When the Standard Is Perfection, Everything Fails

Ideals should give government direction. When perfection becomes the minimum acceptable condition, leaders can mistake rejecting an imperfect reality for solving the problem.

I took up boxing when I was 58. Ten years later, I am still working on mastering the basics: head movement, defense, distance, my rear hook—the right—and especially footwork. I’ve come a long way, but age, experience and a late start place real limits on how far my improvement can go.

But I have an ideal in mind for what I’m striving toward in the ring: my coach. He fought professionally with some success until a couple of years ago. His balance, timing and command of distance are on a level I will never approach. The power a professional like him can generate with a punch is downright scary.

That doesn’t frustrate me in the least. I don’t leave the gym convinced that my training has failed because I’ll never reach his level. I watch, listen and try to make the next movement a little better than the last one. I keep progressing in the right direction.

The ideal is useful because it supplies direction. It would become destructive if I used it as a pass/fail test of my efforts.

Public life needs ideals too. They tell us what justice, safety, fairness and good government ought to look like. The trouble begins when an ideal stops giving government direction and becomes the minimum standard an imperfect world must meet.

Everything fails when the standard is perfection.

That does not mean everything can or should be fixed. Some programs should end. Some technologies should be prohibited. Some institutions may require structural replacement. Pragmatic reform is not automatically right merely because prohibition is sometimes overused. The question is how public leaders decide.

Minneapolis confronted that question in its most consequential form after the murder of George Floyd. His death was not a minor flaw in an otherwise satisfactory system. It exposed profound failures in policing and intensified longstanding concerns about misconduct, accountability and public trust. City leaders had a duty to act.

Nine of the City Council’s 13 members publicly pledged in June 2020 to defund and dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a community-based public-safety model. The proposal that reached voters the following year would have removed the Police Department from the city charter, created a Department of Public Safety and eliminated the charter’s minimum police staffing formula. The new department could have included licensed peace officers if city leaders later determined they were necessary. Voters rejected the amendment, 56.17 percent to 43.83 percent.

The vote did not prove that ordinary reform was sufficient, and the proposal did not promise a city without any police officers. But it revealed the burden that comes with replacing an institution. Removing an existing department is a decision. Demonstrating that a successor can reliably perform the indispensable parts of its work is another one.

A serious replacement plan must explain which functions will continue on the first day and who will perform them. It must identify the authority, staffing, training and supervision the new structure will need. Residents should also know how success will be measured. An institution can deserve fundamental change while the public still deserves proof that essential capacity will not disappear in the transition.

The same governing habit appears at a smaller scale when leaders are asked whether to test an unfamiliar tool. This summer, the City Council considered a 75-day police drone pilot in north Minneapolis. Supporters wanted to learn whether a drone sent to selected 911 calls could give officers faster situational awareness. Opponents raised legitimate concerns about surveillance, privacy, data retention, the vendor’s other government work and the possibility that a limited program would expand. The Council rejected the contract on a 6–6 vote.

Perhaps that particular contract deserved rejection. A pilot does not become wise merely because it is temporary. But rejecting one contract should not end the inquiry. Leaders should explain whether the problem was the vendor, the proposed safeguards or the technology itself—and whether a narrower test could answer the disputed questions without creating unacceptable risks. The claimed improvement in response was only a hypothesis. Without a carefully designed test, it remained one.

Sometimes government refuses to test a tool. Sometimes it seeks to exclude an entire category before writing rules for it.

Data centers create real public costs. They can demand large amounts of electricity and water, rely on backup generators, create noise, occupy valuable land and place pressure on public infrastructure and ratepayers. Minneapolis is now considering how to regulate them through conditional-use permits, limits on size and location, reuse of existing buildings, utility disclosures and sound controls. Those are not reasons to wave every proposal through. They are the raw material of governing.

Council Member Robin Wonsley has stated a different endpoint. In a constituent newsletter, she wrote that data centers have “no place in Minneapolis” and that she opposes “any zoning to allow any data centers in our city.” She also acknowledged that an overlay district would at least create opportunities for community engagement and allow the Council to consider individual proposals on their merits and weaknesses. That qualification is important. So is the categorical position that precedes it.

Regulation asks what conditions might make a proposed use acceptable. A categorical ban decides in advance that no conditions can. Either conclusion might ultimately be justified, but they are not the same governing act. One requires leaders to examine differences among sites, designs, operators, benefits and harms. The other requires a strong evidentiary case that the risks cannot be adequately controlled or that no plausible proposal could serve the public interest.

Before leaders preserve, replace or prohibit something, they should understand what useful work it performs, what harm it causes and whether that harm can be controlled. Rules, oversight and design changes matter only if government has the ability and willingness to enforce them.

The alternative deserves the same scrutiny as the status quo. If leaders want to eliminate something, they should be equally clear about what will replace its useful function, how soon the replacement can work and what evidence supports the promise. When important facts remain disputed, a limited and reversible test may answer them. Leaders should also consider which mistake will be harder to correct: permitting a controlled experiment that can be stopped, or destroying capacity that may take years to rebuild.

That inquiry may lead government to preserve something, improve it, redesign it, replace it, end it or prohibit it. The value of the process is not that it always produces the moderate answer. It is that the answer follows comparative analysis rather than treating the discovery of imperfection as the end of thought.

In the gym, progress is measured in basics: better footwork, tighter defense, a better sense of distance, a rear hook that lands the way it should. None of that will make me my coach. Each improvement keeps me moving in his direction.

The Constitution begins with the aspiration to form “a more perfect Union.” Whatever else the phrase carries, the modest word “more” is useful here. It points toward improvement without pretending that the work will ever be finished.

Governing is not the search for policies without flaws. It is the disciplined work of deciding what must be preserved, what can be repaired, what should be replaced and what truly must end—and then accepting responsibility for what happens next.