You Want the Smartest Surgeon and an Ordinary Prime Minister, and That Tells You What Governing Is

If you need brain surgery, you want the best surgeon you can find. If your engine is making a noise, you want the mechanic who really understands engines. Nobody says: I want a surgeon who is one of us. Nobody chooses a mechanic for his emotional depth.

Now listen to how people choose a leader. They want someone who is a common man. Someone who understands ordinary life. Someone with feelings, who has suffered, who is like them. Intelligence comes up, but rarely first, and a candidate who is visibly much cleverer than the voters is often punished for it.

So which is it? Is governing an intellectual problem or not? The question sounds like a debating point. I think it is one of the most useful questions you can ask about a political system, because the honest answer is neither of the answers people give.

The Two Consistent Positions

If governing is an intellectual problem, like surgery, then we should want professionals throughout. Not just in the ministries but at the top: the best economist to run the economy, the best strategist to run defence, and no place at all for the popular vote, which is as sensible as electing your anaesthetist.

If governing is not an intellectual problem, then experts have no special claim, and we should not want them anywhere near the decisions. A common man at the top, common men in the cabinet, and the technical staff kept firmly in the role of tools.

Both of these are coherent. Almost nobody holds either.

The Position Everybody Actually Holds

What people actually want is a popularly elected leader chosen for his ordinariness, who then appoints a cabinet and a civil service chosen for their expertise. The common man at the top, the professionals underneath.

Stated that way it sounds odd, and it is worth sitting with the oddness before explaining it away. Why would you want the least expert person in the building to be the one who decides?

What the Oddness Reveals

The answer, I think, is that the public has understood something the two consistent positions miss. Governing has two components and they are not the same kind of problem.

The first component is knowledge: what will this policy do, what does the evidence say, what are the options. That is an intellectual problem and experts are better at it, which is why we want them in the ministries.

The second component is interest: whose benefit is the decision for. That is not an intellectual problem at all. An expert is not better than anyone else at wanting what the public wants, and there is good reason to think he is worse at it, because he belongs to a class with interests of its own and to institutions that have shaped him. The public, when it insists on a common man, is saying: I do not need the top of the system to be clever. I need it to be on my side, and the only way I know to check that is to see whether it resembles me.

I made a version of this argument long ago about foreign and security policy: the right strategy there turned out to be simple, and what mattered was having the will and the interest to carry it out, not the brains to invent it. The same structure appears everywhere in government. The knowledge is available from advisers. The alignment is not.

Why the Compromise Fails Anyway

The common man on top of the experts is the public's attempt to have both components. It is a clever design, and it does not work, for a reason that has nothing to do with the man's intelligence.

Resemblance is not alignment. A candidate can look like the public, talk like the public, have suffered like the public, and once inside the building be subject to exactly the pressures that push everyone in the building toward the building's interests. The ordinariness was a signal, and signals are cheap to fake and easy to lose. Within a term the common man is uncommon: he knows things the public does not, owes people the public never met, and sees the world from a chair the public has never sat in.

Meanwhile the experts underneath him, who were supposed to supply only knowledge, supply the options, and whoever writes the menu decides the meal.

The Alternative the Question Points To

Take the public's intuition seriously and follow it further than the public does.

If the top of the system should be aligned with the public rather than cleverer than it, the most aligned thing available is the public itself. Not a man who resembles it, but the thing he resembles. Keep the experts exactly where the public already wants them, supplying knowledge and options underneath, and put the decision where alignment is guaranteed rather than signalled.

That is what the surgeon-versus-leader puzzle resolves to. We do not want a smart ruler. We never did. We wanted someone who would decide as we would decide, and there is one candidate who fits that description perfectly.