What Is Wrong With Democrats? August 18, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Political Philosophy, politics.Tags: Obama and bipartisanship, rationality and politics, what is liberalism
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Nothing, at least nothing that isn’t baked-in to the liberal world view like eggs in a cake.
On Obama’s signature issue, his first priority (after dealing with the inherited financial crisis), Democrats appear to have lost control of the debate. The political atmosphere is thick with charges that Obama is a commie fascist (?) who intends to kill the elderly, destroy Medicare, set up internment camps for opponents, and substitute bureaucrats for doctors, charges that are backed up by armed thugs who show up at Obama’s speeches.
Despite almost universal agreement that our health care system is sick and near collapse, Democrats have allowed scare tactics and lies to derail reform.
And liberals are fed up. Here is Jane Smiley at Huffpost today:
It was always pretty clear to me that the right wing was not ever in a million years going to play the bipartisan game, and I couldn’t figure out why Obama thought they might. At first I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt — that he knew he had to appear to extend the hand across the aisle so that he could then do the right thing with a clear conscience (and good PR). But then it became evident that he really does care more about the Republicans across the aisle than the left side of his own party, and this is really peculiar, because the more that he has attempted to woo those Republicans, the more hysterical they’ve become. They think he’s weak, and they think they’re winning. If he foregoes the public option, they have won. Simple as that, and we on the left can and must come to the conclusion that he used us and our money, but never intended to listen to us or give us a G-D thing.
How did this happen? Was the Obama Administration taken by surprise by the strength and volume of the opposition? Doesn’t anyone remember swiftboating? As Rick Perlstein pointed out recently, this has gone on for decades. Are Democrats really slow learners?
No. I don’t think that is the problem. I doubt that the Administration was surprised. They are not naive nor were they out-maneuvered by clever conservatives, or duped by Republicans moving the goalposts on reform. After all, the Obama Administration is staffed by political operatives who engineered a brilliant election campaign in the face of dishonest Republican attacks. They are not beholden to the DC establishment consultant class, who became experts at losing elections and are in the pockets of special interests. Obama himself is well-versed on the “lies and disinformation” campaign that has been standard operating procedure for conservatives for years.
The whole point of the “hurry-up” offense—Obama’s attempt to get health-care reform legislation passed before the congressional recess”—was in anticipation of these attacks.
So why is health care reform coming off the rails?
There are structural impediments to progressive legislation. The U.S. Constitution gives inordinate power to small, rural states that tend to be conservative, and Senate rules give inordinate power to self-important centrists who get juiced on their influence.
But Republicans, when they are in power, don’t seem to have the same reticence about pushing their agenda despite structural impediments. As Matt Taibbi writes:
I’ll say this for George Bush: you’d never have caught him frantically negotiating against himself to take the meat out of a signature legislative initiative just because his approval ratings had a bad summer. Can you imagine Bush and Karl Rove allowing themselves to be paraded through Washington on a leash by some dimwit Republican Senator of a state with six people in it the way the Obama White House this summer is allowing Max Baucus (favorite son of the mighty state of Montana) to frog-march them to a one-term presidency?
No, I can’t imagine this. So why does it happen to Democrats?
The explanation lies in part in liberal philosophy.
Liberals assume that human beings are rational and if you present them with the facts they will acknowledge the truth. Liberals think this because they are committed to deliberative democracy, which is based on respect for opposing views and aimed at achieving a rational consensus about how to solve problems. (It is no accident that two of the better books about advancing progressive ideas were Robert Reich’s Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America, and Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason.)
The commitment to reason and dialogue is, as I said, baked-in to liberalism’s view of the aim of politics.
Hence, Obama’s calls for changing the culture of Washington, to turn it toward a more rational discourse, to seek bipartisan solutions, etc. He’s not trying to be nice—he is just being liberal.
But liberals need to wake up! We know that people are not rational! The entire field of psychology is an extended litany of irrational behaviors, and even economists are now coming around to the view that human beings are fundamentally irrational even when their self-interest is at stake. But the word apparently hasn’t reached liberals who continue to lay out facts and invite dialogue.
Well, that is actually unfair to some liberals. Writers such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen have written widely-discussed books detailing the less than rational assumptions that inform political behavior. The problem is that we don’t know what to do with these insights. We don’t know how to conduct liberal politics without belief in the efficacy of rational discourse, because rational discourse is at the heart of liberalism. How do you engage in deliberative democracy when people refuse to deliberate?
