The Right is angry with Obama and Congress for having done too much. They vehemently oppose the Obama Administration, and the Congressional Democrats, as advancing a radical left-wing agenda. The word “socialist” probably hasn’t been used so often (and so erroneously) in America since the New Deal.
The Left is angry with Obama and Congress for not having done enough. Many if not most are disenchanted with the president and their Congressional representatives, angry that they did not fulfill their mandate, as these critics see it, to pursue a more aggressive progressive agenda.
Those who read my posts undoubtedly know that I would personally prefer moving as assertively as possible in the direction of using government to address both market failures and social problems, but I also recognize that it is impossible to get too far ahead of the center of gravity of popular opinion. Even having done as much as Obama has done has catalyzed a radicalized, blindly ideological, mostly irrational reactionary movement so passionate that it threatens to sweep Congress in the midterm elections.
Some on the left might argue that that’s why we should have done more in the two years that we had. But what’s done can be undone, in a variety of ways, and the goal is not to be stuck in an unproductive tug-o-war, a perpetual stalemate, both sides pulled into the mud every two years, but rather to create a sustainable progressive path into the future.
The fickleness on the left, the mirror-image of Tea Party irrationality, is, in many ways, a bigger threat to our ability to forge that progressive path than even the Tea Party, because the opposition doesn’t want us to move forward, while our own implacable extremists (or purists) want to move forward but are partners with the radical right in undermining our ability to do so. Without the disaffected Left, the Right would not be as successful as they are likely to be in this election, and in prosecuting their agenda. Which leaves those members of the left who are facilitating the right-wing takeover as responsible for it as the right-wing activists themselves.
The parallels between America today and 1920’s Germany may be reflected in this dynamic as well. The rise of the far-right Nazi party, which shared with our Tea Party a set of angry, scapegoating beliefs (anti-intellectualism, disdain for the poor, xenophobia and widespread racism, de facto service to corporatism), may also share with that era the implicit assistance of mainstream disaffection with the more moderate current government, allowing a group of hateful right-wing extremists to take over the country.
The Tea Party isn’t the Nazi party; it is both less explicitly racist and less explicitly corpratist. It is also far less capable of “getting the trains to run on time.” But it is fundamentally similar in being a movement that hates reason and idolizes a blind and self-destructive ideology, clinging to a fixation scrubbed of rationality rather than addressing the real complexities and subtleties of the world in which we live. And the end results, while unlikely to be as horrible as the Holocaust, are likely to be extremely destructive, and extremely cruel.
And those results toward which we are plummeting will be the fault of both those who fought to bring them about, and those who were foolish enough to abandon the effective fight against them.
Reading an AP article on President Obama’s appearance on The Daly Show (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101027/ap_on_en_tv/us_obama_daily_show) reminded me of the title truism, the flip side of “the electorate rewards pandering.” Of course, to the current dominant populist force in America, there’s no such thing as “pandering,” because democracy to them means, should mean, must mean, government by the lowest common denominator, that whatever is shouted loudest must be truest, that the mob is never wrong, and knowledge is never relevant. Forget the fact that history has thoroughly disproved this (ever seen film clips of Nazi rallies in 1920s Germany?). Forget that fact that it is mindbogglingly obvious that there are complex issues, economic, legal, technical issues that require the application of actual knowledge to actual systems. Forget the fact that the only response this neo-Neanderthal movement has to these obvious observations is to yell:
I have never before read so much elitist, “better-than-thou” snobbery rife opinions full of progressive intellectual drivel in my life than right here. Somebody has spent way too much time in isolated Liberal environments and media.
(That was a direct quote from someone named Keith Perry in a recent Tea Party Facebook circle jerk I had the honor of inspiring). There are better quotes out there, ones that more explicitly denounce any application of knowledge with accusations of disdaining “the unwashed masses.” Any attempt to suggest that we should consider that governance merits professionalization in much the same way that medicine, law, education, accounting, geology, carpentry, mechanics, and any other profession that deals with even moderately complex systems do is met with blind, unreasoning rejection. Even when it is coupled with recognition of the need to hold those professionals democratically accountable for the job they do.
No, the rising tide is one that rejects such quaint notions as that there is any relevance to expertise. They don’t want laymen to instruct surgeons on how to do their child’s open-heart surgery, but they want laymen to instruct representatives on how to deal with complex economic, legal and technical challenges, because they are incapable of recognizing social systems as systems, complex and subtle systems, systems as challenging to work with effectively as (really more challenging than) human anatomical systems, or mechanical systems. But we are cursed by an ignorance so aggressive that it isn’t content merely to lack any understanding of social systems, but has to insist on dictating how they are addressed.
The people best equipped to govern are those who do know enough about these social systems, about the economic dynamics, the technological complexities, the legal and administrative framework, the ways in which all of these articulate with one another and with the natural and cultural systems that envelop and permeate them. These are people professional enough to examine the historical and international record, to compare various institutional arrangements, to identify their strengths and weaknesses, in short, to do what professionals do, applying training to information in service to the job for which they are paid.
