politician was rather new at the time. His main point is that to be politically effective you must have both passion AND perspective. “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards”, or in other words: it takes time and deliberate effort to make things happen in politics.
These are all functionally useful ideas, but still leaves us with gaps in how politics works. How do you do politics?
How To Do Politics
I’ve written this article to hopefully give language and an approach to anyone who is trying to change the world for the better. Making change will involve politics. You can’t avoid it, you have to engage with it. You can do politics at any level; as a voter, non-voter, activist, intellectual, monied elite, bureaucrat, official, journalist, pundit, and most of all as a politician.
I also write to hopefully give people a more grounded idea of what actually doing politics is. The contemporary world is filled with many activities that feel like doing politics but are not effective and mostly leaves everyone involved feeling worse. The day to day news cycle can get you super stressed by so many small details that it becomes overwhelming. Hopefully having a more accurate picture of what doing politics is can provide some relief.
Our definition of Politics is the activities, discussions, and negotiations around how power is used.
The definition of doing Politics is accumulating power for achieving your goals. At the end of the day this is the game of politics. To win the game of football you maneuver to try to score more points than your opponent. To win the game of politics you maneuver to try to accumulate enough power to get what you want over the objections of your opponents.
So what do you need to do to become an effective do-er of politics?
The first step is you need to have a clear goal of what you want. Oftentimes “better” is not going to cut it as a goal. Politics is waged over specific details with specific goals, if you’re going to make a change in the world it has to be something specific. Your political goal may just be to get elected, it might be to do something, it might be to send a specific message, or many other possibilities. But without having specific goals to work toward you’re not going to be able to effectively do politics.
The second step in the process is you need to know the rules of the game, or at least some of them. Knowing the rules is important to competing in any competition. If you don’t know the rules of football then you’re not going to play very effectively. Same goes for politics.
There are lots of rules in politics and it’s not just limited to the written rules. In every political system there are “norms” which are unwritten rules that are still important. These rules aren’t enforced by official punishment or courts but are instead enforced by shame and distancing from others in the process.
Regardless, you need to learn as many of the rules as you can. If you don’t know the rules there is very little chance you’ll be able to be effective at doing politics. Without knowing the rules you’ll spend so much time, energy, and resources on things that end up not mattering. Knowing the rules can also help you keep your emotions in check so you aren’t expecting something to happen that can’t happen because of the rules.
If you’re a politician you’ll especially need to know the rules of your office. For instance if you are a legislator, like a representative or senator, you’ll need to know the rules of your house. You’ll need to know the full process of how a bill gets created and passed. You’ll need to know all the different votes and who needs to approve it. You’ll need to know parliamentary procedures so you can work the rules to your advantage or see how your enemy will work the rules for their advantage.
If you don’t know the rules you’ll just be reacting to politics, not actively doing politics effectively. There are hardly any politicians who know all the rules, and I speculate there is a large quantity who don’t even know some of the most basic rules.
But after you know the rules, then the next step is you need to accumulate power. The way you accumulate power is managing relationships.
Relationships are Key
Every person in the world has some measure of political power. This isn’t limited to just democracies either, every person has at least a tiny sliver of political power. For many they only have meaningful power when they are in coalition with others since their sliver of power is microscopic, but together it can be meaningful.
The work of politics is accumulating power by getting other people to give their little bits of power for your cause. If you aren’t working towards accumulating power for your goals then you aren’t doing politics, you are just watching it happen. Politics is a pretty popular hobby and I get it, I used to be a hobbyist. When I was younger I used to follow politics much closer and get really invested in it. I would watch closely and get really emotional about the day to day stuff going on. But doing that wasn’t accumulating power for my causes. Reading articles, watching cable news shows, and liking tweets is not really doing politics as much as it may feel like.
