Prose, poetry, numbers - or AI?
What do the different styles of political discourse tell us?
When the diplomat listens to the government - politicians or officials - in the country they’re working in, what do they hear? Not just what is being said, but how it’s being said?
We’re familiar with the saying, attributed to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo: “you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose`’. For the diplomat (and for voters too), it’s always important to bear in mind that what you hear during an election campaign will turn into something very different once the victor is in government. Campaigns are about creating vision and hope, describing what you aspire to do, painting primary colours. However much a candidate may attack his or her opponents, campaigning is ultimately usually positive: appealing to “your” people, broadening the target audience as far as possible while not frightening the others. Creative creative language helps a lot: the broader the brush-strokes and the more elegant the style, the fewer boring questions about how it will all work in practice. The diplomat may find this reassuring: if some of the proposed policies sound ill-judged, maybe they’ll not survive longer than the campaign itself.
Government, on the other hand, is about dealing with the humdrum and complex, in shades of grey and with multiple trade-offs, some of which will end up disappointing even core supporters. From the outside observer’s perspective, that may be a good thing. A government that’s prepared to disappoint its supporters, especially early on, may find it easier to take decisions for the longer term before the electorate’s patience runs out. If it’s all about distributing the spoils, it may easily end up in tears.
Because it’s very unlikely that the winning party can do all the things it’s promised, the language of government can quickly become defensive if not evasive, exacerbated by the fact that there are often good reasons - as well as many bad ones - for not being 100% open and transparent in government. Sometimes leaders try to perpetuate the language of campaigning into government, but at some point they come up against the reality of what they’re having to do - and what their officials are telling them isn’t possible. As we are seeing now in the US, when political leaders continue to campaign in government and push back against official advice, it’s not an easy ride. That’s not to say it’s the wrong thing to do, just that it inevitably leads to tension.
This tension reflects the underlying contradictions in the political leader’s role: they are there to serve the long-term national interest, the will of the people as a whole and the interests of those who voted for them all at the same time as having responsibilty for the institutions of government. It’s as though for a company as though the Chair of the Board is at one and the same time looking after the long-term interests of the company, the shareholders, activist shareholder groups while playing at being CEO at the same time. There’s a good reason why the UK Corporate Governance Code favours splitting the Chair and CEO roles, so that the former provides proper oversight of the latter and the executive organisation. But in no country is the Minister and the Permanent Secretary/Secretary-General (or whatever they are called) in precisely the same relationship as the Chair and CEO. In many countries, the leaders of the executive function in a Ministry (Secretary-General) is not permanent at all, but a political appointee (presumably) sharing the Minister’s personal and political aims. You’d expect a political appointee to use a different style to a permanent civil servant, even when making the same points. Understanding how these relationships operate in the national system you’re operating in will be esential to interpret what the different players are telling you - at different points in the political cycle. There’s no substitute for understanding not just the organogram, but what it means in practice.
Language itself is an important element: when you’re campaigning, you’re speaking in your own voice, assisted no doubt by your spin doctors. When you’re in government, so much of what you have to say, whether it’s on domestic and foreign policy, has to be carefully calibrated by your experts (or even worse, your lawyers). When politicians extemporise, they tend to get into trouble, but when they follow the script there’s a big risk that they create distance between themselves and their voters. For the diplomat, studying not only what is said but the language used is vital to understand what’s really going on - which is precisely why diplomats who can speak the language have a head start.
Explaining how you’re doing and how the tradeoffs have to be made often has a lot to do with the economy and the delivery of public services. This lends itself to prose rather than poetry, but the key points are often expressed in numbers. A government will often explain its achievements - or the challenges it faces - in numbers: the size of the deficit, the improvement (or otherwise) in GDP, the number of patients treated, the percentage increase in pay or pensions. But using numbers, however precise, doesn’t mean that they will be believed. British Chancellor (Finance Minister) George Osborne’s efforts to highlight the improvement in the country’s GDP did not convince the woman who complained he was talking about “… your GDP, not mine”. Lived experience cannot always be so easily expressed in crisp numbers. I saw this myself during the Greek debt crisis when we would report promising economic trends only to walk out of the Embassy building and see evidence of hardship on the streets, even of our upmarket neighbourhood. The leader who relies on numbers has even less chance of inspiring than the one who governs in prose.
It’s not only that (with apologies to the mathematicians) numbers are not obviously poetic. As CP Snow described in his 1959 Cambridge lecture, it is difficult to bridge the divide between the “two cultures”: science and the humanities, which often keep themselves to themselves. Today’s world is more complex and more driven by technology than in 1959, with many more numbers easily accessible, if not always easily understood. The divisions are still there. It’s not only that some people are uncomfortable with numbers. It’s also that the numbers are most familiar to those who produce them or work with them: the professional-producers rather than the citizen-consumers. Producers are often judged by their peers by the numbers and have an interest in the numbers telling a good story. More prosaically, the numbers are the KPIs by which the producers are judged, as opposed to the lived experience which the rest of us tend to rely on. I don’t much care if inflation is down if what I have to buy costs me more.
Whatever your view on contemporary politics, the dividing line between the professional-producer and the citizen-consumer is perhaps underestimated. Politicians as well as technocrats - like to rely on the numbers or what they call the “facts”. When citizens show that they are unimpressed, they are then often dismissed as lacking the education to understand “the facts’, while they are simply focused on a different reality. Professional-producers are more inclined to give each other the benefit of the doubt, as they sympathise with the difficulty of their peers’ job rather than on the outcome for the citizen-consumers.
No wonder, once the poetic campaigning is over, disillusion can quickly set in. The politicians who best overcome these very real challenges manage to strike a balance between poetry, prose and numbers - continuing to tell the story while being as transparent as possible and remaining grounded in observable as well as numerical facts. As a former public servant, I have to admit that sometimes that means ignoring the advice of the officials and experts in favour of the “ordinary” voters whom the politicians (at least the good ones) tend to know best.
Gill Ereaut’s book The Way We Talk Around Here: How your organization’s culture shows up in your language and why it matters explores what the (often unconscious) use of language reveals about how professional-producers think about their job and their customers (citizen-consumers in our case). Although her focus isn’t on politics, I’d say that when we hear too much from politicians about the numbers, it suggests they’re behaving too much like the CEO - speaking on behalf of the executive - and too little like the Chair, representing the shareholders. As the underperforming company exposes itself to corporate predators, the producer-professional whose language reveals that they identify too closely with the producer interest risks challenge by the “populists”.
I suspect that the divide between professional-producer and citizen-consumer is at risk of getting a lot wider with the increased use of AI. The bigger the role of technology, the harder it seems to be for the professional-producers to understand the citizen-consumers. They seem literally to treat them like numbers, which is convenient, because that’s the world in which they are most comfortable. You can already see this in the difference between the optimism of those who are pioneering AI - and stand most to benefit - and those who are at risk of losing their jobs and seeing their lifestyles change as it is more widely introduced. For now, the optimists are very active, while there isn’t that a lot of public debate about the risks and how to mitigate them. That’s not to say that there isn’t a win-win scenario, but rather it isn’t clear that enough attention is being paid to how to get there. While AI will inevitably become an indispensable part of government, how it is used and what it does to politics is far too important to be left to the professional-producer-experts with a vested interest. Success will still depend above all on the skills and character of politicians to manage the impacts. Whether that’s an encouraging or depressing thought is rather up to you, and probably depends on where you live.