And those so equipped shouldn’t say, “yes, Joe-the-Plumber, you are the expert, you know all that needs to be known about economic and fiscal policy, about international relations, about geohydrology and electrical grids and toxic environmental contamination. There is no knowledge anywhere in the world that you don’t possess that can possibly be relevant to public policy.” No, they should say, “You hired me to do a job, and it is my responsibility to do it faithfully and capably. And doing it the way your telling me to do it would be neither.” Just as the surgeon would refuse to take a hacksaw to his patient just because the father insisted it was the best way to go, so to the most talented elected officials, the kind who have the combination of knowledge, integrity, and courage to do the job they were paid to do, and to do it well, the true leaders, are punished at the polls for being true leaders. Only sycophants to popular ignorance need apply.
In fact, true leaders do more than tell the public that not each and every member knows each and every relevant fact or systemic dynamic, but also tells the public that, collectively, they possess vast untapped genius, and that that wisdom can only be tapped once the public stops drowning it out with undifferentiated noise. The job requires not just technocracy, but also energizing and mobilizing what’s best about the populace, inspiring each to contribute what they have in greater degree than others, while also encouraging each to acknowledge what their individual limitations and areas of inexpertise are.
If too many cooks spoil the broth, then the Tea these particular chefs are steeping is a toxic brew, one so putrid that it poisons the body politic each and every time it is served.
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Tea Party Fanatics Believe the Means Justify the Ends: Just a couple of days after a Tea Partier, in an on-line conversation with me, criticized Democratic Party get-out-the-vote efforts, not only on the paranoid basis that it is a secret attempt to access personal information, but also because many voters “[have] no idea what the issues are or the qualifications of the candidate,” the Denver Post reports on increasing voter intimidation tactics by Tea Party fanatics (http://www.denverpost.com/ci_16441222). Actual violence by a (male) Rand Paul volunteer against a (female) MoveOn.org volunteer just before a debate between Paul and his Democratic opponent, a fortunately thus far exceptional event in American politics, may be just an isolated incident, or it may be indicative of the general disdain for democracy increasingly in evidence among Tea Party fanatics. Just yesterday I wrote about The Tea Party’s Mistaken Historical Analogy, drawing parallels between the Tea Party’s anti-intellectualism and disdain for the poor with mid-twentieth century European Fascism. Continuing evidence of the parallels should raise people’s awareness of how corrosive and dangerous this movement really is.
9News removed the anti-Perlmutter ad that the Denver Post had called “a whopper,” 9News had called “false,” and 7News called “fiction,” the last adding, “Perlmutter did not vote for a bill to allow rapists access to Viagra.” (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16442793, Saturday Night Briefs: Deceptive Political Ads & Dogmatic Intolerance). Another example of the Far Right’s extreme tactics. Negative ads are one thing, but even some unfortunately mainstream excesses, such as taking quotes out of context don’t rise to this level of outright deception. The Tea Party is upping the ante in electoral deception and distinctly unethical conduct. Shadowy right-wing groups attacking Democratic candidates with outright lies so egregious that television stations have to pull ads (in another break from the previous standard, the groups themselves refuse to when called on the deception), along with the observations noted above and yesterday, need to start registering on the collective consciousness.
Not only does it mark a new level of outright deception and voter intimidation, but The Tea Party is based on the notion that we are better governed by the arbitrary opinions of uninformed lay people than by any degree of professionalization of governance (New Tea Party Bumper Sticker: “If It Isn’t Dumb, It Isn’t Right”, John Andrews Recommends Protecting CU From Intellectuals). The horrors of the rise of fascist and communist totalitarianisms in Europe and Asia in the early and mid-20th century were preceded by just such populist rejections of moderation and professionalism in governance, embracing instead demagogues who promised to cure government of those defects.
We have enjoyed, longer than any other country, a modern democracy characterized by a high degree of professionalism and moderation in our governance. We need to preserve and reassert our collective commitment to maintaining both, especially as such a distinctly immoderate and anti-professional movement is so passionately on the rise.
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The Tea Partiers are More Like 2oth Century European Totalitarians than 18th Century American Revolutionaries. The original Tea Parties on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States immediately prior to the American Revolution, though more complex and less noble than American mythology would have it, were not the anti-intellectual and anti-empathy movements that the modern Tea Party is. Those characteristics align our own contemporary movement more with 20th century European Fascism and Eastern European/Asian Communism than with liberty-loving American revolutionaries. And The Tea Party’s ideology is even in some ways quite similar to the anti-government sentiments that inflamed the Russian populace to support a revolution that put into place a government more autocratic and repressive than the one it overthrew.