If anyone doubts that our political discourse is now driven by fools, here is an example. An allegedly “ordinary voter” Katy Abrams challenged Senator Arlen Spector at a townhall meeting last week, alleging that recent policies amounted to a “systematic dismantling of our country”. She is utterly clueless and incoherent but has apparently become the new conservative hero, since Joe the Plumber retired. Her interview with Lawrence O’Donnell is here. From the MSNBC transcript of the interview:
“I mean, I — you know, yes, I mean, there are programs in place that, you know, the — the founders did not want to have here. The — you know, I know that there are people out there that can’t afford health insurance, that can’t afford a lot of different things. And, you know, with the founders, they had — they thought and hoped that the goodness of the people would allow the people to take care of those who could — who were doing without.
“And I know that may seem naive in today’s world. We stayed at a friend’s house last night who is at the other end of the spectrum than what I am. And we have had political debates a million times over. And he thought, isn’t it naive, you know, to think that way? People don’t do that anymore.
“And I said, not everybody, but a lot of people that I know go on missions. They-they-they volunteer.”
It turns out that Katy is a Republican political operative, not merely a concerned voter. But she displays a level of ignorance and confusion that is typical of so-called “low information voters.” You can see the dilemma that liberals confront. Presenting facts to such a person is not going to be sufficient to change her beliefs. Significant portions of her belief system are already impervious to facts if she thinks the founding fathers had the last word on current policies. If we listened to the founding fathers, Katy wouldn’t be able to vote!
Not all voters are as clueless as Katy, but vast swaths of the American public hold false background beliefs, especially about liberty and the role of government in our lives, that induce confirmation bias exacerbated by a tendency to believe the loudest voice, or the craziest person in the room.
Conservatives know this. Thus, they are loud, crazy, and complain about the role of government in our lives. Insanity, for them, is not a bug, it is a feature, and lots of Americans prefer insanity to good policy proposals.
So what can liberals do to fight back against pervasive, endemic irrationality? Liberal theory needs to be reformulated but that is the topic for books, not blogs. I’m not about to give up on deliberative democracy just because conservatives won’t play along. In the meantime, there is much we can do to minimize the damage.
1. Stop assuming that people are rational. Don’t be surprised when Republicans lie and people believe them. Be prepared. As noted above, I don’t think Obama was naive about this, but many liberals are.
2. Call out Republicans for the lies they tell and insist that the press reports them as lies. Realize that the tone of discourse in Washington will not change, at least not with the current Republican Party. This is something the Obama Administration does need to work on. It is not pleasant, and seems intolerant, to attack the character of your opponents, but the people behind these lies deserve to be held accountable. And the American people deserve Democrats who stand up and say that lying to the American people is wrong.
3. Realize that we are up against centuries of the American mythmaking about self-sufficiency and the tyranny of government, along with a well-funded campaign to keep the myths intact. It will take decades, not months, to undo the influence of these myths. In the current climate, progressives cannot expect to win most of the battles. Obama’s election was an election, not a mass lobotomy. The American public that elected Bush for two terms is still with us.
4. Don’t assume the message or the messenger is inadequate—the problem is not Obama, his message, or his strategy. The problem is conservatism and its hatred of deliberative democracy. There is no strategic or tactical plan that will make nonsense magically disappear.
5. Remember that conservatives are not our audience. They cannot be persuaded, and compromising with them on principle is a fool’s game that makes us look weak. Our audience is people without strong ideological commitments who simply want a politics that enables them to to get on with their lives. Showing them that they can get on with their lives through good governance is the most effective arrow we have in our quiver.
6. Thus, it is essential that we stick to our values which allow us to govern effectively. We cannot adopt the tactics of the right and remain liberals. The aim of our politics must remain reason, adherence to facts, and dialogue but realize that the conditions are not always conducive to achieving these aims.
7. Presenting facts is not enough because conservatives will lie about the facts. Rely on stories to get our values across. Policy wonks prefer to analyze evidence and model competing alternatives to get the best outcomes, but that by itself is not enough to sell a policy. The response to Katy should be “if your husband died and you lost your health insurance, would you depend on charity to pay your medical bills?”
8. Most importantly, realize that achieving progressive goals can never be a short-term enterprise. Persistent, pervasive irrationality will be with us permanently. You can’t defeat it. You can only make an occasional dent in it by pushing progressive alternatives through very narrow windows of opportunity that close quickly.
This last point is crucial. Liberalism will always have to do battle with selfishness and unreason. I doubt that we, at least in the U.S., can ever achieve a steady-state liberal equilibrium. The history of the 20th century is a history of backsliding on liberal values. Yet the liberal victories of the past—the welfare state—are still with us and make our lives immeasurably better.
Battlefield victories are meaningful even if the war is unwinnable.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Why Education Can’t Solve Inequality August 17, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Education, Political Philosophy.Tags: Daniel Willingham, Education, education and inequality
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It is common knowledge that economic inequality is increasing in the United States, and that means we don’t quite deserve our reputation as the land of opportunity. Most discussions of equality assume we should be aiming for equality of opportunity (rather than equality of outcome), and most people think the only solution to inequality is to improve education for disadvantaged kids, thereby leveling the playing field.
