When Ideology Takes the Place of Rational Thought

Robert Reich/Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley

The Triumph of Dogma, and a Sad Goodbye to David Frum
Posted: 10/14/11 08:23 AM ET

Every other Wednesday evening for the past few years I've been offering commentary on a spritely show on public radio called Marketplace. On alternative Wednesdays David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, has been airing his views.

This past Wednesday, Frum called it quits. He explained to the show's host, Kai Risdal, that he could no longer represent Republican views.

I think that there's a kind of expectation that when you do it that you represent the broad point of view of your half of the political spectrum. And although I consider myself a conservative and a Republican, and I think that the right-hand side of the spectrum has the better answers for the long-term growth of economy -- low taxes, restrained government, less regulation -- it's pretty clear that facing the immediate crisis -- very intense crisis -- I'm just not representing the view of most people who call themselves Republicans and conservatives these days.... And it's a service to the radio audience if they want to hear people explaining effectively why one of the two great parties takes the view that it does -- it needs to have somebody who agrees with that great party.

I respect David's decision but I disagree with his understanding of his job on Marketplace. And I find his decision to leave a sad commentary (no pun intended) on what's happening to public discourse in America.

Why exactly was it necessary for David Frum to "represent" the views of conservative Republicans?

I don't feel any obligation to represent liberal Democrats. Over the years I've argued, for example, in favor of getting rid of the corporate income tax, creating school vouchers inversely related to family incomes, and extending free-trade agreements -- positions not exactly favored by liberal Democrats.

The American public doesn't want or need to hear "representatives" from the so-called right or left. It wants insight into what's best for America.

Yet over and over again -- on the radio, on TV, in print, in the blogosphere, and all over Washington -- political ideology is substituting for thought.

Politicians take oaths and sign pledges. Special-interest groups abide by litmus tests and ideological labels. The media is either assertively liberal or conservative. Pundits are either on the left or the right.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become so extreme that it's more and more difficult for anyone to rationally "represent" its views. As Frum put in in a post on his website, FrumForum, "Under the pressure of the current crisis -- intoxicated by anti-Obama feelings and incited by talk radio and Fox -- Republicans have staked out an extreme position on the role of government."

What if conservative Republicans believe the sun revolves around the earth? Would someone in David Frum's position who disagrees feel compelled to stop offering "conservative" commentaries about the celestial bodies? And would a major media outlet then be obliged to find a replacement who agrees with conservative dogma? (This isn't such a far-fetched example when you consider what leading Republicans say about evolution or climate change.)

David's particular break with Republicans has come over what to do about the continuing awful economy. Here's what he told Kai Risdal:

This is not a moment for government to be cutting back. ... Right now we're watching state governments try to balance all of their budgets at the same time in the middle of this crisis. We've seen half a million public sector jobs disappear. Now, if these were good times, I would applaud that. We need to see a thinner public sector -- especially at the state and local level. But we're seeing what happens when you do that as an anti-recession measure and you make the recession worse. And even though we're in a technical recovery, incomes and employment -- all of that remains lagging for people -- I think that we've rediscovered in this crisis something that I think we all knew. Which is, there's a reason why the people of the 1930s built some kind of minimum guarantee -- unemployment insurance, health care coverage and things like that. And it's not because they wanted to be nice. It's because in a crisis when people lose their jobs, if there is no social safety net they loose 100 percent of their purchasing power.
It so happens the vast majority of economists and economic policy experts agree with David on this - even though you wouldn't know it if you watched or listened to broadcast debates between a so-called "liberal" and "conservative" economists.

No wonder Americans are so confused.

David Frum's voice will be sorely missed. Yet I understand his dilemma. At the start of his interview on "Marketplace" explaining his decision to leave the program, he was introduced this way:

David Frum has been a regular commentator for this program for years, offering the voice of the political right against Robert Reich and the views of the political left.
That introduction illustrates the problem.

Bumper Cars

Life is a lot like a game of bumper cars like you see at an amusement park. We run around each day as in a bumper car, bumping into one another, bouncing off with a jolt, bumping into others, accomplishing very little, until they turn the power off. Then we're back at it the next day. The presidential race is certainly like a game of bumper cars. 9-9-9 reminds one contestant of 6-6-6. Now THAT's heavy stuff. Shudder. I guess it's time for me to get back into MY bumper car for the day.