Both the Central European fascist countries (Germany, Italy, Spain), and the Eastern European and Asian communist countries, were deeply imbued with a passionate anti-intellectualism, always identifying intellectuals with the hated scapegoats (often Jews), or sometimes identifying intellectuals themselves as the primary hated scapegoats (as the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia). This tracks closely with the Tea Party’s identification of American intellectuals as the “elitists” they most fervently despise, and with their idolization of distinctly non-intellectual (and non-intelligent) leaders such as Sarah Palin.
The indifference to, or outright hostility toward, the poor as freeloaders on hard-working people also more closely tracks European fascism than it does American founding principles and ideas. Part of the “smaller government” message of Tea Partiers, that I encounter in virtually every interaction, is some statement about how the left insists on taking money away from those who earn it to give it to those who are too lazy to work. This characterization is, of course, far removed from reality, in which poverty exists for a multitude of structural reasons, has far more to do with the chances of birth than with individual merit and effort, and involves tremendous suffering by the most innocent members of society, our children. But the complete absence of empathy, or of understanding of the realities of the problems we face, combined with antipathy toward intellectuals (and particularly empathetic intellectuals) who accept the social responsibility of seeking systemic ways to address those problems, makes our Tea Partiers far more analogous to Fascists than to American Revolutionaries.
But certainly the Tea Partiers aren’t totalitarians; that would seem to be the exact opposite of what they stand for, right? Wrong. Opposition to government per se, and liberal use of the word “liberty,” do not necessarily imply a movement that is not essentially totalitarian, even if unbeknownst to the majority of its adherents. The Russian peasants that facilitated the Boleshevik revolution were trying to oust an oppressive government, not usher one in. And they made the same exact mistake that our modern Tea Partiers do, and that our American Revolutionaries did not: They look more to the promises of people who claim to represent their interests, than to the careful design of social institutions, to ensure that their interests are being addressed.
The Tea Partiers ignore completely what social scientists call “the agency problem,” the challenge of aligning the interests of agents (elected officials) with those of the principal (those they represent), instead happily and haplessly investing all of their faith in those who claim to be their champions. They are, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff noted in his book The Political Mind, actually inherently driven more by an authoritarian ideology than by one committed to liberty, though they clothe that authoritarianism in a professed commitment to liberty.
The Tea Party does not object to government as an oppressor of the downtrodden, but rather as an ally of the downtrodden, perceiving this commitment as an infringement on the advantages enjoyed by those who have drawn an at least adequate lot in life. It is a movement heavily funded by corporate wealth, which sees in this opposition to an empathetic government a population that will complacently allow corporate America to continue its advance in the recapture of government as an agent of the most privileged at the expense of the least privileged, rather than as an agent of the populace as a whole, striving to preserve the robustness of our economy, while addressing the demands of increased equality of opportunity and sustainability.
What brought this comparison to mind today was an article in The Economist on Germany’s resurgence, and the angst associated with it due to Germany’s unavory mid-20th Century past (http://www.economist.com/node/17305755). As I was reading the description of the kinds of xenophobic, scape-goating attitudes that Germany has actually in recent times managed to exhibit to a far lesser rather than greater degree than many other nations (most notably The United States), but that any trace of which still raise concerns among Europeans about a resurgent Germany, I couldn’t help but think “if those trends concern you, they should concern you where they are currently most robust: in The United States of America.”
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Amercan Perceptions of Christianity: What struck me most in the Denver Post article reporting that 1 in four Americans can’t think of any recent positive contribution by Christians was the intergenerational difference among Christians themselves (http://www.denverpost.com/ci_16433284). “[R]esearchers noted that Evangelical Christians over age 25 and those who said they are ‘mostly conservative’ on socio- political matters were least likely to list serving the poor as an important contribution.” This confirms what has long been obvious: That the configuration of political beliefs that include Evangelical Christianity, “Constitutional Idolatry”, and a general anti-government/pro-social-injustice-and-inequality-of-opportunity stance includes indifference to the plight of others. Cognitive Scientist George Lakoff, in his book The Political Mind, identified this orientation as a lack of empathy. Whatever policies we design and implement as a nation, whatever balances we strike between efficiency and equity, a lack of empathy should never inform them. More than anything else, this lack of empathy, frequently waxing into outright antipathy toward the poor, combined with a disdain for reason and knowledge, are the principal causes of my vehement opposition to the Tea Party and its fellow travelers. We must never, ever govern ourselves with indifference to human suffering, much less belligerence towards those who are suffering.
Crowdfunding: An example of Wikinomics (Wikinomics: The Genius of the Many Unleashed), crowdfunding is the use of an internet platform to present “grant proposals” to the public at large, and receive donated support from members of that public who find the idea worthy of their support (http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2010/10/crowd-funding_art). Again, this is triumph of decentralization through reduced transaction costs, allowing an increasing number of publicly funded projects to be funded directly by the public, rather than indirectly through the governmental and non-profit apparatus that has traditionally played the role of gatekeeper.
