Opinion
In Praise of Boring Government
The virtues that make democracy work are exactly the ones our media environment punishes. We should notice that before it is too late.
There is a genre of political complaint that begins: "Why can't politicians just get things done?" The question is usually meant as a critique of partisanship or dysfunction. I want to suggest it is the wrong question entirely. The better question is: Why have we organized our politics in ways that make getting things done invisible when it happens?
Consider what it looks like when government actually works. A water main in a mid-sized city is replaced on schedule and under budget. An agency's backlog of unprocessed applications is cleared through a combination of staff additions and process reform. A school district adopts new curriculum standards after eighteen months of public comment, expert review, and board deliberation. Nobody covers these events. Nobody tweets them. Nobody runs political advertisements claiming credit in a way that a viewer outside the district would notice.
And yet these are the things that make collective life possible. They are, in the most literal sense, the delivery of government: the translation of public resources and authority into actual results for actual people. The gap between how much of governance consists of this kind of work and how much of our political attention it receives is, I would argue, one of the central pathologies of our current civic life.
The reason is structural, not accidental. Political media — and by this I mean not only cable news and partisan websites but the entire attention economy in which political information circulates — is built to reward conflict, novelty, and emotional intensity. The city employee who processes five hundred applications a week is not a story. The city employee who makes a single corrupt decision is a story. The consequence is a systematic underrepresentation of competence and a systematic overrepresentation of failure.
This is not a new observation. Journalists have been making variations of it since at least the 1970s. What feels different now is the degree to which politicians themselves have internalized the media logic and begun performing for it rather than against it. When the incentive to generate heat outweighs the incentive to produce light, you get legislatures where members compete to be the most quotable obstructor rather than the most effective legislator. The skills required to be a compelling political personality and the skills required to shepherd a complex bill through committee and conference have always been different sets; what has changed is the degree to which only the first set is rewarded.
The prescription is not simple and I am not going to pretend it is. You cannot solve a structural problem with individual acts of will, and telling citizens to pay more attention to boring governance is roughly as useful as telling them to eat more vegetables — true, and almost completely without effect in the aggregate. What might actually help is a shift in how we design the incentives facing elected officials at the margins: longer terms, less frequent primaries, committee assignments and leadership positions that accrue to members who can demonstrate legislative accomplishment. None of this is beyond imagination. Much of it has historical precedent.
What I am more confident about is that the current arrangement is not stable. A politics organized entirely around performed conflict produces a citizenry that either disengages entirely or becomes progressively more credulous about charismatic promises of dramatic change. Neither outcome is friendly to the patient, unglamorous, compound-interest work that functional democracy actually requires.
Boring government is not a lesser form of government. It is, in many ways, the highest form — the evidence that a society has organized itself well enough to allow its bureaucratic machinery to operate without constant crisis. We should be suspicious of any politics that makes us unable to see it.
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