Post-Crisis Politics

Why investigative reporters and political activists seem so depressed

Virginia Postrel from the August/September 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

In post-crisis America, politics has not, of course, disappeared. Nor should it. But it has changed. And those who care about the proper relationship between government and society must change with it. Unless they want to be thought hysterical maniacs by a public tired of phony crises, they must learn a different, more honest, and more satisfying way of talking about issues. (None of this precludes using the rhetoric of crisis and emergency response in a genuine emergency--if, to take the summer's favorite movie scenario, a large heavenly body is about to hit the earth, or if the Chinese seriously threaten to nuke Los Angeles.)

In its public, high-profile form, post-crisis political activity has two main functions: cleaning up chronic problems and helping shape interpretive worldviews. When there are no immediate dangers, addressing long-term problems becomes more feasible. It's possible to invest the time necessary to draw public attention to such nagging issues as out-of-control entitlements or a deranged tax code.

In dealing with chronic problems--which, by definition, are not momentary "crises"--how you understand the world matters a lot. Consider the terrible state of the public schools, the chronic problem that looms largest in the public imagination. If you believe that educational quality is simply a matter of will and thus something that can be decreed, you will look for a central education czar and charge him with establishing standards. If you think quality is something that can easily be bought, you will simply spend more money. But if you believe that competition, experiment, and feedback lead to improving quality, and that diversity can be both a source of important innovations and a good in and of itself, you will look for ways to increase those factors.

The spread of this dynamic understanding of progress has, in fact, changed education policy. So it is that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs recently used the threat of a well-funded initiative campaign to get the legislature and governor to open California's educational marketplace to many more charter schools--a sharp contrast to the more-money-plus-harder-tests approach usually favored by business lobbyists, including many technology enthusiasts. Elsewhere in the country, philanthropists are injecting competition into moribund school systems through direct action, by funding scholarships that allow kids in the worst schools to opt for private alternatives. And many school reformers now advocate testing mostly as a source of valuable feedback for parents and communities, rather than a good in and of itself. For such feedback to work, however, choice, competition, and innovation must also be possible--which implies a whole different approach to founding, funding, and running schools.

Crises, real or imagined, are useful political tools. By making political change an imperative, they help break what Milton and Rose Friedman have called the "tyranny of the status quo." But relying on crises to drive change simply won't work any more. The public no longer believes the rhetoric of crisis and emergency response, at least not in times of peace and prosperity. A different sort of persuasion is necessary.

Politics is no longer like swatting a mosquito--see a problem and whack it down; it is gradually becoming more like tending a garden, which grows mostly on its own. So how we understand those "natural" social processes matters a lot. Political action in a post-crisis age, then, demands not only that we address chronic problems but that we explore and analyze, champion and explain a broader worldview. And it requires a different sort of political person, one less caught up in the drama of emergencies, more satisfied with enabling the wonders of everyday life.

After a century of crisis-and-response politics, such people may be hard to imagine. But so is a general public that will continue to fall for overhyped crises. The politics of emergency has run its course.