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To me, there seem to be two defining characteristics of The Tea Party movement: 1) a lack of empathy for the suffering of others, and 2) an outright hostility to knowledge and reason. In just one example among many of the latter characteristic, here’s part of a Facebook exchange I just engaged in:
Charles Heatherly: Val., Brian,,,,Steve is a descendant of the progressives of the early 20th century who dreamed of a technocratic society where experts make all the important decisions, unrestrained by the confusions and biases of ordinary citizens. It is a dream that is hard to awaken from because so many educated people are seduced to believe THEY will be part of the scientific elite making the decisions. It is a deeply anti-political ideology because it does not trust democracy.
Steve Harvey: It’s usually wiser to let people speak for themselves, especially when you disagree with them, than to volunteer to put into their mouths and attribute to their minds the caricatures of their thought that you find easiest to repel.
I think that there are two challenges facing a representative democracy:
1) The agency problem, of aligning the interests of the agents (the elected representatives) with the principal (the people they represent). Democracy addresses this, imperfectly and incompletely. Refining the systems by which we align these incentives is one of the on-going challenges we face.
2) The mobilization of relevant knowledge and expertise in service to pursuing the interests of the principal most effectively, which does not mean exclusion of the public, since the public has some relevant knowledge and expertise, but does mean not reducing decision making to a crude plebiscite of popular opinion.
In all information intensive endeavors, the robust value of a division of labor, in which some people dedicate their lives first studying, and then daily working with, the systems that are the purview of their profession, has pretty thoroughly proven its value. When our child needs open heart surgery, we don’t find a surgeon who agrees with our community’s lay opinions about how to perform surgery, but rather one trained and practiced in that profession. And since we are very concerned that they act in accord with our interests, of performing that surgery as diligently as possible, we have put into place many safeguards to help ensure that they do so.
Neither of these two challenges should be considered in isolation, but rather both in conjunction: We want a government that is a faithful agent of its principal, and we want one that is an effective agent of its principal. Neither one alone is sufficient, and the absence of either is unsatisfactory.
The notion that only the first demand applies, and not the second, is based on the myth that there is no information-intensive aspect to governance, that it is not necessary to understand any economics, law, and some sufficient cross-section of other relevant knowledge (e.g., how energy grids, hydrogeological systems, and other natural, technological, and social institutional systems that are relevant to public policy decisions, work). In reality, there are few professions that benefit more from a high degree of expertise, since few professions deal with systems as varied and complex as public policy work does.
You may agree or disagree, but your dismissiveness of this point of view is not a sign of the impeccable commitment to reason that you claim (in contrast to folks like me, who are merely raving fools). And before you “rubber-and-glue” me, I am completely open to counterarguments, made with comparable precision and logical integrity to the argument I just made. They do exist, and I am aware of some of them. I do not dismiss those arguments as mere ravings, because they aren’t. That’s part of the complexity of the world in which we live.
Charles Heatherly: Steve..Thank you SO MUCH for proving my point. You alone have the scientific paradigm for solving society’s problems. Congratulations, and good luck with that.
Steve Harvey: No more than I alone have the scientific paradigm for diagnosing and treating diseases, but we together do, and not embedded in each and every one of us, but as collective wisdom more fully embodied in those who study and practice the relevant profession. That’s why we have professions, and why we continue to professionalize broader swathes of our economy: Because expertise is not a bad thing. Knowledge is not a bad thing, and mobilizing knowledge for specific purposes is not a bad thing.
Keith Perry: I have never before read so much elitist, “better-than-thou” snobbery rife opinions full of progressive intellectual drivel in my life than right here. Somebody has spent way too much time in isolated Liberal environments and media.
Brian Wilson: Translation of Steve’s arguments: “the people aren’t voting the way we (the elites) tell them to! We need to “align” their votes to benefit us. They don’t know what’s good for them.”
Keith Perry: Oh, I got that loud and clear in his needlessly lengthy dissertation.
Valarie Murphy: Thank you, Brian, for that translation. I think Steve does not like the great unwashed masses (Republicans). Isn’t that what he said? No one will “align” my vote. Sorry, Stevo.
Steve Harvey: Yes, it’s deja vu all over again. I make a cogent argument, and the chorus declares it “unreasonable” because it challenges their dogmatic assumptions, and that, after all, is your definition of what is unreasonable. Nobel Prize winning economists are “irrelevant”, because the speaker knows more about economics. Knowledge is “irrelevant,” because it’s “anti-democratic.”
Of course, there is never any counterargument, never any counteranalysis, never any application of knowledge to observation, never any logic. And yet, despite those defects, yours is the only rational point of view. It’s simply amazing.
If it isn’t dumb, it isn’t right. That should be your bumper sticker.
Valarie Murphy: Mine is the only rational point of view. I don’t know why you argue with that.
Steve Harvey: I don’t either, Valarie. It’s a disease, not an argument. You can’t argue with a disease.