I think it’s important to establish what is NOT doing politics, or at least don’t make all that much difference. While the subject matters may involve politics they effectively do very little to advance your goals. Having opinions and policy positions is not doing politics. Believing the “right” beliefs is not doing politics. Consuming news so you are current on what’s happening politically is not doing politics. Posting one angry social media post about something is not doing politics. Sharing an article or meme on social media is not doing politics (for most people). Arguing directly with someone online is not doing politics. Many of the most common ways people interact with politics have an effect close to zero of helping their causes. None of these things are bad on their own, but clearly knowing that these activities aren’t actually doing much is important to keep in mind.
Doing politics is building and managing relationships. This work is tough, hard to measure, and is not a straightforward process. You theoretically need to manage your relationship with every single person, since every person has a small sliver of power that could be used for or against you. There is also the additional concern that there is the power both in the legitimate system of politics, and outside of it. Every voter has power from their vote, but they also have a different power outside the system if they choose to use violence in an attempt to achieve their goals.
You need to manage your relationship with both those who are for you and those who are against you. And notice I didn’t say those who agree with you or disagree, because a lot of times that doesn’t matter. When I say you need to manage your relationship with everyone I do mean everyone.
We sometimes think that people are just lists of policy preferences gravitating towards others with similar lists. Under this model agreeing or disagreeing is the most important interaction, but people are more complicated than that. Vibes are very important, aesthetics are important, and relationships are important.
There are different modes in which people can interact with political power. For this article I’ll loosely divide them into 5 categories: the people, voters, elites, politicians, and extremists.
To help spell out how all this works I’m going to use a fictional scenario to help illustrate the considerations you need to make as someone who passionately wants to get something done through the political process.
I want to emphasize that my scenario is not the law of how it all works. Every scenario is an example and the described outcomes are potential outcomes. Managing relationships is very dependent on the people and the goals, so your lived scenarios will be completely different. I am not using this to comment on the importance of any particular issue or politician. I also want to state that I myself am not a politician, I have gained these insights from observation and theory, not practice.
Doing Politics as a Citizen
To start off you need a goal. For this I have chosen an issue that I hope is sufficiently non-important yet still gives us a grounding in reality. I will use an example that is used for high schoolers everywhere to learn how to write opinions.
You are someone who is passionate about school uniforms. Where do you start off?
Common first step might be sharing an article on social media after you see a news piece about kids dressing inappropriately in school. Maybe you get some likes on there, maybe you don’t. Sharing articles can at best convince someone who had no thoughts on the issue before or energize someone who already shares your beliefs. Almost never will sharing an article change the opinion of someone who already disagrees on the issue.
Say you post an article about school uniforms. Friend 1 who believes in uniforms likes the post and comments “Finally, someone else agrees with me”. Friend 2 who never thought about school uniforms in their life sees it and goes “huh I had never thought about that before, sounds like a good idea”. Friend 3 who is already very much against school uniforms either ignores it or tries to argue with you in the comments.
You could start arguing with people in comment sections but after a bit your interest fades, you see you’re out of your depth, and then go on because it’s going to be harder than you thought. It seems to be so obvious that school uniforms are the correct thing to do. Your efforts online haven't accumulated any meaningful amount of power to achieve your goal. At most you slightly convinced some but haven’t inspired them into any additional action.
If you are a citizen and registered to vote you could wait until the next election, read up on the candidates and see if any are for school uniforms. This would in fact be doing politics. Voting is the act of giving your little slice of power to someone to get elected. While the amount you can personally change with your vote is small, it’s still doing politics. But sometimes waiting to vote isn’t enough when you’re passionate about a cause.
So you decide to take it up a notch, you’re going to go speak to the city council. You prepare a big impassioned speech about how important school uniforms are for students and how it’s an outrage that they aren’t standard practice. You plan to call out the do-nothing politicians for letting this issue slide.
You get there on the day, get up to the podium, and start delivering your speech just as you had practiced and it’s going great. But there are two issues – First, you are only allowed 4 minutes to speak to the city council and you wrote a speech that is in reality 12 minutes long. At 3 minutes and 30 seconds you are told you only have 30 seconds left and you get flustered trying to condense the next 8 minutes of speech into 30 seconds. Secondly, the city council has no say whatsoever in school uniforms. The school board is the correct place to go for this issue, not the city council.
