The Trade-Offs and Tough Choices of the Serious and Responsible People

Not everyone gets an equal say in determining “the way things are.”

This article is the second in an eight-part series. Read part one here.

Last May, Gideon Resnick and Maxwell Tani wrote in The Daily Beast about the political evolution of Brian Fallon, a former press secretary to Hillary Clinton and a longtime Senate spokesman for Chuck Schumer. The reporters observed that in the years since Trump’s election, Fallon had “self-radicalized and become a resistance leader,” helming a progressive advocacy group pressuring Democrats to be more ruthless in their opposition to Republican judicial nominees.

Fallon’s aggressive tactics and willingness to challenge allies as well as enemies surprised many in Washington. They also quickly began to irritate the staffers and party insiders who’d long been his colleagues and comrades-in-arms. What made his political and tactical transformation so jarring, Resnick and Tani reported, was that Fallon hadn’t always been an advocate on the party’s fringe or a guy who built a dedicated following on liberal Twitter. He was “once a fixture of the Democratic Party’s institution” — a product and proponent of working within the system. “For years, Fallon and other operatives of his age functioned under the idea that politicians needed to work within the realm of the possible,” they wrote. In that world, “those who drifted outside of those constraints were deemed hopelessly naïve at best, and irritating idealists at [worst].”

Fallon isn’t the only former Democratic aide for whom events of recent years have prompted a bit of a rethink. As a young staffer who arrived on Capitol Hill just out of college at the end of 2009, I had quickly adopted a similar “that’s just the way things are” framing of the world. Even though I considered myself an idealist, I generally saw those working outside the accepted boundaries of the system as naïve and irritating — counterproductive, even, in that their efforts risked undermining our shared goals. Sure, none of America’s most significant progressive advancements had ever succeeded solely by working within “the system,” but that was a different era, right?

By the time I went to work on Capitol Hill, everybody knew that times had changed, and the system now functioned the way it was supposed to. Everybody knew that the Founders had designed a constitutional order based on compromise and checks and balances, and working within the accepted constraints was the only way to achieve anything. Everybody knew that radical advocacy made it harder to get things done. Everybody knew that if an idea wouldn’t bring both Democrats and Republicans to the table, it wasn’t worth pursuing, even if one party was operating in bad faith and systematically denying the existence of the negotiating table in the first place.

No one sat me down and told me explicitly that Serious and Responsible People had agreed to these basic operating tenets. Everybody just knew them. Everybody accepted and understood them as the way things are. This understanding wasn’t unanimous, of course, but the rules of the status quo had the buy-in (literally, in some cases) of enough politicians, pundits, and power players in both parties that for most people the scope of the possible had long since narrowed to only the most minor and incremental reforms. (Seen in that light, the 2010 passage of Wall Street reform and the Affordable Care Act are even more monumental accomplishments.) The consensus of the serious and responsible people was not to be questioned.

I don’t think I realized it at the time, but as a young Hill staffer who’d studied computer science in college and feared I might never fit in as a politics and government guy, I really wanted to think of myself as a serious and responsible person in Washington. I was progressive, sure, but I trusted that the system was moving inexorably toward achieving the goals I believed in, from expanding access to health care to fighting climate change. The system had never let me down, after all. I equated trust in the system that had worked for me with faith that it could work for anybody else.

This identity — as one of the serious and responsible progressives — was comforting and simplifying. It enabled me to go about my life without worrying as much about those who were struggling, since I knew that the system would take care of them (as long as they worked hard and did their part). It allowed me to justify my own professional status as something I earned through merit and effort. And in my acceptance of “the way things are,” and my cynical dismissiveness of those who refused to accept it as the only way, I acquired a very pleasant sense of self-righteousness and all-knowingness (an attitude encountered by many people who have interacted with young Hill staffers of either party).

Meanwhile, consciously or not, my political worldview narrowed to a Bill Clinton-era liberalism in which balancing the budget was as fundamental a moral responsibility as helping those in need. Shrinking the deficit was as important a priority as expanding access to health insurance. Propping up businesses that had made themselves too big to fail was as critical to the health of the economy as raising workers’ wages and lowering the cost of living. Giving people a “hand up,” to paraphrase the patronizing rhetoric of personal responsibility, was more appropriate than giving them a handout. I took Clinton’s urging not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and I interpreted it to mean that it wasn’t even worth fighting for the perfect in the first place.

My we-know-best worldview didn’t emerge from thin air. Over decades, the perspectives of serious and responsible people have been honed, shaped, skewed, and replicated by a range of forces and interest groups, from corporate lobbies and anti-government ideologues to conservative economists and well-off individuals seeking to retroactively justify their successes and others’ failures. These relentless efforts, which we’ll discuss later in this series, have served the interests of their lead proponents extremely well.

But they have also dramatically narrowed our collective understanding of what society can be and shrunk our expectations of what government can achieve. The rules of “the way things are” have infused the thinking of America’s political and economic decision-makers with the doctrinaire belief that we can have economic growth or strong social protections, but not both. We can lower the unemployment rate before the next election, or we can attempt to address structural injustices stretching back generations, but not both. We can fire up the engines of entrepreneurship and economic prosperity, or we can make sure more workers have decent health care and retirement benefits, but certainly not both. We can have a dynamic economy or dynamic social mobility, but… you get the idea.

Over the years, this way of thinking has contributed to a widespread belief among generations of staffers and operatives like me — not to mention voters and other participants in American democracy — that being serious and responsible means accepting these rules. It means recognizing that the way the system works now, honed by free markets and guided by the entrepreneurial wisdom of the private sector, is the best it will ever be.

Once that understanding is in place, it becomes the mandate of serious and responsible policymakers not to upset the system, and instead to preserve its upsides while rationalizing its downsides. Serious and responsible policymakers find serious-and-responsible-sounding ways to explain why big ideas cannot be realized or why special interests cannot be challenged. Serious and responsible policymakers know “yes” is impossible (everyone knows that), so they find serious-and-responsible-sounding ways — often couched in rhetoric about “trade-offs” and “tough choices” — to get to “no.”

As a young and idealistic staffer on Capitol Hill, I quickly learned that serious and responsible people work within the system. Therefore, so would I.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the second in an eight-part series. Read part three here.