What most strikes me about this exchange, other than the persistent insistence that no one who thinks differently from them can possibly be rational, while simultaneously never making any rational argument themselves in defense of any position (more apparent in the first part that I didn’t reprint), is 1) the twisting of my description of agency theory, which is really just another way of describing the challenge of holding elected officials accountable to the electorate, into some notion of aligning them to some point of view they disagree with; and 2) the inability to recognize that there can possibly be any value to the mobilization of expert knowledge in the design and implementation of public policies.
The first point is an illustration of a sort of paranoia (even more apparent in Charles’ status update under which these comments appeared, in which he insisted that the OFA Facebook GOTV campaign is a conspiracy to access all of their personal information), in which they perceive everything, particularly that originates from “the evil other” (a concept which embraces all non-Americans, non-Christians, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and non-bigots), as an assault on their “liberty.” So, if a progressive describes holding our elected officials accountable, using a body of thought called “agency theory,” which is about how to hold agents accountable to their principal’s interests (big in managerial theory, law, and microeconomics), they perceive it as a nefarious conspiracy to control them, miraculously getting it diametrically wrong.
The complete miscomprehension in their collective response is due to a combination of confirmation bias (selectively perceiving information in such a way as to confirm what they already hold to be true) and prejudice (anything a liberal says must by definition be wrong), so that they were simply incapable of grasping what agency theory is really about. Since a liberal said something about aligning the interests of government and the electorate, it could only mean government control of the populace (which it didn’t), not popular control of government (which it did).
The second point is an affirmative commitment to ignorance, not only in the prejudice against scholarship, but also by simultaneously declaring all who disagree with them “irrational” while never making any arguments of their own, thus insulating an information-deprived ideology from any intrusion of fact or logic. After explaining that there are two challenges to self governance (ensuring that our representatives act in our interests, and ensuring that they do so effectively), these mouthpieces of Organized Ignorance, to an even greater extent than I could have predicted, not only were unable to acknowledge the latter challenge, but, amazingly, could not even acknowledge the former when I said it, just because I’m the one who said it. The irony is that, to the extent that they acknowledge we should have any representatives at all, holding them accountable should logically be a cornerstone of their own ideology (emphasizing popular sovereignty, as it does).
These various facets define their movement perfectly: Paranoia informed by an ideology which privileges ignorance, so thoroughly insulated from any contradictory informaton that they won’t even agree with what one would assume is a cornerstone of their own ideology if stated by an ideological opponent, all in service to the avoidance of any shared responsibility to others, especially to those less fortunate than themselves. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
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The Denver Post published an article today on Denver truancy court, and on the importance of diagnosing the problem with a child who is chronically truant rather than just punishing the violation of the law (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16425102?source=pop). As DPS truancy attorney Amber Elias put it, “School attendance is only a symptom. The purpose of truancy court is to identify what the disease is and how to address that.”
A good example of how important that is can be found in the case of 15 year old Louis Pollack-Trujillo, whose truancy was a direct result of an undiagnosed depression anxiety disorder. “I wanted to go to school; I just didn’t want to go in the building,” he said. “The rooms felt too full, and there was too much going on.”
There is a movement underway in child and family services, called “Systems of Care” (SOC), which integrates and coordinates child-oriented services and agencies across the spectrum, including schools, juvenile justice, and county health, mental health, family, and social services. Both federal and state legislation (including in Colorado) is making it easier to “blend and braid” different funding streams (traditionally difficult to do, due to the precise discrete reporting requirements of each program), so that services can be designed as an integrated package for each child and family. By doing so, we can prevent the problems that fester and grow in the absence of such proactive attention.
This is just one dimension of the choice we face as a nation: Whether we want to be the kind of people who justify failing to do the best we can to address the problems that kids face, and by doing so prevent the problems that ensue from failing to provide kids with an education, to address debilitating mental illnesses, to provide health and mental health care services, to address abuse and neglect issues, to address substance abuse issues by the children or their parents, to address truancy and other juvenile justice issues, and to address all of these as parts of a single whole.
Those who chant the mantra of “less government,” without taking into account the legitimate demands that government alone can adequately meet, are not only contributing to higher rates of adult non-productivity and public dependency, associated higher rates of crime, and the intergenerational reproduction of these same problems in a cycle of perpetual costly dysfunctionality, but are also costing tax-payers far more in the long-run by declining to invest in far less expensive early interventions rather than incurring the far more expensive costs of reactive but ineffective “solutions” like incarceration and welfare. By refusing to use government as a precisely targeted proactive tool addressing specific issues, we are trapped into using it as a blunt and costly reactive necessity.
It’s like failing to maintain upkeep on a house or car, allowing it to deteriorate instead, at far greater expense to the home or car owner. It’s just plain dumb. And in this case, the deterioration of the “house” we’re talking about not only costs us, but involves enormous human suffering, suffering which has detrimental rippling effects throughout society.
The choice exists on many levels: Whether to try to resolve conflicts or pay the costs of their eruption; whether to try to identify and treat mental and emotional disorders, or to wait until those who suffer them impose costs and suffering on others; whether to find and address the causes of problems, or turn a blind eye and only deal with the results of not having confronted those problems affirmatively and proactively.