To effectively do politics you need to know the rules, you need to know where the decisions are actually made and where you need to accumulate power.
In this encounter you have your first brush with managing real relationships. If you give an impassioned but not insulting speech at the wrong venue there’s a chance somebody will let you know. Maybe after your speech a city staff member tells you should go to the school board meeting for anything to get done. But in your impassioned speech you decided to go fire and brimstone and denounced the city council and city staff for their failures on this issue. Since 1) this isn’t the correct place for your issue you look foolish and unserious and 2) you just insulted everyone for something they don’t control, there will be little chance they will help you in any way. Some of the members may even agree with you about school uniforms but since you came in so heavy they don’t want to be associated with you.
In this first instance how were the relationships managed? Insulting someone makes it very unlikely that they’ll join you in your cause. In this instance you took a whole group of people with political power and turned your relationship with them negative. Before you spoke they had neutral opinions on you, now they’re negative. That goes for politicians and staff who both agreed and disagreed with school uniforms. If this is the only time you ever show up, they’ll know you aren’t a force they need to recognize and won’t pay any further attention to your cause. You did not effectively do politics in this instance, in fact you likely hurt your cause.
In this instance here are some pointers. For starters, being passionate does not mean you need to be insulting. Insulting someone in politics is at best a tool to get people who support you riled up, it hardly ever changes the behavior of the person you are insulting. Sometimes you need to get your people riled up, but a lot of times what’s needed is to change someone’s mind. Outrage and passion are effective tools if people believe you are reasonable and that you are letting this passion out for a good cause. If you are always super passionate or outraged then people might take you less seriously because surely not everything can be 10/10 seriousness at all times.
Additionally, showing up consistently is important. Imagine at your job you’re doing your work like you always do and out of nowhere a person comes yelling at you that you’re doing your job wrong. They say to your face that you're horrible for doing your work that way and then leave never to be seen again. Would you listen to what they had to say? Most likely not. Same goes for people in the political process, the politicians and staff are there for the long haul and if you want change you better be ready for the long haul too.
A Considered Approach
Alright, let's start over. You never posted on social media and never did your impassioned speech at the City Council. You instead start off by going to speak at a School Board meeting about the issue. You get to the board meeting a little late and when it comes time to speak you realize you needed to sign in before the meeting to be able to speak.
Again you need to know the rules, sometimes there will be trial and error in figuring them out, but you’ll need to figure them out eventually. In this instance you could try and raise hell to try and speak at this meeting. Doing that would likely only sour relationships, again looking foolish and unserious. You decide to wait for the next meeting.
The next meeting comes, you get yourself there early so you can get checked in to speak. You eventually give an impassioned but not insulting speech about how you think there should be school uniforms. This is a good start. In a material sense, nothing changes. The School Board hasn’t voted on the change, they didn’t all stand and clap after your speech, there aren’t even thoughts of bringing this onto the agenda. But you’ve established yourself in a good manner. The people who agree with you are happy with your speech and think positively of you. The board members who disagree with you still disagree, but you haven’t racked up any additional negative feelings in them so that’s good for you.
So where would you go from here? The board has 7 members, meaning that you need to get at least 4 to agree to vote on this. But even that might not be enough. Knowing the rules means both the formal rules, informal rules, and the rules of each of the individuals voting. You may be able to get 4 board members to support school uniforms but they might not vote if it’s just the 4 of them voting for it. Just as you have to manage your relationship with politicians, the politicians have their own relationships to manage. In small boards like this it’s common for there to be a belief that the board should vote unanimously, or at least more than the bare minimum.
