Having It All Means Having No Expectations

Our politics are dysfunctional because we get ahead of ourselves. We have to concede that things do not always get better.

Photo: Everett Bartels, Unsplash

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Our politics are dysfunctional because we get ahead of ourselves. We reach into the future for an ideal, bring it back to the present, and then act as though it were manifest and inevitable. When a fantasy about, say, securing single-payer healthcare or reverting decades of demographic change fails to cohere, we have to choose between changing our perception or changing reality.

We would much rather change reality, as rationalist Julia Galef shows in her recent book, The Scout Mindset. Galef argues that seeing the world as we wish it to be, rather than the way that it really is, is caused by something called motivated reasoning. Basically, we see what we want to see because (and here’s the motive) we may otherwise risk emotional estrangement from our identity and social ostracism from our community. We defend fantasy not because we are stupid but because we want to avoid feeling bad and alone.

I think she gets this right. We are often easily motivated to see what we want to see, reason and reasonable entreaty be damned. Galef’s remedy, that we “wear our identity lightly” and get curious about our perception, is just about the best take on “identity politics” to date. Taking stock of these things is good practice. Even the clearest and most capable critical thinker can fall prey to fantasy.

Understanding how we can be motivated to change our reality to fit our perception is one thing. Determining why we get ahead of ourselves in the first place is another thing entirely. I think the answer is relatively simple: we no longer set expectations. Worse, in the same way that the Standard Model of particle physics has yet to reconcile with gravity, our “standard model of politics” is now too narrowly specialized to even perceive expectations. I believe this is why we waste our days on factional score-keeping, philosophizing about polarization, and arguing about whether the “broken system” is best reformed or remade outright.

Nevertheless, expectations, like gravity, are too fundamental to our political universe to ignore. Expectations govern relationships: come through for someone and win a friend for life; miss and risk losing them forever. Expectations create boundaries: set yours too high and you will be alone; set yours too low you will be walked all over. Expectations ground our ambition: set them on something too far out of reach and you will come out empty-handed; fail to set them at all and you will achieve nothing at all. Expectations enable us to solve problems: map out the individual steps toward solving a problem and you’re on your way; fail to size the problem into smaller pieces and the end goal becomes the only goal.

I remember watching Jonathan Alter tour his biography of President Obama’s first year on cable news in 2010. Invited to discuss healthcare, Alter routinely brandished Bismarck’s old axe, that “politics is the art of the possible,” to convince the media that any increase in Americans with healthcare coverage was a net good. Listen to Democrats today and you would think that “Obamacare” is a story about failing to secure single-payer. More than anything, it’s actually a story about the failure to set expectations.

When we fail to set expectations we set ourselves up for failure. I’ll bet that you have recently heard some version of “we just need to” in preface to some nontrivial problem—like, say, “eliminate the filibuster”—that, for the future-facing faithful, represents some happily ever after. Admittedly, this is technically an expectation but it’s more like gambling, with a perpetual doubling down, because it never resolves. It’s like that friend of yours who earnestly tells you every time you seen him that, as soon as he gets home, he’s going to start in on that project that he’s always talking about.

How did we lose sight of expectations if they are so important? Well, first, we have to concede that things do not always get better. Our political framework is motivated to see what it wants to see in the same way that we are. My baseline theory here is that we lost sight of expectations when we decided that we could have it all in our culture more generally. Having it all means not having to set any expectations. It means not having to bargain, compromise, or negotiate. That’s loser talk. The only expectation we have today is that we can have anything we want and that includes never having to adjust our expectations.