The rest of the developed world has very definitely and clearly selected the former strategy of confronting problems proactively, and have far better success at diminishing violent crime and infant mortality, improving social mobility, reducing incarceration rates, and, in general, spending more of their public resources on improving the quality of life rather than paying for the failure to do so. Isn’t it time we joined the modern world as well?
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Yes, Denver Post’s most insane and inane columnist, John Andrews, published a column today advising that we need to defeat Harvard Law graduate, former Supreme Court clerk, and current CU Law professor Melissa Hart for CU regent, because we have to protect the university from professors (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16401229). And he doesn’t just mean protect governance of the university from any representation of faculty at all (there are currently none on the Board of Regents), but actually protecting the academy itself from its traditional definition as the home of academic discipline. Instead, Andrews assures us, the people want it to be more representative of popular opinion, and so we should impose a rule that the university affirmatively hire professors more representative of popular opinion.
Here’s what Andrew’s doesn’t get: Scholarship is a discipline, a methodology through which to distill observation and interpretation in ways far more useful for understanding systemic, causal relationships than any previous approach. Imposing on it some a priori requirement to represent a certain spectrum of lay beliefs is completely antithetical to its purpose, and what has set western science apart as a robust system of thought.
And it is precisely the kind of Medieval approach to knowledge that science and scholarship have whittled away at, this imposition of arbitrary cultural beliefs rather than subjecting them to the lathe of systematic scrutiny. One would have hoped that the battle over whether arbitrary opinion or systematic thought subjected to scientific methodology is superior in accuracy would have been settled by now, since we have about 400 years of experience pretty decisively settling it. But, alas, it is not to be so. Andrews quotes that any handful of random people know more than a cross-section of experts on the subject of their expertise, parroting a popular but absurd ideological conviction.
Andrews’ examples all prove his error: The stimulus package did avert an economic disaster, and was cost-effective, in light of the non-partisan CBO’s conclusion that it created between 1.3 million and 3.4 million jobs (do the math). Roosevelt’s New Deal spending, despite the information-deprived ideology to the contrary, resulted in about five years of phenomenal economic growth during the Great Depression, until FDR, seduced by this success, tried to implement budget-balancing measures.
Arbitrary opinion “benefits” from neither being tested, nor allowing itself to be tested, so that it can always declare itself correct despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And Andrews wants to “storm the gates” (in the words of his preferred candidate for regent) of the last refuge of systematic academic thought in America, and reduce it to just another ideological echo-chamber, under the delusion that he and his fellow Inquisitors are doing just the opposite.
Like his predecessors over the centuries, those products of scientific methodology that are inconvenient to his ideology are heresies, and the fact that the academy systematically dispells the absurdities that his camp clings to (evolution is a myth, etc.) means that it must be a left-wing ideological echo-chamber. Because in Andrews’ Bizarro world, all belief is arbitrary, but his arbitrary beliefs are absolute truths.
The Inquisition is returning in full force, folks. John the Inquisitor has long been writing such drivel, and the Denver Post has long been irresponsible enough to privilege it with column space (along with others, like Vince Carroll, who contribute to the vacuuming of intelligence from the minds of his loyal readers). “Political Fundamentalism” is a force to be reckoned with. And we had better reckon with it, very, very assertively.
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It’s more difficult than ever to talk about what’s right with America these days, both because we’re still languishing in a persistent economic downturn, and because the most visible movement in America today is a single screaming complaint against everything that America, as a nation-state, does. As Susan Greene discusses in her column in today’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16418853), it is political fodder for both candidates and citizens to decry the alleged laziness and inefficiency of public servants, without acknowledging the hard work, low salaries, and deep commitment that is widespread among them.
Certainly, there are inefficiencies, there are the issues of “goal displacement” and “agency problems” that are inherent to large bureaucratic organizations. These are authentic institutional challenges posing a legitimate need to address them to the best of our ability. But that demand on our ingenuity should not be confused with condemnation for the essential work that is done, and must be done, through our public agencies.
The problem is that the many indispensable things that America does, and that American public servants do, are so fully incorporated into our lives, so much a part of our expectations of what is and what should be, that they have become invisible to most of us, taken for granted and unacknowledged unless and until they’re gone. And even then, the competing streams of often inaccurate information allows people to blame the decreased quality of their lives resulting from the lack to other forces altogether, perversely leading to an increased demand for the shrinkage of government that caused the material and palpable decreased quality of life in the first place.
Such is the dilemma we’re in now. A decades long Republican-driven agenda of deregulation led to underregulated financial markets, the consequences of which were well foreseen (and frequently trumpeted on shows such as 60 Minutes, as was the inevitability of a major large-scale terrorist attack in the United States and a clear identification of our vulnerabilities) at least as long ago as the 1990’s, resulting in 2008 in “the biggest economic crisis since The Great Depression,” driven by a financial-sector fabricated housing bubble collapse and subsequent crash in values of mortgage-based securities.
