Delusional self-belief is a superpower until it's a disaster

What's the optimal amount of self-deception for a politician?

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My theory is that Liz Truss is secretly funded by Boris Johnson. Not content with making him look like a relatively competent Prime Minister, she is now contriving to make him look like a dignified former Prime Minister. Her tour of America’s MAGA circuit is the most cringe-inducing performance by an ex-PM I can remember. The sight of Truss delivering her unique brand of anti-oratory to an audience which hardly knows who she is and can barely be bothered to feign interest was pitiable. Johnson would at least have had some of them struggling to their feet, and to applaud rather than head to the bathroom.

She’s not even very good at playing to this gallery. While she declared that she wants a Republican in the White House, she didn’t endorse Donald Trump. You could argue that’s evidence that she has some integrity left, since doing so would have been the surest way to win applause. But I see it as a failure of nerve, an attempt to signal a position without actually occupying one (she didn’t endorse Haley either, even though Haley, unlike Trump, backs Ukraine, as Truss claims to do). It smacks of the shifty, weasel-politics she professes to disdain. Populism without straight talk is the bun without the burger.

Perhaps Truss will return from America and think, “That didn’t go so well, maybe I should reassess my career plans, and while I’m at it, radically recalibrate my self-perception.” But I doubt it. My bet is that Liz Truss thinks the speech and the tour were a success. She’s Liz Truss! Everyone can see she’s great, apart from the haters and losers. I really do think she believes this, or something like it. Her self-belief is astonishingly impervious to reality.

Truss was the most unpopular and shortest-serving Prime Minister in UK history. After such definitive humiliation, a slightly less confident politician would have gone quiet for a couple of years and maybe for the rest of their life. Yet here she is, back in the saddle, with a new campaign and a new book (with blurbs from Johnson, Matt Ridley and Garry Kasparov). It’s not as if her reputation has recovered among the public. She is, by quite a long way, and amongst fierce competition, the most disliked politician in Britain:

This self-belief may be delusional, but we must reckon with the fact that it enabled Truss to rise to the top in the first place. It’s what took her to the podium at a Liberal Democrat conference, aged 19, to argue for the abolition of the monarchy. It’s what made her believe that she could nonetheless go on to become a successful Tory politician. It’s what kept her believing she could become Conservative leader even after she backed Remain while the country voted Leave. It’s what enabled her to win a leadership contest and become Prime Minister while patently deficient in the basic skills of the job and short of any but the most superficial ideas about what she would do once she got there. Delusional self-confidence was her most valuable asset, right up until it became toxic.

Some measure of self-deception seems important to human happiness and progress. Well-adjusted people have what the psychologist Roy Baumeister called an “optimal margin of illusion”. Most people walk around believing they’re slightly smarter, taller and better-looking than they are, and that they have more control over their lives than they do. People who don’t have this margin of illusion tend to be suffer from unhappiness and anomie. The need for self-deception starts at a neurological level. The room around you is an illusion conjured up by the brain. In reality, your eyes capture only very basic visual information, a fuzzy sketch, which the brain converts into a richly detailed simulation.

But while we’re skilled at fooling ourselves, some people have a wider margin of illusion than others. Stretch the margin too far and you become clinically insane; stretch it just somewhat and you can become a successful politician. Barack Obama once remarked that you have to be something of a megalomaniac to think you should be president of the United States. Politics selects for individuals with an outsized talent for seeing themselves as they wish the world to see them. The successful ones combine this with the ability to haul either the voters or themselves or both into line with this vision. Almost all effective political leaders have a screw loose, in that sense. In 2017, no 39-year-old without a Napoleon complex would have believed they could defeat the whole political establishment and become French president, yet Emmanuel Macron prevailed. Angela Merkel might be an exception to this rule, although perhaps she was simply better at concealing her madness.

I’m poking fun at this tendency but I think it’s essential to politics and to progress. Great things are often accomplished by irrational people for irrational reasons. The rational move for Churchill in May 1940 was to pursue a peace agreement with Germany. In 1997, no Prime Minister without Tony Blair’s luxuriously proportioned ego would have believed it possible to lead a successful peace process in Northern Ireland. Failures of political leadership often stem from leaders without the necessary grandeur of self-conception to really lead - from recent British history, Gordon Brown, Teresa May and Rishi Sunak spring to mind. Leaders without this special sauce tend to flounder around without direction; leaders with too much of it become Liz Truss.

If you’re trying to spot future political stars, look for individuals who display some delusions of grandeur but who aren’t in thrall to them. Similarly, when trying to predict how a political leader will behave, you should factor in the likelihood they are more optimistic about their prospects and abilities than any sane person would be. I often see commentators assuming that a leader’s assessment of the landscape is similar to their’s. This is usually a mistake, and it’s the one I made when I assumed that Joe Biden was unlikely to run for a second term.

Of course, he may still step down, but the fact that we’ve got this close to an election without him doing so is not what I would have predicted when I wrote about his inauguration speech. I assumed that having slain the dragon, he would retire, nobly, to Delaware. In fact, it wasn’t until late in 2022 that his intention to run again became unmistakably clear to me. As soon as it did, I realised I’d made the elementary error of assuming that top-level politicians see the world in the way the rest of us do. To me and other observers, it seemed obvious that he would be too old to run and win in 2024, and be a competent second-term president. Surely Biden would see that too?

No. Joe Biden ran two failed presidential campaigns and didn’t even come close to winning - and still believed he should take another shot, even when nobody else did. He wanted to run in 2016 and was eased out of the way by the Obamas, who thought Clinton was a better bet. Throughout it all, Biden kept believing he could and should be president, and eventually the world came around to where he had been in his mind for fifty years.

So if you’re Joe Biden, of course you believe that you can and should win a second term. Indeed, you believe that you’re the only person in America capable of defeating Trump and governing a divided nation. He believes all this even now, when the polls show that he is more unpopular than Donald Trump at the same stage in 2020, or than, God help us, Jimmy Carter in 1980 (Biden is the green line).

The fates of great nations turn on these quirks of political psychology. There are several candidates who stand a better chance of defeating Trump in eight months’ time, and none of them are yet in a position to run. The Democrats should have done more to prepare for this situation, but if there’s one person blocking the way to their party’s victory in November, it’s the same person who ensured one last time around. We have Joe Biden’s ego to thank for Trump’s defeat in 2020; we may have it to blame for Trump’s victory in 2024.

This piece is free to read so please burnish my enormous self-regard by sharing and recommending.

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