These offices are almost always done on a volunteer basis, the school board is almost never a stepping stone for an ambitious politician or for someone to do as their full time job. The people who do it care about their community. Members of a board like this might not want to sully their relationship with the other members because they’ll need the other members on their side for other issues. If the school uniform supporters on the board don’t see the issue as important enough versus the risk of ruining their relationship with the other board members then they most likely won’t vote for it.
So what do you do after your first speech? You need to be accumulating power. You could keep attending and speaking at school board meetings attempting to build power with the members. You may not need to be there for every single meeting or speak every time , but you at least need to be there regularly. The more effective you want to be the more you’ll be there and the more you’ll speak. Pragmatic and persistent will most likely be your best path forward in an arena like this. I’m not ruling out that being impassioned and impatient can be effective in the right circumstances, but in this specific scenario I’ve described it’s most likely not the most effective move.
I want to use this as an aside about being a true believer. Being a true believer means that in every instance possible you stand up for your beliefs full throatedely and with passion. This can often feel good because it feels like a morally pure strategy. “It’s me who is morally correct and pure, I speak nothing but the truth, it’s everyone else who is morally wrong.” But again, having positions and opinions is not doing politics. It at best may gain you some followers to your cause, but that’ll only be as big as the number of people who feel similar about the idea, aren’t worried about it not getting done, and aren’t put off by your other positions. Being outwardly unchanging about something you believe in doesn’t always lead to change. Bringing up your issue at every chance may actually hurt your cause. In the end, what do you care more about, always saying what you believe is the morally correct thing or the morally correct change you want to see actually happening? All of this is tough to navigate, but you should at least be aware that there are tradeoffs.
Now back to you at the school board meetings. Going as an individual and making a good natured speech to the board is the upper limit of what you can do as an individual. This is a space where you could be effective due to the smaller personal nature of the organization. Your temperament can be key. It’s a regular occurrence that people will make a wild impassioned speech one time about some wild idea never to be seen again. A much less regular occurrence is someone coming in steadily to advocate for something real or grounded. They may listen.
But just because they’ll listen doesn’t mean they’ll act on it. Doing politics is about accumulating power to achieve your goals. Power comes from people. People give their power for many different reasons including agreeing with the issue, cultural reasons, electoral math, maintaining relationships, or just pure financial interest.
Making pragmatic and persistent speeches to the school board is doing politics. But if you want to do more you’ll most likely need to move from your role as just a voter to becoming an activist.
Doing Politics as an Activist
An activist is someone who takes further steps to try and achieve their goals. They try to attract others to use their power for the cause. As an activist you could try to convince more people to come and speak about school uniforms, rounding up as many as possible to speak at the school board. The hope is to demonstrate that your cause has power behind it. With this step you’d again need to be managing your relationships, making sure that you’re keeping the people who agree with you and trying not to flare up an opposition.
If you make a big enough of a stink another activist might sprout up to try and stop the progress you’re making. You don’t want to spark opposition. To be maximally effective you have to thread the needle of getting enough people to support you while also not inspiring people to oppose you. You need to manage your relationships with both those who are for you and those who are against.
Instead of going the route of gaining power through ‘the people’, you could try working with the ‘elites’. Elites in this framing are a broad group of people. Under my definition these are anybody who has political power throughout the whole system where their power isn’t from voting or violence. You in your role as an activist would become an elite. Activists have power from their relationships. A wealthy person has power due to their money. Intellectuals have power by controlling the idea space. Pundits and journalists have power by controlling the narrative of what’s happening. Those working in government have power over their tasks. Staff of politicians have power by being close to the elected politicians. Local leaders have power from their organizations. There are many players in the political system who have power to sway.
You could also try working directly with the politicians. This can be harder because elected politicians often have many people contacting them. BUT, the lower down the political chain you get the more accessible they tend to be. While as a standard voter there’s no way you’ll be able to correspond regularly with the president, you have a slightly higher shot with your senator, slightly higher shot with your representative, then state senator, assembly member, etc. Then by the time you get to local councils and boards they can be pretty accessible depending on the size of your locality. For the vast majority of local elected boards and councils, very few people attend or pay attention. This is an arena with the greatest possibility to work directly with elected politicians as an activist.