But recent discoveries in cognitive science suggest that improving education for the disadvantaged, although a good thing to do, will not provide them with equal opportunity.
Cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, in his book Why Don’t Students Like School?” writes that:
When it comes to knowledge, those who have more gain more. […] The researchers had people learn either a lot or just a little about subjects that were new to them (for example Broadway musicals). Then they had them read other, new facts about the subject, and they found that the “experts” (those who had earlier learned a lot of facts about the subject) learned new facts more quickly and easily than the “novices” (who had earlier learned just a few facts about the subject).
So how well and how quickly you learn depends on how much you know already.
The implications of this are profound.
Consider two kids, Jake and Amy, the same age, and with equal raw brain power. Suppose Amy has 10,000 facts in her memory and Jake has only 9000. And suppose the percentage of new facts both retain is based on what they already know. Amy remembers 10% of the new facts she encounters, and Jake remembers only 9% because of his lack of background knowledge. And suppose both are exposed to 500 new facts per month.
By the end of 10 months the gap between them has widened from 1,000 to 1043 facts. And of course the gap is only going to get worse over time. The velocity of increase between Amy and Jake is going to continually increase as well. (This example is adapted from Willingham’s example in his book)
We know that children who are economically disadvantaged tend to suffer other disadvantages as well—fewer books to read, less dialogue with parents, less exposure to vocabulary and ideas, in short, less background knowledge at least with regard to knowledge that is important to their formal education.
How is Jake going to catch up to Amy so that when he graduates from high school his opportunities will equal those of Amy? The disadvantages suffered early in life look intransigent.
We could make sure Amy was exposed to fewer facts by giving her an inferior education until Jake catches up, but that would be unfair to Amy. If it is wrong for Jake to be disadvantaged because of an accident of birth (the family into which he was born), it is wrong for Amy to be disadvantaged because of an accident of birth as well.
So I don’t see a solution to this. (At least none that is morally palatable. We could give qualifying exams for parenthood I suppose)
Of course, we can and should improve Jake’s life chances by improving his education. And we are under no obligation to maximize Amy’s opportunities. We can divert some resources to Jake that Amy might have enjoyed.
But what we won’t get is equality of opportunity.
If education is the key to equality of opportunity—and the more technologically sophisticated we become, the more important education will be—equality of opportunity seems an unrealizable ideal.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Piling on the Whole Foods Debacle August 17, 2009
Posted by iduckles in Current Events, politics.1 comment so far
Much has already been written about John Mackey’s, CEO of Whole Foods, editorial about health care in the Wall Street Journal. Most of the important criticism have been covered, but there was one part of the editorial that really bothered me which hasn’t been touched on yet (at least from what I have seen). In arguing against a government run health plan, Mackey writes,
At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.
As Mackey understands it, this behavior on the part of Whole Foods employees in Canada and the UK is evidence that these individuals are unsatisfied with their current health care system. This seems to me to completely miss the point. The reason these employees ask for money to spend on health care is because there is nothing else for them to ask for. If you had great health care and someone asked you what additional benefits you wanted, what else could you ask for but cash? The fact that Whole Foods employees in Canada and the UK don’t ask for any specific benefits (like dental, vision, mental health etc.) or ask for help paying medical bills (i.e. lower deductibles, lower out-of-pocket, lower copays) is actually evidence that these plans are so good that people don’t really have anything to add to them. Just compare what unionized employees in the US ask for when they negotiate contracts with what Mackey reports Canadian and British employees ask for. That Mackey uses this as support for his position is merely evidence of his mendacity and lack of good faith.
Government Is Good August 16, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: good government, libertarianism
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The ugly debate over health care reform has given rise to that time-honored theme that is never far from the surface in any political debate in the U.S—big government is bad, the less government the better, the government can’t do anything right, government strangles business, bureaucrats will run (and ruin) everything, more government leads to tyranny, and blah, blah, blah. These claims circulate without evidence, immune to counter-example, as if they express a truth so obvious it needs no defense.
In a recent blog discussion regarding the Whole Foods Boycott, a commenter, MBshopper,had a brilliant response to this anti-government rhetoric that is worth posting in its entirety, via Daily Kos:
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and tTechnology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issed by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local police department.
I then log on to the internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.
The only reason government doesn’t work is because conservative Republican administrations defunded and/or patronage staffed them with people with ties to special business interests: to wit the last FDA, Dept of Interior and Agriculture under Bush. No one seems to have a problem with pumping over $500Bil to the Defense Department which last I hear is a socialized entity.