The Gift of Glib

BY Gail Collins
New York Times
12 October 2011

Right now you’re probably asking yourself, how did Rick Perry do in the big Republican debate in New Hampshire this week?

He did great! It turns out that Governor Perry has a big energy plan, known as “The Plan I’m Going to Be Laying Out.” When he does, it’s going to be the answer to almost everything. We know that because no matter what Perry was asked, he talked about the plan. Which will involve “the American entrepreneurship that’s out there.” And a whole lot more. When he’s ready to tell you.

For the rest of the time, Perry pretty much sat there like a large boulder with good hair, while the remaining members of the gang attacked Herman Cain, the former fast-food chain president turned Republican front-runner, about his economic plan.

This is what we’ve come to. A presidential debate about the 9-9-9 plan.

9-9-9 is the sine qua non of the Cain candidacy. It would scrap the tax code and give us 9 percent corporate, income and national sales taxes. He mentions it every 10seconds. (Opening statement, he got it in by 5.)

I have never heard anybody discussing the 9-9-9 plan in the real world, but obviously I hang out in the wrong places. The organizers and the candidates felt the need to really get into this, and, as a result, Tuesday night in New Hampshire will go down in history as the 9-9-9 plan debate. (Here is how presidential primary debates go down in history. The tapes are stored in a moisture-proof vault in a civil defense cave in Indiana. If the world as we know it should come to an end, the surviving members of our species will be able to relive these deeply American contests and pass their knowledge on to their children. Soon, they will go forth and repopulate a world in which all the boys sit around looking smug like Newt Gingrich and all the girls sound like Michele Bachmann. That is what they mean by “the living will envy the dead.”)

Among the elite cadre of Americans who have been thinking about 9-9-9, a good number have determined that it won’t raise enough revenue. “The problem with that analysis is that it is incorrect,” announced Cain firmly. I do admire the way he does this. If I could convey that tone, I would win every argument in my family just by saying “The problem with that analysis is that it is incorrect.” And there would never again be a discussion of renting a limo for a family viewing of all the Cincinnati Christmas lights.

Also, Michele Bachmann pointed out that 999 turned upside down is 666, which would make Cain’s tax policy the mark of the devil. Cain seemed to find that amusing, but he looked a little peeved when Jon Huntsman suggested 999 might be the price of a box of pizza.

That, people, was the sum and substance of the wit and humor of the New Hampshire Republican debate. Jon Huntsman also tried to make a joke about gas, but we are not going there.

Cain, in an attempt to pull down his competition, asked if Romney could name all 59 points in his 160-page economic plan.

Now I strongly suspect that Mitt could name all 59 points. I bet he repeats them at night to put himself to sleep. (“lower marginal tax rates ... more free trade agreements ... mmmmzzzzzzz.”) But he didn’t fall into that trap. He whipped out the seven pillars of Romneyism, which support the 59 points and can, therefore, be packed into one 30-second response. If you ignore Charlie Rose yelling in the background.

The guy has pillars for his points. No wonder he’s winning.

There were other high points — Gingrich accused Romney of starting class warfare by advocating an end to the capital gains tax only for investors making under $200,000 a year. He also said Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should be thrown in jail for their bill to reform Wall Street financial practices. Herman Cain said Alan Greenspan was the best Fed chairman in recent history. Michele Bachmann gave the fact-checkers another great night of error-correcting. It was the usual good time for all, except you do kind of wonder what the heck gives this particular crowd of people the right to be the nation’s official presidential contenders. What do they have in common? Intelligence? Appropriate experience? A large base of followers? Not so much.

What have they got? They’ve all got glib.

Except one. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for Rick Perry. If he wasn’t Rick Perry.

As things stand, the Perry camp is apparently planning to keep their guy in the background during debates and hit Romney over the head with mean commercials. That shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe they’ll include the day Mitt drove to Canada with the family dog on the car roof.

