Politics without policy

Even by the standards of recent years, this year's US election campaign is unusually devoid of discussion about policy. The would-be presidents' age, race, gender, and friends seem to be the issues that matter. To some extent this is understandable: politics under the current system fails to hold the attention. There's little relationship between what candidates promise and what they deliver. Real issues do come up: whether or not to go to war, or whether to favour the very rich at the expense of everyone else, but rarely in any of the democracies are candidates' positions explicit. Once the election is over, public opinion is something to be ignored or manipulated.

It's easy for politicians to get away with that because current policymaking systems are opaque. Where they are not secret they are simply too boring for anybody other than experts or academics to capture people's imagination. Policymaking centres around arcane, technical issues: legislative, regulatory or fiscal matters that the average politician doesn't fully understand, let alone normal members of the public. Corporations with powerful vested interests do understand the system - or can afford to bankroll those who do - and revel in it. Politicians and bureaucrats, work hard, take their index-linked pensions and genuinely believe they are doing a great job. The larger, slow-moving problems go unsolved: the degradation of our commons at the hands of government and the large corporations; the alienation of people not only from the political process but, divided by a car-crazy infrastructure, from their neighbours.

Re-engagement is possible, I think, by expressing political goals as outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. Instead of proposing this or that reorganisation of health care systems, for example, target real-life health goals: longevity, quality-adjusted life years, infant mortality etc. More broadly, instead of sacrificing quality of life to economic growth, target social and environmental goals and subordinate the economy to those. People can understand such goals. We don't, really, care about the race of politicians, and we don't have the time to compete with corporations and specialists when it comes to arguing over policy. But we do understand and care about social and environmental outcomes.