If, at the end of the Bush administration, a deal had been offered to the nation that we would be in the economic condition we’re in today less than two years later, with a weak but stabilized economy, with an end to net increases in job loss and less than 10% unemployment, with the fairly clear prospect of a gradual return to economic growth and prosperity, every sane human being would have wiped their brow in relief, and screamed, “God yes! I’ll take that deal!”
But instead, the disingenuous Right gets away with trumpeting that 3.3 million jobs have been lost during the Obama administration, and even stating that that loss is a direct result of stimulus spending, disregarding that the rate of job loss was accelerating right up until the passage of Obama’s first stimulus bill, and began decelerating right after (http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-jobs-lost-in-the-bush-and-obama-administration-2010-2), and that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has reported that the stimulus bill created between 1.3 and 3.4 million jobs that would not otherwise have existed (Organized Ignorance and the Amplified Echo-Chamber of Disinformation).
More importantly, those of us who have actually studied the legal, economic, and physical complexities of things like energy and financial markets, and recognize the role of information asymmetries in the ability of those in centrally located market positions to play markets to the advantage of a few at the sometimes extreme expense of the public (such as happened in the Enron-fabricated California Energy Crisis of 2000-01, and the financial sector collapse of 2008), are aware of the immensity of the task of creating regulatory regimes sophisticated enough, and well-enough funded, to keep up with and police the opportunities for socially disastrous mischief. (See, e.g., Monday Briefs: Labor Markets, Mandela, & High Frequency Trading, Regulation of Financial Markets)
Not only the large demand on the nation-state to provide, maintain, and grow an extensive enough and sophisticated enough regulatory architecture to keep up with technological and institutional advances in insiders’ ability to game the system at the public expense, and unsure the smooth and efficient operation of our markets, but also the large demand on necessary infrastructural maintenance and improvement to reduce transaction costs, attract investment capital, and, in general, grease the gears of the market economy in ways that no private investment capital can’t fully accomplish (due to long time-horizons of return-on-investment, for instance).
We have been underproducing these public goods essential to the smooth functioning of our markets, with Democrats fighting to better approach the optimal level, and Republicans fighting to reduce our investment even more, moving in the direction of increased dysfunctionality. Doing as much as we are doing (and, preferably, considerably more) on these dimensions is what’s right with America; the populist and corporatist pressure to do less is what’s wrong with America.
Beyond these demands on the government to provide the material and regulatory infrastructure necessary to the maintenance of a robust market economy, is a duel-natured demand to make a similar investment in our human capital. As I argued in The Real Deficit, there is both an economic and social imperative to do so: We need a well-educated work force capable of competing in the global economy both to be economically competitive as a nation, and to enable our citizens to occupy the high-skilled high-salaried jobs that contribute to individual prosperity and financial security.
What’s right with America is that, until recently, we have maintained a vibrant system of state universities and government subsidized student loans which have enabled most academically capable young people to take advantage of higher educational opportunities. What’s wrong with America is our diminishing commitment to continue these policies, the erosion of higher education opportunities for middle and lower class Americans.
Of course, those young people need to have not only access to affordable higher educational opportunities, but also the academic preparation necessary to utilize those opportunities successfully. American public education is the target of widespread and, in some ways, much deserved criticism. But the problems with American public education are much more a function of factors outside the schools than within the schools. What our schools themselves have been doing, to the extent that we have allowed them to do it, is very much what’s right with America, for we have gotten an enormous return on our investment in public education. We have, on average, a far higher-quality teacher pool than the salaries and benefits themselves alone would be able to purchase, because many people who simply love to teach and love children go into that profession because it’s what they were born to do.
Even so, there are many deep structural problems with American education, within the schools as well as without. The profession attracts not only the highly committed, but also those who are not competent but can pass the threshold of entry into education, because the demand is so high and the compensation so relatively low. We cannot improve the teacher pool simply by eliminating tenure and removing “bad teachers,” because unless we alter the supply-and-demand equation, all we would accomplish by doing so is to stack the deck just a little more against attracting the highest quality human capital in the first place (by reducing incentives to enter, without counterbalancing the change in incentives elsewhere).
But, despite this weakness in a generally strong teacher pool, and the overwhelmingly risk-averse, ossified, autocratic administration of large school districts (qualities which further undermine the efficacy of the elimination of teacher tenure, by ensuring that almost as many excellent teachers as poor ones are likely to be weeded out as a result), the biggest problems with American public education are, in combination, the deep and widespread cultural anti-intellectualism that continually undermines the educational mission in most out-of-school social contexts, and the general failure to create robust school-community partnerships and programs to better prepare and include parents in the educational mission.