Dismissing George Will

How George Will Misunderstands Both Elizabeth Warren and Liberalism
William Galston

October 8, 2011 | 12 George Will and I have something in common: We were both trained in the close reading of political texts. Will recently applied his interpretive skills to a statement by Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Democratic senatorial nomination in Massachusetts. Here is what Warren said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. … You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea—God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is [that] you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
After applying to Warren’s words William F. Buckley’s description of John Kenneth Galbraith—a pyromaniac in a field of straw men, refuting propositions no one asserts—Will moves to the gravamen of his argument: Warren’s vision entails a collectivist political agenda. He tartly and uncharitably described that agenda as follows:

[Its] premise is that individual is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so that the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize—i.e., conscript—whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.

I have never met Warren. For all I know she may privately embrace the premise Will sketches. But even a cursory inspection of her public words reveals that she is saying nothing of the sort. Rather, she is making a straightforward argument. Without the enabling framework that only government can create, individuals cannot securely enjoy the fruits of their endeavors. Every return on investment, then, is actually a return on two sources of investment, one reflecting individual choice, the other public decisions. Taxation is not theft; nor is it, as the late philosopher Robert Nozick once put it, “on a par with forced labor.” Rather, it reflects the return on the public investment to which nearly everyone contributes. It does not rest on the claim that all resources are collective and that individuals receive what is theirs as an act of grace, but rather on the more modest claim that we all owe something in return for the collective goods without which our individual striving cannot succeed.

And Warren is saying something else as well—that (to quote a thinker with whom Will has more than a passing acquaintance), “Society is indeed a contract … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Warren’s homely phrase, “pay forward,” captures the moral bond that connects this generation with the next. If we don’t adequately provide for their future, we are breaking that bond. A decent political community has the right—indeed the obligation—to honor that bond—if necessary, by compelling individuals who refuse to look beyond their own immediate concerns to contribute their share to the common future.

To be sure, these general arguments don’t come close to settling the question of who should pay how much in taxes. That’s what elections and political contestation are about. But they do establish a sturdy foundation for the idea that individual choice does not create all our obligations and there is nothing in principle objectionable when society presents its bill to each of us. I hope that is one of the straw men that Will (unlike some of his less tutored conservative brethren) never intended to deny.

Not content to accuse Warren of collectivism, he proceeds to accuse her of determinism, or at least to tar her of that sin by guilty association. Warren’s statement, he contends, is a “footnote to modern liberalism’s more comprehensive disparagement of individualism and the reality of individual autonomy. A particular liberalism, partly incubated at Harvard, intimates the impossibility, for most people, of self-government—of the ability to govern oneself.” This premise—public incompetence—is said to warrant a “tutelary government” that owes “minimal deference to people’s preferences.”

As Will might say, Well. Let us set aside Galbraith, John Rawls, and the bedraggled remnant band of Marxists clinging to the doctrine of false consciousness, none of whose views can be fairly be imputed to Elizabeth Warren. As I understand it, her case for reasonable regulation does not ignore, but rather reflects, people’s preferences. We don’t want to be misled or cheated, but the complexity of modern contractual arrangements can baffle even the most educated among us. So we collectively opt for a framework that protects us against those who have more time and expertise to devise deceptions than we do to ferret them out. No, government shouldn’t make our choices for us, and we shouldn’t ask it to. But it does have a legitimate role in ensuring that the information relevant to those choices is accurate and intelligible.

Again, we can argue about the details. No doubt the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Warren conceived and hoped to lead is imperfect in some respects, as is every human creation. If so, experience will expose its flaws, and the political process can improve it. But the claim that it rests on a necessary presupposition of individual incompetence—and worse, the denial of individual autonomy—is unfounded. And so is Will’s root-and-branch dismissal of modern liberalism.

William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor for The New Republic.

Gordon Wood - Empire of Liberty

I just finished this definitive history of the US from 1789 to 1815. Gordon Wood is the premier historian of the revolutionary period. I will have a conclusive summary soon.

Gene Chizik - All In (6)

The Coach says that when he took over the Auburn program, he found the team in disaray. There was division within the team on multiple levels. The team was "shattered." His first task was to bring the team together.

The Legacy of Bill Clinton

Here is a marvelous summary of Clinton's presidency from Sean Wilentz, one our leading liberal historians.