You get to work trying to build a coalition for school uniforms. From your speeches in front of the board a few people have come up to say they support you. You reach back out to them and find some others on social media. After extended conversations you’ve found a couple dozen people, a wealthy elite, and a principal from one of the schools in the district on your side. This isn’t a bad group, definitely has more power than just you as an individual, but the group isn’t rock solid. Half the people you have are just kinda interested, not motivated too much about the issue. The wealthy member wants to go fast and big to get this done, while the principal wants to be more cautious since they have to manage their relationship with the district. This tension makes the coalition a tough one. You have to manage your relationship with the people who support you while you’re trying to manage the relationship with those who don’t support you.
One key aspect to managing relationships is that you have to be able to read and understand people. Specifically, if you’re trying to sway the school board to enact school uniforms, you’ll probably want to know how each of the 7 board members will vote. This can be a difficult task to find out how they’d vote, and an even trickier task to figure out what influences that vote.
You’ll also need to know this info about your own people. Let’s say you find out that there’s another group in town who supports school uniforms. You might think initially that this is wonderful, more people to come along with our cause. But after a bit you come to realize that this group is more than just for school uniforms, they’re also religious radicals. Their organization is founded on being a group of radicals and just so happens that one of their goals is school uniforms. They’re much more vocal about their issues and are willing to call out others.
This other organization presents a real dilemma to you. You yourself are not a religious radical and don’t believe in any of their other causes. Some of your followers will go along with the radicals, others will not. The wealthy member very much wants to merge with the radicals while the school principal states he would have to stop participating if you merged with the other group. This would be a very real tension.
If you merge with the other group, you may gain additional power advocating for school uniforms but lose some of your key members. The radicals might also expect you to start speaking about mandatory school prayer and ancient religious law, they won’t let you just speak on school uniforms. You’d also need to see how this would affect the further accumulation of power through people. Maybe in the short term you’d gain power from merging but then there might not be potential for more. There might not be anymore people who are for school uniforms AND religious radicalism, but there could possibly be more people who’d support JUST school uniforms. As goes with the people, goes with the politicians. It may be that if you had the vote on school uniforms 5 of the board members would vote for it. But if the vote came after tough pressure from only the radical group only 3 would vote for it. This could be because one board member thinks that letting the radicals win would hurt their electoral chances and the other board member is a staunch atheist so doesn’t want to give the radicals any wins.
But with all that in the last paragraph, it may also be the opposite! I want to make clear that I (me, Joe the writer) am not advocating or denouncing any of this or trying to express any policy positions. What I am trying to say is that you need to manage your relationships, and knowing where people are at on the issues and politics is very important.
So let’s say you’ve considered what the other group is and decided you are not going to work with the religious radicals. Actually you’ve decided you’re not going to work with your own organization anymore either. This is because you’ve decided you’re going to take matters into your own hands and run for school board!
Doing Politics as a Politician
Becoming an elected politician is no small feat, you need to get enough people to vote for you. To do this you need to manage your relationships so that you have a coalition big enough to get you elected. In building this coalition you need to manage the relationship with the people against you in a way that you don’t inspire them to fight harder against you. You also need to manage your relationship with the elites because they’re the ones who give you the resources both on what to do and the financial/manpower resources to do what is needed.
Through your activism you’ve gained a decent following but they’re spread across the whole city, you need to get votes in your district. You start campaigning, knocking on doors and putting out yard signs. Since it’s just for the school board you never have to do any speeches but people do ask you questions about what you believe. Your number 1 issue is school uniforms but the voters keep asking you about other things. They ask about textbooks, curriculum, buses, sports programs, their one nephew who had a weird disciplinary issue, after school programs, the traffic for drop off and pickup, and much more. The problem is you don’t actually have strong beliefs about any of those other things, but you still believe in school uniforms and think this is the best way to accomplish your goal.
