What rom-coms teach us about politics
And how people make the same mistake with politics they do with dating
Crazy, Stupid, Love
Steve Carell sits alone at a crowded bar, sporting worn out New Balance sneakers. To anyone who will listen — and then to no one at all — he repeats the name of the man his wife cheated on him with. Ryan Gosling, suave and seated a few tables over, beckons him in a gesture of apparent mercy. Ryan offers to transform the clumsy Steve into someone presentable with confidence and charm.
I don’t want to spoil the plot. What’s clear the entire time is that most of us aren’t Ryan Gosling. For mere mortals, the prospect of asking someone out or talking with a stranger can feel terrifying — somewhere on the scale from “What if they laugh?” to “What if the entire universe collapses?” Hence Steve’s need for a coach.
Like Steve in the movie, most of us are sensitive to the potential costs of something going wrong. Risk aversion can be good when it makes us invest our money in index funds rather than crypto or when it spurs students to wear a helmet rather than look “cool” while biking.
But we seem to lack the same instinct for evaluating the consequences of inaction: what we lose when we don’t take risks. What’s already wrong feels dull and familiar. It’s just … there. We taste the bitter certainty of the status quo, and like a straight shot of alcohol or a vegetable smoothie, lie to ourselves and insist we’re okay with how it tastes.
Better the pain we know than the potential consequences we don’t.
The same bad thinking drives our politics
We often make the same mistake in politics that we do in dating. We overvalue potential consequences of action and undervalue existing consequences of inaction.
I want to give you an initial example of how pervasive this bad thinking is.
San Francisco, like most American cities, has too few public toilets. So it seemed like good news when the city announced it secured funding to build a new one in the Noe Valley neighborhood.
Then details came out. The single stall restroom would cost $1.7 million. It would only be completed in 2025. Cue a swirl of uproar and toilet puns. For a while, it was the #1 or #2 issue on the public agenda… (I’m done, I promise). California’s state government eventually said it would withhold the money until S.F. found a better way to spend it.
The high price tag and lengthy timeline were partly because of design, permitting, and feedback processes meant to ensure the toilet aligns with the neighborhood’s aesthetic values and provide the public with opportunities to comment.
Um.. what? Aesthetic values? For a single-stall toilet?
Admittedly, the example verges on the absurd. But this convoluted, tortured process to build new infrastructure happens all the time in America — even in liberal cities like San Francisco that supposedly have the “political will” to address issues of public accommodation, housing, transportation and more. And it’s not like other places have the same problems. When I was in Paris and looked up “public toilet” on Google Maps, a ton of options popped up.
There’s a false mentality that we can’t do anything before we’ve thought through the ramifications of everything. Committee after committee leads to tragedy after tragedy.
The existing consequences of not having a toilet, like the consequences of not asking someone out, are muted. As Henry Grabar wrote in Slate: “While architects and political appointees trade ideas for toilet design, out there in the real world, costs mount and people need to go.”
The potential impacts are amplified. Each “What if?” deifies the status quo — smoothing out its inconsistencies because they are certain.
Everyone undervalues inaction sometimes. But when we do so depends on our position. The people most concerned with “What if we do something and it’s catastrophic?” are those who can at least tolerate the status quo. For others, the scarier question is, “What if we do nothing and everything stays the same?”
This is the question that drives the third act of romantic comedies. And it’s the question that must drive a new act in our politics.
In When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal runs around New York City to find Meg Ryan on New Year’s Eve. Billy’s pursuit is urgent — even desperate — because he realizes two things. First, the enormity of what’s at stake: happiness and love. And second: things do not work out on their own.
In politics, our personal lives, and the many places where the two intersect, we cannot rely on a “vague supplication” that the universe will sort out problems — to use Samuel Beckett’s phrasing in Waiting for Godot.
Instead, we must run around like Billy on New Year’s Eve: with urgency and desperation, aware of all that will happen if opportunity passes us by, and all that could happen if we finally do something.
Coming up …
This post is the first in a new, ongoing series that will explore problems with the ways we think about politics.
Follow-ups will detail how gas companies, bankers, and others undervalue existing consequences of inaction and overvalue potential consequences of action. New pieces will probe why we often care more about people who lost their house than ongoing homelessness, and the political problems that arise when we don’t understand statistical averages and distributions. And more!