"Politics can be likened to driving at night over unfamiliar hills and mountains. Close attention must be paid to what the beam can reach and the next bend"
About this Quote
Trimble’s metaphor is almost aggressively anti-heroic: politics isn’t a battlefield or a chessboard, it’s a night drive with bad visibility and zero romance. The point isn’t that leaders lack plans; it’s that plans are structurally limited by what you can actually see, verify, and survive in the next few seconds. “Unfamiliar hills and mountains” signals a landscape you don’t control and didn’t design. “The beam can reach” is a quiet rebuke to the cult of certainty: you steer by partial illumination, not omniscience.
The intent feels inseparable from Trimble’s Northern Ireland context. As a central figure in the Good Friday Agreement era, he operated in a setting where each “bend” contained potential spoilers: factional violence, brittle trust, shifting public opinion, and the constant risk that one misread move would send the whole vehicle off the road. In that world, maximalist rhetoric is a kind of reckless driving. Incrementalism becomes not cowardice but prudence.
The subtext also defends compromise without ever using the word. Paying “close attention” frames good politics as disciplined attention rather than moral grandstanding. The emphasis on the next bend implies a politics of sequencing: you don’t solve everything at once; you stay on the road long enough to reach the next stretch of visibility. It’s a leader’s argument for patience and calibration, delivered in the language of ordinary risk: the public may crave daylight, but governing often happens in the dark.
The intent feels inseparable from Trimble’s Northern Ireland context. As a central figure in the Good Friday Agreement era, he operated in a setting where each “bend” contained potential spoilers: factional violence, brittle trust, shifting public opinion, and the constant risk that one misread move would send the whole vehicle off the road. In that world, maximalist rhetoric is a kind of reckless driving. Incrementalism becomes not cowardice but prudence.
The subtext also defends compromise without ever using the word. Paying “close attention” frames good politics as disciplined attention rather than moral grandstanding. The emphasis on the next bend implies a politics of sequencing: you don’t solve everything at once; you stay on the road long enough to reach the next stretch of visibility. It’s a leader’s argument for patience and calibration, delivered in the language of ordinary risk: the public may crave daylight, but governing often happens in the dark.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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