You try to stick to just school uniforms but you sense that you are actively turning people off because not many people are single issue voters for school uniforms. If you keep going down this path you’ll fail to get enough votes because they see you as single minded. So your message becomes a vague “I’m going to get in there and fix things, we’re going to do what we need to do to make things better” which is great talk that can be inspiring but lacks much substance. But since you’ve built up a network of support and people see you as someone who is able to take charge and actually do things, they believe your words have more backing to it than just cheap talk. In your eyes the rest doesn’t really matter, getting on the board is what’s important so you can get school uniforms passed.
Congrats, you get elected! You are now one of 7 board members with Kevin, Elizabeth, Harold, Mike, Susan, and Pat being the other 6. From your earlier work you learned that Kevin and Elizabeth are for school uniforms and that Harold and Mike are against uniforms. Susan and Pat are both newly elected with you so you aren’t sure what their positions are.
Now let’s say you get sworn in but this is in the universe where you hadn’t internalized the message of managing relationships so you decide to go full force on school uniforms. You immediately ask the staff to put school uniforms on the agenda. You ask Kevin and Elizabeth to also ask for it to be on the agenda to increase your chances. You haven’t talked to any other members to see where they’re at, you’re just going for it. The second meeting into your term school uniforms gets put on the agenda.
You get to the meeting and a good amount of people show up. They are alarmed at both the policy but also how quickly the new school board is trying to do what seems like a radical change. A good number have a very concerned tone while some are much more passionate. Only a couple spoke in favor of school uniforms. Since public comment is first at the meeting this drags out the time until the vote.
After public comment finishes the school uniform item comes up. You give a big passionate speech about how good school uniforms are and how anyone who is against this is a horrible person. You hope that Kevin and Elizabeth will also speak in support but they end up not speaking.
Then Harold makes a motion to table the item until the next meeting.
You plead that we need to do this now for the good of the community.
On the motion to table only Harold, Mike, and Susan vote to table, with Pat joining you and the others in voting no on tabling. You see this as a sign that Pat is on your side. Motion failed 4-3.
After the motion to table was rejected, now comes the vote for school uniforms. You’re thinking you’ll have 4 votes: you, Kevin, Elizabeth, and Pat. With those 4 votes you’d have school uniforms instituted and you’d achieve your goal!
The votes come in.
The item fails 5-2. Only you and Kevin voted for it.
School uniforms do not pass.
What went wrong? You thought you had it. You went for the opportunity and until it happened it seemed like you had the support.
You didn’t manage your relationships, if you had you would’ve known you didn’t have the votes.
Harold was originally against school uniforms but his feelings weren’t too strong. If there had been wider discussion from the board about it he still would’ve been opposed but wouldn’t have made a motion to table it. He also tipped off some constituents he knew really disliked school uniforms to come and speak.
Mike had been staunchly against uniforms from the beginning. He prefers to keep quiet on most things so there is less he has to talk about. He’s aware that in his district there are a good number of people who want uniforms but he personally doesn’t want it to happen. He avoided saying anything on the topic to not flare up those voters hoping this vote will be forgotten.
Susan could’ve been persuaded to be for school uniforms but it just wasn’t very important to her. He main concern is curriculum and sees school uniforms as nothing but a distraction. She is wanting to preserve her political capital to do work on curriculum changes that might be contentious. She sees you as reckless and not someone who will carry much additional power so decided to go against you on this one. Given the right environment she would’ve voted for it but this was way too hot for her with the backlash.
Pat is new and very inexperienced. They had submitted their name on the ballot because nobody else had submitted and thought it would be something for them to do. They had never been to a school board meeting before and had very little idea of what being an elected politician is like. It turns out when they voted to reject the motion to table they didn’t know what was going on and thought they were voting no on the actual item. They weren’t prepared for the speeches the people made against uniforms. The idea that the broader public opinion can be different from those speaking in the room is not one Pat has thought or can really comprehend. Maybe if Kevin and Elizabeth had also made speeches in support Pat would’ve voted for it, but at that moment more people spoke against it than for it, so Pat voted against it.
