These Aren't the Consequences You're Looking For
Some policies have unintended consequences. And we should thus embrace a degree of political humility.
Now that the Capitol Riots are several months behind us—at the time of writing—we should examine the law of unintended consequences in politics. The capitol riots undeniably injected fear and uncertainty into politics unlike anything that we have seen recently—since, perhaps, the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. It was alarming to see fellow Americans, under the sway of conspiracy theories, use force and violence to attempt what is tantamount to a political coup. Thankfully the attempt failed, and even backfired. And it is this backfiring that is salient to the law of unintended consequences.
Most Americans—in the political right, left, and center—condemned the violence they saw on their televisions and computer screens. And in the aftermath, corporations cracked down on those involved in the violence, either directly or indirectly. One example was the halting, by corporate America, of donations to Republican candidates and politicians who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. And we can the intentions behind this decision: donating money to politicians who stoke the flames of violence rioting is simply a recipe for the rioting to continue—one may even argue donating to those politicians rewards and incentivizes violent and undemocratic behavior by sending the message to voters and citizens sympathetic to rioting that such behavior is acceptable. And in a specific case, the publisher Simon and Schuster cancelled a book deal with Josh Hawley—the Missouri senator who appeared to expresse solidarity with the rioters, and voted to overturn the elections results.
While the intentions of the political and corporate actors here may be noble—few of us want to encourage rioting and other violent political actions—the outcome of those actions isn’t so laudable. We often forget when thinking about politics and policy that intentions aren’t the same thing as outcomes: even if we want our actions and decisions to have a particular outcome, there is just no guarantee the intended outcome will prevail—this is the law of unintended consequences. The idea here is that there are consequences to our choices and actions that are often unintended and unforeseen, and though they can be positive, they can sometimes be negative or counterproductive too. Before delving into the unintended consequences of the crackdown on the rioters and their supporters, we should think a bit about the law of unintended consequences using a couple of examples to clarify the idea.
The classic example here of course is the Streisand Effect: back in 2003, Barbara Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for violation of her privacy. As it turned out, the photographer included a picture of her California Costal estate in a collection of 12,000 pictures of the coastline—without identifying who owned which house—to document erosion of the California coastline, and thereby influence climate change policy in the state. Hardly anyone looked at the picture prior to the lawsuit. And as a result of the lawsuit—contrary to what Streisand intended—knowledge of the photograph, and of the famous owner of the house, grew at an alarming rate. Hundreds of thousands of visitors flocked to the house the following month. The outcome was the opposite of what Streisand and her attorneys intended.
We find the same mistake—conflating intentions with outcomes—in recent politics. During a Democratic presidential debate in the summer of 2020, Senator Bernie Sanders (VT—D) and Congressman Tim Ray (OH—D) spared over what Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan would mean for labor unions. Here was the salient part of that exchange:
SANDERS: [Union members] will be better because Medicare-for-all is comprehensive — it covers all health care needs. For senior citizens, it will finally include dental care, hearing aids, and eyeglasses.
RYAN: But you don’t know that, you don’t know that, Bernie.
SANDERS: I do know it, I wrote the damn bill.
The unspoken assumption by Senator Sanders: if he intended Medicare-for-All to have certain outcomes—like covering dental care and hearing aids, say—then that would be the outcome of passing the bill. And of course, Bernie could be right: it may be that if his bill were passed into law, the outcome would be exactly as he intended. (One of the difficulties with unintended consequence is oftentimes they are hard to anticipate). But the problem here is that he doesn’t know that to be true. We often intend for our actions to have certain outcomes, but sometimes they don’t. And the same could apply to Sanders’ Medicare-for-All bill. It may be the bill would inadvertently harm union members in ways hard to discern beforehand—the interaction of policy and society is complex and complicated after all. In fact, if the interaction were easier to figure out beforehand, policy would be a lot easier to design and implement; the fact that it isn’t is partly a testament to the difficulty of intervening in a complex social system, and getting the results that one aims for.
Returning to the Capitol riot, we find the law of unintended consequences rearing its ugly head again: corporate American cutting contributions to Republican politicians who voted against certifying the election arguably backfired. We now know that the effect wasn’t to starve these politicians of cash for their political future, but instead to force them to find an alternative source of funds that is politically radical—to the point it may have succeeded in pushing Republican to be even more radical in their views to raise funds from their supporters. We already have some evidence of this taking place. And that isn’t all: Josh Hawley has been racking in cash from his supporters—more so than at any other time in his political career. I assume that this is the opposite of what Simon and Schuster intended when they cancelled his book contract, and yet that is what happened.
This isn’t to argue corporate America should have continued supporting Republican politicians—or politicians from any party, for that matter—bent on denying the electorate their choice, but instead to be careful in the actions taken to rectify politics. We may act, boycott, protect, and vote with the best of intentions, but if we can learn anything from the law of unintended consequences, it is that consequences can greatly outstrip our intentions, and sometimes for the worse. We should be careful that our actions don’t inadvertently foster the political forces we aim (rightly or wrongly) to stop. It here that we find value in political humility.
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