What’s right with America is that we currently counterbalance the relatively low professional salary we provide to teachers with an attractive package of benefits, ample vacations, and unusually high job security. What’s wrong with America is educational reform that kicks responsibility for deep structural and cultural problems down the hierarchy, blaming and punishing those who are, by and large, the strongest component of American public education for defects over which they have virtually no control, and, by doing so, undermining that strong pillar without strengthening the weaker ones. What’s right with America is maintaining the revenue streams that schools require to address these challenges. What’s wrong with America is the zealous movement committed to continuing to reduce and eliminate those revenue streams. (For more on education and education reform, see, e.g., Real Education Reform, A Positive Vision For Colorado, Are We Civilized?, and Education Policy Ideas).
Beyond the regulatory architecture and material and human infrastructural investment that only government can provide, and our commitment to public education as the foundational institution in preparing our citizens to prosper individual and contribute to a robust state and national economy, there are a host of challenges that society faces, and commensurate demands on government, that can be met at considerable present cost in return for both far greater future savings, and a generally improved quality of life for a larger spectrum of the population. I have discussed these at length in essays such as The Most Vulnerable Americans, The Vital Role of Child, Family, and Community Services, Community, Family, and Crime Prevention, and Sound Mind, Sound Body, Sound Society; Sound Good?.
What’s right with America is that we have, by and large, elected people to public office who are more often than not pretty well-qualified for the job, people who know some economics and some law, are aware of the devastating suffering of millions of children, recognize the magnitude of social challenges we face that can only be addressed through the agency of government, and, in general, have some understanding of the real demands of governance. What’s wrong with America today is the massive and massively misinformed populist movement, financed by corporate money eager to keep the candy store unlocked and unguarded, pushing to put people who reflect and embody their own lack of comprehension and misconceptualizations into office, and threatening to do so successfully, at great and enduring cost to all Americans.
Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards
Deceptive political advertising: My favorite is the anti-Perlmutter ad, in which one young woman says to another that Ed Perlmutter voted to provide convicted rapists with Viagra, since, apparently, the health care bill failed to create a new exclusion specifically for convicted rapists. As a spokeswoman for the Perlmutter campaign aptly put it: “The bill also doesn’t stop Martians masquerading as humans from getting a proctological exam.” This ad was brought out to replace one that Adam Schrager had reported made two claims that were absolutely false (http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2010/10/21/viagra-martians-the-latest-in-the-7th-cd/17205/). The left is not completely clean on the issue of false campaign advertising, and I’m not sure that the two sides are not equally culpable. But the right doesn’t seem to have any moral compass whatsoever. It appears to me that they will say anything, do anything, lie about anything, to dupe people into giving them the power that favors those who historically have most benefited from and least needed government’s favors.
The irony of dogma: After writing an essay (Personhood, Politics, & Truth) in response to Susan Greene’s column taking umbrage with being booed for daring to state that there is some moral complexity to the abortion issue (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16392181), another pro-choice reader of Greene’s column took me to task on the comment board for pointing out the basic similarity between a late-term fetus and a newborn baby as part of an illustration that a pro-choice position survives acknowledgement of facts that are not convenient to it, and that our willingness to put all such facts on the table rather than sweep them under the rug is essential, in all matters, to governing ourselves intelligently. I’ve found that it’s almost inevitable that, as soon as you argue against dogmatic certainty, someone who is dogmatically certain finds something in your argument that is offensive to them. And it is usually someone with whose conclusions you agree. Part of the irony in this case is the weakness of the argument she finally relied on to “prove” that there was no room for argument (you can find it on the message board of Greene’s column that I linked to above). True-believers can’t tolerate even those who agree with them, if the latter can’t also agree with their insistence that there is no other way of thinking.
This dogmatic intransigence has many facets, and is such a large part of our basic political dysfunctionality that it merits focused attention and frequent repetition. One left-wing poster posted an oversimplistic model of “corporate fascism” on the fairly like-minded blog SquareState, announcing that he welcomes all reasonable criticism, and then defined reasonable as “not harveyisms,” meaning not any kind of analysis that does not already agree with his. (If he hadn’t mentioned my name, I wouldn’t have noticed his model. It turns out that he’s someone who has gone ballistic several times when I’ve challenged his on-line counsel to Democrats not to vote for Michael Bennet, on the basis of the same shallow analysis mentioned just above).
And, of course, dogmatic intransigence is the foundation of “Political Fundamentalism”, which characterizes Tea Party adherents as well as the two posters I just described. It shouldn’t matter whether your issue is reproductive rights, corporate political influence, or the caricature of “fiscal responsibility” that Tea Partiers claim as their main issue. If it’s strong enough to prevail within your mind, then it should be strong enough to accommodate all facts and arguments. We should be secure in our positions not by insulating them against challenges, but by honing them in response to such challenges.
Some positions have no legitimate arguments at all, such as those that are outright predatory or bigoted. The challenge then is to make that case. But if a postion can pass a minimal threshold test of presenting some legitimate points, no matter how committed one may be to the position that opposes them, those arguments should be acknowledged before being dismissed, and then dismissed by counterarguments that do not simply disregard or sidestep them. That is what robust public discourse should look like.
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