Elizabeth wanted to vote for school uniforms but ended up not voting for it. She’s been on the board for many years and she values her relationships with Harold and Mike. The three of them have worked on a lot together and they generally see eye to eye except for this one issue. Elizabeth didn’t want to sully her relationships with Harold and Mike if it was just going to barely pass. If there had been 4 other votes and it was just Harold and Mike voting against the measure she could’ve maybe voted for uniforms because it’s less contentious when something wins 5-2 instead of 4-3. In a 5-2 scenario she could claim she’s with the bigger majority, but that anything less than 5 votes for it would’ve been too few and she didn’t want to take that risk and voted against it. She is not going to ask for this to get put on the agenda for a long time.
Finally there’s Kevin. Kevin voted with you for school uniforms but actually personally disagrees. He thinks it’s a restriction on the kid’s freedoms. But he supported it because a good number of prominent constituents had expressed they are very in favor of school uniforms. He believes both that it’s his duty to do what his constituents want and that he could lose his office if he voted no on school uniforms. He’ll most likely go another round with you on this but not without significant assurance that it will indeed pass. He feels like he looks like a fool being one of the only two to vote for it.
So there you had it, you spoke your mind, forced a vote, and then lost badly with a 5-2 vote.
All of these variables, all of these personalities, and all these events can happen differently. What gets done in politics is what can get enough agreement on. It’s not just the policy, but how it gets presented and everyone’s relationships to each other. To be able to do anything requires people, knowing their rules and needs, and seeing what can work between all of those.
There is a version of this story where you come on the school board and start building and managing your relationships. You talk with your peers and see where they’re at. Maybe there’s some vote trading you need to do on curriculum with Susan, afterall all you care about is uniforms so curriculum could be whatever. A slower process that builds steady support is much preferred. You don’t need to lose your passion, it just needs to get channeled through the effective methods for the circumstances.
There may also be a version of this scenario where the actual preferences of the board is 6-1 against uniforms with you being the only supporter which would mean you’d need to completely change your strategy. To be able to effectively do politics you need to know where you’re at, where everyone else is at, and see a way to bring those together in the right environment so it passes.
Titans of Doing Politics
A good amount of this insight came from reading Robert Caro’s books on Robert Moses and Lydon Johnson (The Power Broker and The Year of Lyndon Johnson Series). Both these men wielded incredible power. In addition to legitimate means they also amassed lots of power through dirty corruption and just straight up illegal shit. Even with that corruption the root of all their power was managing their relationships with people with relevant power.
Here’s an anecdote from LBJ’s career where he managed his relationships. (From Chapters 19 & 22 of “The Passage of Power” by Robert Caro)
Shortly after JFK’s assassination it was time to start the budget process. LBJ knew he needed to get civil rights legislation passed but that if they didn’t get the budget done before civil rights the budget would never pass. The men on JFK’s team had gotten the budget down to around 101 billion and were also trying to get a tax cut passed to boost the economy. They were certain both were going to pass through the senate finance committee and then the senate as a whole, the two major roadblocks. They counted the votes and they had them. The chairman of the committee was even a prominent Democrat, Harry Byrd, he wouldn’t go against the party right?
LBJ knew it wasn’t going to be able to go through like that. Harry Byrd was a staunch fiscal conservative who was very worried about the debt. Byrd had stated previously that he wasn’t going to let anything pass unless it was under 100 billion. He also wasn’t too excited about the tax cut either since it added to the debt.
JFK’s team thought that 101 billion for the budget was going to be close enough. They thought when the chairman Harry Byrd said 100 billion that he’d settle for pretty close to 100 billion. No, he was not going to accept anything a penny over 100 billion dollars. If the 101 billion budget and tax cut had been allowed a vote in the committee without any say from the chairman it would’ve passed, but the chairman had great abilities to stall. There are many tactics available to stall and slow progress, if the chairman didn’t want it to be voted on then he could delay almost infinitely.
