"Politics is a field where the choice lies constantly between two blunders"
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Morley’s line lands like a shrug delivered with a straight back: politics, he suggests, isn’t a morality play with a right answer waiting in the wings. It’s a corridor of bad doors, and the job is choosing which one won’t collapse the building. Coming from a statesman, not a café cynic, the sentence doubles as a confession and a defense. Confession: the people making decisions often know they’re steering into error. Defense: error is not always incompetence; it can be the price of action under constraint.
The real bite is in “constantly.” Morley rejects the comforting fantasy that politics occasionally goes wrong but mostly gets it right. He frames blunder as the baseline condition because governing means trading off harms: budgets that cut or inflate, reforms that disrupt or calcify, diplomacy that appeases or provokes. If there were clean options, they’d be technocratic problems, not political fights.
The phrase “two blunders” also punctures the melodrama of partisan storytelling. It’s not “good versus evil,” it’s “mistake A versus mistake B,” with each side selling its blunder as prudence and the other’s as catastrophe. That’s the subtext: politics runs on forced choices, then retroactive moralizing.
Historically, Morley lived in the thick of empire, Irish Home Rule battles, and the long Victorian hangover of liberal self-confidence meeting industrial reality. His aphorism reads like late-stage liberal realism: a warning against purity politics, and an argument for humility when power meets complexity.
The real bite is in “constantly.” Morley rejects the comforting fantasy that politics occasionally goes wrong but mostly gets it right. He frames blunder as the baseline condition because governing means trading off harms: budgets that cut or inflate, reforms that disrupt or calcify, diplomacy that appeases or provokes. If there were clean options, they’d be technocratic problems, not political fights.
The phrase “two blunders” also punctures the melodrama of partisan storytelling. It’s not “good versus evil,” it’s “mistake A versus mistake B,” with each side selling its blunder as prudence and the other’s as catastrophe. That’s the subtext: politics runs on forced choices, then retroactive moralizing.
Historically, Morley lived in the thick of empire, Irish Home Rule battles, and the long Victorian hangover of liberal self-confidence meeting industrial reality. His aphorism reads like late-stage liberal realism: a warning against purity politics, and an argument for humility when power meets complexity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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