[hourago]

> My personal meta-cynical view is that politics is all about relationships: nobody gets anything done using their own power alone, and nobody has enough broad and direct influence to even try.

That is not cynical, that is the great power of democracy. No one can change rules by themselves but agreements are needed. When one person can make big changes alone then it usually a form of dictatorship and things do not go so well.

> you need to go about it indirectly, exploiting the incentives of the entire system

Politics are complicated, I also believe that. But many politicians go thru all that pain to achieve good things, not just to profit personally.

[TeMPOraL]

> That is not cynical, that is the great power of democracy. No one can change rules by themselves but agreements are needed.

I guess the cynical bit is my belief that the flip side of this "great power" is that a democracy quickly becomes structurally incapable of doing anything significant, good or bad, to meaningfully improve things or to solve a problem ahead of time, before it turns into a crisis.

> When one person can make big changes alone then it usually a form of dictatorship and things do not go so well.

That's true, unfortunately. If it wasn't the case, democracy would not look appealing at all.

> But many politicians go thru all that pain to achieve good things, not just to profit personally.

The cynical part of my view is that no politician can "go thru all that pain to achieve" arbitrary things, good or bad. They can only directly achieve things that are already neutral or beneficial to most of their colleagues. For all the other things they'd want to achieve, a direct attempt to push the issue through will only get them sidelined or forced out, and indirect attempts (through the long process of compromising and trying to gather allies) will just wear them down and turn them into just another self-interested politician.