20 Years Later: How Bill Clinton Saved Liberalism From Itself
Sean Wilentz



Since the end of World War II, every Democrat who has sought the presidency has attempted to update the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In announcing his candidacy Clinton called his reformed liberalism “a new covenant.” By this he meant a revitalized connection between government and the citizenry that rejected the Reagan Republican idea of laissez-faire, but that also reemphasized what Clinton called “the solid, middle-class virtues of hard work, individual responsibility, family, community, and faith.” The phrase “new covenant” did not stick, but the idea behind it would become the guiding light of the Clinton administration for the ensuing eight years. During that time, it offered Democrats and the nation at large a reopened path to the future that had been blocked since the distempers of the late 1960s and, in particular, since the tragedies of 1968.

Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of the civil rights movement in 1964, followed by the presidential candidacy of George Wallace four years later, had insured the movement of the great bulk of the white South into the Republican Party. And, in 1968, the Democratic Party’s crack-up over Vietnam and racial disorder opened what became a deep division between relatively affluent and highly-educated northern “new politics” liberals and the party’s traditional blue-collar and white rural liberal base. That division fed the growing impression that liberalism was an elitist conceit dedicated to draining the middle-class in favor of the poor—Reagan’s “welfare queen.”

Despite the Republicans’ crisis over Watergate and the brief liberal resurgence in 1974, the Democrats’ divisions remained. The party increasingly became identified with its “progressive” wing, devoted to expanding the rights of racial and sexual minorities as well as women, reflexively opposed to American military operations abroad, and skeptical about if not hostile to conventional cultural taboos. Traditional Democrats—more interested in lunch-pail economic issues than in identity politics—remained essential to the party’s success but felt increasingly distant from it. Jimmy Carter tried to combine elements of the new and the old, but shaped a technocratic, anti-political, anti-Washington frame of mind that undercut both his administration’s relations with the Democratic Congress and the public’s confidence in the White House’s competence. After 1980, Democratic liberalism remained directionless and the party as a whole lacked credibility.

In his announcement speech, Clinton offered a fresh political synthesis of liberal themes. He forthrightly endorsed the legacy of the civil rights movement and of the feminist victories of the 1970s, including, on the abortion issue, a woman’s individual right to choose. With a Southerner’s experience, he emphasized how divisions over race, still being inflamed by Republicans in the late 1980s and early 1990s, operated to reinforce privilege. That perception led directly to Clinton’s insistence that the interests of the ordinary middle-class ought no longer to be pitted against aspiring minorities. This false opposition, he said, had for too long been a key to conservative political domination. What he did not say—and did not need to—was that some elements of his own party still beheld Middle America with suspicion, if not contempt, as the caricatured “Reagan Democrats” embittered at the cultural impact of the 1960s and taking refuge in backward provincialism.

Clinton aimed to win back alienated traditional Democrats not by shifting to the right, as some pundits have claimed, but by retrieving basic political principles enunciated by FDR and those successful liberal Democrats who followed him. Nothing cost Clinton more political capital inside the left wing of his party than his advocacy of welfare reform. “We should expect people to move from welfare rolls to work rolls,” he proclaimed in his announcement speech. “We should give them the skills they need to succeed and then insist that they move into the workforce to become productive members of society.” These were fighting words to some liberal Democrats. Yet in 1936, in a rip-roaring attack on Republican callousness, FDR had defended those forced on the relief rolls while adding, “Of course we will provide useful work for the needy unemployed; we prefer useful work to the pauperism of a dole.” As a matter of policy, Clinton aimed to return liberalism to its basic ideas, not to forsake its ideals. And in doing so, he would help accomplish the crucial political task of removing from national politics one of the issues that had helped Republicans inflame the middle class against the poor, especially the minority poor, as well as against the Democratic Party.

In order to overcome the Reagan ascendency Democrats needed to advance the rights secured during the 1960s while returning to more traditional political bedrock. To a remarkable extent, Clinton delivered on that promise. In doing so, he made the nation comfortable once again with the idea that the well-being and future prospects of most Americans require strong and effective leadership by the federal government. It was a matter of common sense, Governor Clinton said in 1991: “Government’s responsibility is to create more opportunity for everybody, and our responsibility is to make the most of it.” These are Democratic ideas, and liberal ones. Bill Clinton reaffirmed, updated, and carried them forward into the twenty-first century.

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of Bob Dylan in America.