You Can Just Do Things
That’s the title of the forthcoming book by Cate Hall.1 Her thesis is simple: high personal agency is the key to success—much more so than intelligence or hard work and certainly more than following the accepted “rules” of success—and it is a trait you can learn, not something you are born with. Watch the Ted Talk and read all about it on her substack.
I don’t think of myself as particularly good at this, but my personal experience makes me confident Cate is right. Virtually every time I’ve just stopped worrying or waiting or making excuses and decided to do something, it’s worked. And it has usually been way easier than I expected. You can just do stuff!
I haven’t read Cate’s book yet—very much looking forward to it—and it seems like it is about personal and professional success, but its applicability to politics is obvious.
I’ve written about this many times in the context of local politics. You can just do it. Go tell decision-makers how you feel. Go write a federal grant and get money for your town. Go run for local office. Or go bigger. Members of Congress are not political wizards, not even close. They are your friends and neighbors. But they are the ones who decided to just do something.2
There’s also a more fundamental feature of this sort of agency in politics: actions matter even more when they reshape the public understanding of the possible.
Ezra Klein did a podcast on the topic this week. This famously was a tactic of late 19th century anarchists and their theory of the propaganda of the deed. But it’s just as applicable to those operating within government. You can just do things. Most of the “rules” aren’t actually rules. What the most consequential presidents have in common—Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR—is that they have just done things.
Trump is a master of this. He wants to get rid of USAID, so he just does it. He wants a new ballroom at the White House, so he just bulldozes the East Wing. He wants the troops paid and Congress hasn’t appropriated money, so he just directs treasury to pay them and tells the lawyers to come up with some bullshit. He wants to remove Maduro, so he just send the military to do it. He wants to direct the spending of the oil money he’s going to pull out of Venezuela, so he just announces he’s going to do it. He wants to get rich of the presidency, so he just does absurdly corrupt things.
And the spectacle of doing these things awakens everyone to a new reality: the presidency is actually a lot more powerful than we thought. I don’t have any doubt at this point that Trump has reshaped the constitutional order of the nation—the arrangements of governing power, the basic commitments of the government, and the basic cleavages of conflict between the new political coalitions. And this is largely because he has just does things. And for better or worse, by just doing things, he has rewritten everyone’s understanding of politics and political behavior.
———————
I’m 93% sure Cate and I have never met and 60% sure we’ve never directly interacted on the internet, but we’ve had many mutuals in various phases of life and my socials’ timelines are always overlapping with her and that’s a weird sort of 21st century acquaintance; I don’t know her at all, but I feel like I sort of do.↩
Don’t actually run for Congress. The bullshit to good-you-can-do ratio is the worst of any political office in the country. Run for school board in your town instead. Or small-town mayor. Both have much better ratios.↩