Politicians don’t persist because they’re stupid or confused. They persist because the system rewards the one thing a normal adult hates doing: admitting they screwed up.

At first, sure, they get to play dumb. They get their little starter pack of excuses. “Unintended consequences.” “We didn’t anticipate.” “The data was unclear.” That’s the early stage, when the disaster still has plausible deniability. When the smoke is thin enough that you can look the camera in the eye and say, “Smell what? I don’t smell anything.”

But after a while, “we didn’t know” stops being an explanation and becomes a confession. Not that they didn’t know. That they weren’t watching. Or worse, that they were watching and kept eating popcorn while the room filled up with smoke.

So why do they keep going, even when the consequences are obvious? Because the moment they stop, they have to explain why they stopped. And the moment they explain why they stopped, they have to say the one sentence that ends political careers faster than a sex scandal in a choir robe:

“We were wrong.”

Not “we could have done better.” Not “we learned lessons.” Not “moving forward.” Wrong. As in: the thing we did harmed people, and you were right to complain, and we ignored you, and we used your taxes to pay for the mistake, and then we called you a bad person for noticing. That’s the sentence that detonates the whole little ecosystem.

Because it’s not just one politician. It’s the party. It’s the coalition partners. It’s the civil service that wrote the memos. It’s the NGOs that got grants. It’s the contractors that got contracts. It’s the “experts” who went on TV and explained why your lying eyes were lying. It’s the legal framework that got built around the policy like a concrete bunker. There are institutions built around mistakes and they don’t want to stop working just because their work is destructive or existential. And now you want them to reverse it? Reverse it how? With what? With humility? These people treat humility the way vampires treat garlic.

And here’s the part the public intuits, even if they don’t say it this cleanly: the costs of reversal are immediate and personal. If a politician reverses course, they lose status today. They lose donors today. They lose committee assignments today. They lose the next election today. They lose the nice job at the consulting firm tomorrow. They become the cautionary tale at the party conference. “Don’t be like that guy. That guy blinked.”

But the costs of continuation? Those are diffuse and delayed. They spread out. They leak into neighborhoods, schools, budgets, institutions, morale. Nobody can put it on a single invoice with a neat little signature line. And because it’s spread out, it can be denied. Managed. Reframed. Kicked down the road like a tin can made of other people’s lives.

That’s why they keep going. Not because they think the policy is perfect. Because the incentives are perfect. The system is built to protect the decision-maker from the decision. It’s the political version of dumping toxic waste into the river and then holding a press conference about water safety. The people downstream get cancer in ten years. The guy upstream gets a promotion on Friday.

And notice how the social mechanics work. When people complain, the first move isn’t persuasion. It’s delegitimization. You’re not a citizen with a concern. You’re a problem. You’re misinformed. You’re a conspiracy theorist. You’re radicalized. You’re a bigot. You’re “dangerous.” Your dissent isn’t treated as a normal part of democracy. It’s treated as contamination. Like you coughed in the operating room.

That trick is essential, because once you admit dissent is legitimate, you have to answer it. And once you answer it, you have to acknowledge tradeoffs. And once you acknowledge tradeoffs, you have to accept responsibility. The whole game falls apart. So they don’t argue with you, they diagnose you. They don’t address your point, they attack your motives. It’s not politics. It’s public relations with moral language stapled to it, from immoral sociopaths no less.

The bigger consequence is the obliteration of societal trust. Trust is the hidden fuel that makes a society work without constant force. People pay taxes because they believe, at some level, they’re part of something reciprocal. People follow laws because they believe the system is at least trying to be fair. People show up in crises because they believe the “we” includes them.

But once people feel decisions that reshape the future were made without asking them, contrary to their interests yet with their money, and then their objections were treated as illegitimate, that fuel drains out fast. And when trust is gone, everything else evaporates with it. Patriotism becomes a punchline. Sacrifice becomes a scam. Cohesion becomes a slogan printed on a banner hanging over a room where nobody likes each other.

And that’s the ugliest part, because it’s not theatrical evil. It’s not a movie villain twirling a mustache while plotting the downfall of civilization. It’s moral cowardice combined with institutional lock-in. It’s people protecting careers, protecting reputations, protecting the narrative, protecting the machine – while the public is told to “be resilient” and “have conversations” and “move forward together,” like we’re all holding hands on a group hike instead of being dragged behind the bus.

So yes, it’s not stupidity. It’s worse. Stupidity would be accidental. This is a choice. A cold one. A familiar one. And it persists because, in politics, the first rule isn’t “serve the people.” The first rule is “never admit the machine was wrong.”

Because if the machine can be wrong, then it can be replaced. And the ruling class is terrified of the one thing they can’t spin: accountability.