Two things can be true at the same time
Dispatches from the West Side, and from Albany.
A politician stands before a group of voters.
The crowd has an instinct about something, a view that isn’t fully grounded in realities on the ground or the complexity of an issue. Their half-formed position might involve an excess of cynicism, or an imagined bogeyman, or an obvious solution that is inexplicably being ignored, or all three. The politician may not be terribly well-informed either, or he or she makes a judgment that preaching to the choir is easier than getting into the weeds and trying to change assumptions. The voters walk away emboldened, angry at everyone but the politician. The politician walks away with votes and a mandate to fight. The next time they meet, the alignment and the certitude in the room will be even stronger — and wronger.
This feedback loop of reductionism might be the thing I hate most about New York politics, and it’s why I’ve started this Substack — to stand before the group and say, from time to time: “What I’m about to tell you is not what you want to hear, but give me a minute.”
I tried to do this as a candidate in the Democratic Primary, last spring, for the State Assembly in New York’s 69th District. In community centers and living rooms, I would find myself walking through why an unpopular program had some merit, or why we shouldn’t do something that seemed like a no-brainer. I did this not to be contrarian (although I’m sure that’s how it came across sometimes), but because it felt better to me than saying the easy thing and, more significantly, because I didn’t want to be stuck with positions I couldn’t earnestly defend in the event I ended up in office.
Sometimes these expressions of candor fell flat, but more often than not, even if I didn’t convert the room, it felt as though I succeeded in raising healthy questions in the minds of the people with whom I was speaking. And, because disagreement is the New York state religion, I think I won more votes than I lost in these exchanges.
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Earlier in my career, I had the privilege to work for the City of New York as Director of the Office of State Legislative Affairs, representing city agencies and the mayor (at the time, Mike Bloomberg) before New York State government. Commonly referred to as “the City’s lobbyist,” the job was one part lobbying, one part policy-making, one part negotiating, all done together with a fantastic team of public servants. It was a formative experience and, I hope, at least somewhat helpful training for the job I’ll soon start as a State Assemblymember.
My best days on that job were when I truly, deeply understood both the position of the agency I was representing and also the opposing view held by a legislator or State official — understood each so well that I could make a persuasive case to the other and, more important, see the merit on both sides, which there generally was.
This kind of intellectual empathy would arise only after real engagement with someone’s perspective, as well as the experiences undergirding it — from hearing an argument on one side, ascribing full credit to it, and asking for the other side’s response, and going back and forth like this until a shared understanding, if not agreement, was reached.
Before one of our two national political parties completely lost its mind, it was a truism to say there should be more reaching across the aisle in Washington. In New York, there is no partisan aisle to reach across, and our differences as Democrats are often, in the grand scheme of things, fairly modest. But we too often still fail to see, or even acknowledge, the merit on the other side of an argument. Policy outcomes are worse as a result — people stay in their corners, holding out until either one side wins in a shut-out or there is a hasty and forced compromise, with bits from column A and bits from column B that don't really add up to something coherent or workable.
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I have been chipping away, since shortly after Election Day, at a piece on how to think about “Trump-proofing” New York (an effort that will, I am afraid to say, at best be a partial success). It’s close to completion, which is what has spurred me to finally get this Substack up and running. I was going to call the whole thing, “Two things can be true at the same time,” which is the sentence I find myself repeating most often when discussing policy, along with its close cousin, the construct “not just / but also.”
As in: “Yes, this policy has had its desired effect. And it has also had a negative consequence. These two things can be true at the same time.”
Or: It is the job of politicians not just to represent the views of their constituents, but also to help inform those views.
But looking at it in pixels, I realized that “Two things can be true at the same time” is a long and lousy title, so it has been relegated to this first post. “Into the Weeds” is a nod to two of my favorite pastimes — getting lost in details, and theater, which may also be an occasional topic here.
More to come.