I am frequently encountering social media posts, of which many are by progessive (eg, pro-climate, pro-human rights, pro-equality) voices, which frequently label politicians as “incompetent”, “ineffective”, “stupid”, or “lazy”. However, often these politicians are competent, intelligent and ambitious. Their behaviour  only seems incompetent under the assumption that politicians act in the interest of the public good, however, from the perspective of the lobby groups, eg, billoinaires/oligarch, big corporations, their decisions often are very competent.

The problem is that calling politicians incompetent, instead of corrupted by third-party interests, suggests that these politicians have the right intention, but just lack competence. Since competence (or intelligence) are usually a stable personal trait, this framing hides the agency and responsibility of such politicians for their decisions and hides the influence of other powerful actors in the background.

The unconscious motivation of mis-framing politicians as incompetent rather than corrupt maybe that it is self-serving to the speaker to look down upon those “stupid politicians” and gives the speaker a feeling of intellectual superiority.

Example: At an archery competition, one can assume that all archers intend to hit the target to win the competition. If one archer shoots an arrow and kills a competitor, one would not  state this event as “the archer failed to hit the target”, because it suggests that the intention was to hit the target. However, one can only fail at doing something, if one intended to do it, but not if you never intended it.

This is very dangerous, because it makes it harder to explore the real causes of decisions against public interest, therefore, corruption should never be labelled as incompetence.