But LBJ had a relationship with Byrd so they were able to talk about it. LBJ confirmed his suspicion with Byrd that he wouldn’t allow any budget more than 100 billion to pass. LBJ then asked if Byrd would pass the budget and tax cut if Johnson could get the budget below 100 billion and stop members from proposing amendments. Byrd ended up accepting the offer. LBJ then used his connections in government agencies to get the budget down to 97.9 billion and was able to keep amendments from coming to the floor through managing relationships and through parliamentary maneuvers.
The budget and tax cut bill ended up passing just in time, clearing the way for the civil rights debate without any important legislation being held hostage. If they had gone with the original plan there would’ve been no budget, no tax cut, and likely no civil rights bill. They hadn’t adequately managed their relationships. All the soaring positive language in the world isn’t going to overcome someone who wants to stop you and has the power to do so.
IN CONCLUSION
That brings us to the end. The guide to effectively doing politics still follows:
1) Choose your goal
2) Know the rules
3) Manage your relationships.
I hope this doesn’t make you want to quit participating in politics. Supporting causes and having passionately held beliefs can be a wonderful thing and helps provide you with a morality of how you see the world. But if you let yourself get too clear eyed about it all you’ll be expending so much emotional energy on the highs and lows of politics.
These days I really don’t follow politics. I really don’t care what Nancy Pelosi did or what Matt Gaetz said. The actual workings of politics is so opaque that none of us know what game is really being played by any politician in any action. Any speech, action, or inaction could be an attempt to manage their relationship with anyone in the process. They never start a speech with “I am giving this speech in order to get favor with one of the members on my sub committee and nothing more” or do a political stunt and state beforehand “I’m doing this to discredit my opponent and so it will be covered by Chris Hayes on his show and will hopefully raise my name recognition in an attempt to gain more power in the voters”.
A speech given by a politician could be for you, another group, one politician on their side who needs reassurance, one politician who is against them but might be swayed, cool their relationship with someone, ignite a controversy, draw attention away from another issue, discredit an opponent, discredit an ally that’s getting ahead of them, or many other possibilities!
Following politics can make you miserable fast. A close friend of mine told me he had this realization about doing politics, that he was either going to put up or shut up. And when he realized he wasn’t going to get involved in any local meetings he decided to shut up and it’s been good for his mental health. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t care or completely detaches, but just means he doesn’t get too emotionally invested daily and makes sure to vote when it comes time.
If you’re not content with being idle or just voting there’s still tons you can do for your causes, just make sure you’re doing work that actually results in accumulating power. Again, having takes is not doing politics. Maybe for someone like Matthew Yglesias who has wide reach and is read by people in power, for him doing takes is doing politics. For you who has 50 followers, having takes and getting in arguments online is not doing politics, it’s only making you feel worse.
Just remember– have clear goals, know the rules, and manage your relationships, those are the keys to doing politics. It certainly ain’t for everyone, it takes a very specific type of person to do it well. But if you’re going to do politics those are some keys to doing any better than treading water.
Oh! And I almost forgot to talk about managing your relationships with extremists. This one is the least tangible relationship of them all. I don’t even have a good working scenario of how to deal with it. But you should hope that your politics doesn’t inspire extremists in either direction. Extremists for you will commit horrible violence in the name of your cause, whereas extremists against you will just assassinate you or people associated with you. This is a very real phenomenon that is very hard to manage, but still needs to be attempted to be managed. All relationships need to be managed in politics.
Referenced Works
Politics is for Power - Eitan Hersh
Art of War - Sun Tzu
The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli
Politics as Vocation - Max Weber
The Power Broker - Robert A. Caro
The Path to Power - Robert A. Caro
Means of Ascent - Robert A. Caro
Master of the Senate - Robert A. Caro
The Passage of Power - Robert A. Caro