It seems likely that Andy Burnham will be Prime Minister soon. Ian Leslie shared a pretty scathing perspective: Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Yet Another Terrible Prime Minister. What stuck with me wasn't about Burnham specifically, it was the general observation about why Prime Ministers fail:
For the most part, failed prime ministers do not fail because they’re socialists or neo-liberals or conservatives, but because they are situationists. I don’t mean in the sexy French sense, but in the sense that they are captives of whatever situation they find themselves in. Bad prime ministers don’t make things happen; things happen to them
This is not just a Prime Ministerial affliction. It is relatively rare to see people change or escape a situation, particularly when it is big and gnarly.
I'm reminded of an old post, about Live versus Dead players:
A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things.
Invariably situationist Prime Ministers are Dead players, and often they make things even harder for themselves by making commitments (such as the tax pledges in Labour's manifesto), which they then feel unable to break (making the situation even less tractable).
What makes a Live player? Samo Burja makes it sound quite simple, saying that the required attributes are "tight coordination and a living tradition of knowledge" - the former to enable flexibility and responsiveness, the latter to produce the new, useful knowledge required to do new things. To me that feels necessary, not sufficient. I think a certain mindset is also required to come alive.
A gateway is hidden in this Lindsey Graham quote:
“When I was first elected to the House,” he recalled, “I looked for the they. They who run things. They who know how things really work. They who know what they are doing. But I couldn’t find the they.” After that, he went on, “I went to the Senate. But there was still no they. And then I started to get invited to the White House, and to closed-door briefings, and to meetings with top officials. No they.” “What I finally realized,” he concluded, “is that there is no they. There is only we, and we usually don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. There is no they, there is only we.