Consensus and buy-in

From the current issue of the Economist:

Millennials are accustomed to tailoring their world to their preferences, customising the music they listen to and the news they consume. A system that demands they vote for an all-or-nothing bundle of election promises looks uninviting by comparison. Not turning out, 'Economist', 4 February

And not only millennials. There's palpable disillusion, cynicism and despair about where our political systems are taking us. There's consensus that they are not working, but little consensus about how to change them. In such circumstances, we appear to be drifting toward authoritarianism.

My suggestion? Instead of taking as our starting point the political party and its membership, let's focus on the social and environmental outcomes that we'd like to see. There's certainly more consensus over the in which direction we'd like to see broad outcomes move than there is about the supposed means of effecting that movement. I would say there's near total agreement amongst the global electorate that, for example, nuclear war is something we don't want. And while we do have organizations at every level trying to defuse conflict, they do not have the command of resources nor the expertise to look at the global interest over a period of decades. And unlike the 'defence' contractors or the ideological fanatics, neither do their rewards correlate with their success or otherwise in achieving their organizations' objectives. More fundamentally, because we take our current policymaking system as a given, the wishes of the vast majority of human beings have to be channelled through our over-worked, or entirely self-interested, or corrupt politicians and bureaucracies. Few people can afford to spend their time and expertise in working full-time to ensure nuclear peace. When the issue does exercise the public imagination, it invariably becomes a forum for energy-sapping, ideologically-based squabbling about partisanship and motives.

A Social Policy Bond regime targeting sustained nuclear peace would transcend party political differences. It would generate a motivated coalition of interests devoted to achieving that goal - which would be exactly society's goal, as laid down in the redemption terms of the bond. That coalition would be of diverse, changing composition and structure, but its goal of nuclear peace would not be subject to the whims and caprices of faddish ideology or party politics.

The same would apply to less lofty goals: there would be little debate about, for instance, the direction in which we'd want to see a nation's health go. We could debate definitions, targets and priorities but, unlike our current arcane policymaking system, these debates would be relatively easy to follow, so we should have greater public participation and hence greater public buy-in - an asset of crucial importance and one that's almost absent from today's politics.

For more about applying the Social Policy Bond concept to nuclear peace, see here. For health, see here. If you would like to consider supporting my work through patreon, please click here.