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Great political ideas come, not from committees or from random samplings of the uninformed or semi-informed masses, but from intelligent and forceful leaders wh
by grellas 16y ago
Great political ideas come, not from committees or from random samplings of the uninformed or semi-informed masses, but from intelligent and forceful leaders who can think them through thoughtfully, who can articulate them in a way that resonates with people, and who can set out an agenda to carry them into effective action. None of this is easy to do and it takes exceptional people even to make a credible stab at it.
There is no need to bring in modern politics to illustrate this. Any glance through the Federalist Papers will quickly show to any informed reader that one can take very difficult and highly contentious topics (how to form a country, how to divide its power among different groups, how to limit its power decisively in furtherance of broader principles such as natural law) and make well-reasoned and even brilliant arguments about them in ways that compel people to action. The people who made those arguments were steeped in a lifetime of ideas and imbued with a strong philosophy about the principles of right government, and it showed in what they wrote - even when those writings essentially took the form of propaganda pieces (which is really what the Federalist Papers were).
You won't get this from a website such as the one featured in this piece. You won't get it from Democratic Underground either. Leaders are leaders and hacks are hacks. The world offers the latter in abundance but good leaders are a precious few. This is not to say that normal, day-to-day people can't have good ideas or be intelligent in a political sense. It is to say that the intelligent articulation of such views won't come out in a mass setting and that is why political parties are ultimately driven by insiders (who are, one would hope, effective leaders) and not by soliciting random views from the street.
- michael_nielsen 16y agoAn almost exactly analogous argument could be used to "prove" that Wikipedia would entirely fail [1]. Replace "Great political ideas" by "High-quality encyclopedia articles" etcetera. I don't personally think much of Republican policies, but I'm glad they're at least giving things like this a go. I could wish, however, that they'd spoken with more people who have real insight into how social websites work. They could have started with the founders of Reddit, and a bunch of other YC folk. [1] Yes, I'm well aware some people claim that Wikipedia has failed. But arguing with people who use "failure" to describe a site with Wikipedia's impact isn't worth the time.
- prospero 16y agoWikipedia is not a coherent entity, it's a bunch of tinpot dictators ruling over their own little fiefdoms. Wikipedia's success doesn't disprove the above statement, it just shows that the quality of one article is orthogonal to all the others.
- amanfredi 16y agoThis isn't a valid comparison. A high quality encyclopedia article is not analogous to a great political idea. Particularly, an encyclopedia article is grounded in fact, while a great political idea may be considered an untested theory.
- tsally 16y agoIf only coming up with a great political idea was as easy as writing a high quality encyclopedia article. Quantitatively there are several orders of magnitude more article authors than great political thinkers. If we place all activities on a continuum based on intellectual difficultly, there's a point where crowd sourcing stops working. I think it's pretty clear where political thought stands compared to writing encyclopedia articles.
- jimbokun 16y ago"If only coming up with a great political idea was as easy as writing a high quality encyclopedia article." Coming up with a great political idea is probably pretty easy. The difficulty comes in convincing lots of people to make the sacrifices and compromises necessary to implement the great idea. That's why they call it politics, no?
- stcredzero 16y agoWhat's so "great" about a political idea no one cares about?
- KirinDave 16y agoI see no real correlation between "great political ideas" and their source. You're just as likely to get terrible totalitarian, unworkable, incoherent, or simply misinformed ideas as good ones from any one source (e.g, Ayn Rand & co for an example of a series of well-formulated but relatively baseless ideas). Is it possible that there is no way to predict the quality of these sorts of systems (assuming non-triviality) without actually carrying out an experiment?
- stcredzero 16y agoI find Objectivism and related ideas to be extremely internally self-consistent. (Which for me is a big component of being Well Formed.) But just because something is internally self consistent doesn't mean that it's such a good idea in a given context. The results a given system yields are dependent on the interaction of a number of interdependent social, cultural, and economic systems. (A communist revolution could be a great idea in the face of a corrupt system, but turn out to be a horrible idea over time. Capitalism could result in tremendous wealth generation in one time and place, but in tremendous repression in another.) This idea should be extended to programming languages and computer systems. The success of Unix, C, Perl, PHP, iPhone OS and many other examples of technology is highly dependent on their interaction with pre-existing user communities and technological infrastructure.
- hugh3 16y agoGreat political ideas come, not from committees or from random samplings of the uninformed or semi-informed masses, but from intelligent and forceful leaders who can think them through thoughtfully, who can articulate them in a way that resonates with people, and who can set out an agenda to carry them into effective action. Great leaders? Resonating with the masses? That sounds more like a primer on how completely awful (in the gas chamber/gulag/killing fields sense) political ideas come about. Most of the tolerable governments of the world have come about from a process of centuries of gradual refinement and consensus-building. Great leaders tend to screw things up more often than not. Great Britain made its way from monarchy to liberal democracy on its own and without the help (and occasionally with the hindrance -- I'm looking at you Mr Cromwell) of any "great leaders". The US constitution was just a somewhat refined offshoot of the British system.
- navyrain 16y agoWhile I think you're right to say that bad ideas have been given more traction than they deserved by having an effective leader promoting them, I don't think this is a counter-argument to the grandparent. Choosing the country's goals certainly should be democratic, but in an imperfect political system, it still takes tenacious leaders to navigate the rough political landscape to realize those goals.
- Osiris 16y ago> The US constitution was just a somewhat refined offshoot of the British system. I think it's important to point out that there is, in fact, very few similarities between the U.K. government, especially at the time, and the U.S. government. The U.K. uses a parliamentary system of government without a written constitution. There is a single, essentially all-powerful, legislative body with no separate executive. They can literal change the structure of government by passing a law due to the lack of a constitution. The government is structured as it is due to tradition. The only real similarity is that they also use the "Winner Takes All" voting system, in which the person that receives the most votes wins, as opposed to a proportional system used in other countries. Other than that similarity, they're basically entirely different.
- 16y ago
- anamax 16y ago> Great political ideas are rarely the point. Take manufacturing. The assembly line is a "great" idea that is useless without many tiny good ideas.
- eru 16y agoYes, we need common sense more than great ideas.
- dskhatri 16y agoA good point and it seems to be validated in studies involving new democracies: http://www.technologyreview.com/article/25048/ http://www.technologyreview.com/article/25048/ "Unexpectedly, the civic decisions--often involving road, sanitation, and water projects--were nearly identical whether made by majority vote or village elites. Giving power to the people, it seems, does not automatically lead to tangible material changes. Yet when people were allowed to vote, they expressed greater contentment with the results."