Well said. I have nothing to add.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
So Magpies are Self-Aware—So What? August 13, 2009
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Animal Intelligence, Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts.Tags: Rooks; crows; magpies; pigs; mirror self-recognition test; sense of self
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There is something fundamentally ironic in the fact that we are now beginning to understand ourselves as homo sentiens (the feeling human being) rather than homo sapiens ( a paradigm shift which has its own philosophical perils), but at the same time we are expanding our knowledge of the rational capacities of nonhuman animals. Birds and dogs seem to be the favorite research subjects reported on by the media right now, rather than apes—birds, because it is just so weird that birds can think (so it has shock value) and dogs, because we just love them so damn much. I can find less-than-academic reasons why we are glued to these topics, but that shouldn’t detract from the astonishing fact that the scientific community has experienced a sea change over the last decade: Even in the late 20th century you couldn’t enter into an academic discussion about animal intelligence without risking the loss of your professional reputation; now it seems that we’re all getting into the fray, legitimately.
So let’s talk some more about birds. We’ll save the dogs for some other time. Did you hear about the rook that can figure out how to raise the water level in a tube so it can reach the worm? Not the Aesop fable, but for real? A thought process that used to be attributed to humans only—chimps can’t do it as fast or as consistently. Other experiments conducted on crows have shown that crows are able to envision a solution to a problem (using a string to get a piece of meat) without having first tried to solve the problem through trial-and-error. The crow brain is proportionally larger than other bird brains, the body mass taken into account. A bit of online surfing brought me to some research published last year, which I had somehow missed: Magpies are now the first bird to pass the mirror self-recognition test—they will try to remove a visible sticker placed on their feathers, if all they know about it is that they see it in the mirror. So move over, humans, apes, elephants, and dolphins—magpies also turn out to have a basic sense of self! For those of us who were astounded and delighted in the 1990s when we read about chimps who would clearly recognize themselves in the mirror (red dot placed on their forehead), this is only one more step in the expansion of the personhood concept: If you know that you are, as an entity, language or not, then you exist on a higher level than beings who may be aware of their surroundings, but not that they are aware of them. Sartre’s old pour-soi vs. en-soi is being recast in another context.
So what are the ethical implications of this? Should we then respect crows, elephants, dolphins, apes, and other humans as persons? To some extent, most certainly. If you cause them pain, you are contributing to a suffering of which they are aware as happening to them. It is not trivial. But on another level it doesn’t mean that we are no longer allowed to interfere with their lives. We should just feel obligated to take into consideration that we’re dealing with conscious, self-aware life in some form, but we still retain the negative right to maintain our own life, liberty and property. When the crows are nesting in my big tree, I reserve the right to scare them away, because they ruin my night’s sleep. Do I have a right to kill them? That depends on the level of pain they are causing me. If one repeatedly goes for my eyes, or attacks my baby, or my pet, then yes, I will feel morally entitled to kill it. (Not taking into account local legislation about endangered species, noise levels, discharging of weapons, etc., of course. I’m talking about abstract moral rights, as I see them.) That’s just an extension of Locke’s doctrine of negative rights, anyway. The trouble is of course that crows may have self-awareness, but they don’t have human social awareness. They don’t know they’re trespassing, in human terms. So the taking of a self-aware animal life should be cnsidered a “last resort” approach.
But what lies in the future of animal research? I predict that, before long, we will hear that pigs can recognize themselves in the mirror. Pigs are smart, we know that—it is not too far-fetched to assume that they also have a sense of self, and maybe even a theory of mind (understanding that other members of their species are aware). They are in some ways smarter than ordinary chimps, and chimps have a theory of mind. So is that the end of bacon as we know it? You know what? I would actually say yes. If we can justify killing and eating a self-aware animal, there is no theoretical boundary preventing us from killing and eating humans, other than speciecism. An Asian prince of long, long ago who used to eat slave girls was told that eating humans was wrong. He answered, “But they taste good!” So we can’t use the same argument for eating pork—that it tastes good. So far few people eat crows (except metaphorically), but the day will come when some of our food animals will be proven to be self-aware, at some basic level. And in any event, all of them have a general awareness of pain and pleasure (like Bentham pointed out—“not Can they speak, nor Can they reason, but Can they suffer?). Bentham didn’t have a problem eating meat, because he viewed the pros and the cons of incurring suffering—but can we afford to be as bombastic and calculating? Some (like PETA people) would say that the difference between self-awareness and general awareness is invented by humans with an agenda toward eating meat, because life is life (a pig is a boy etc.). In my own view, self-awareness does mark a different kind of existence than general awareness. I will eat animals who are aware of their surroundings, but not animals who are aware that they are aware. The day when our meat animals turn out to be self-aware, even in the slightest degree, that’s probably it for my meat-eating days. Unless I am locked in mortal combat with a pig, and manage to kill it with my equivalent of its tusks (my Swiss Army knife). Then I’ll proudly eat it, and wear its skin…
Money for Nothing August 12, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, ethics of care, Political Philosophy.Tags: ethics of care, Gregory Clark, robotics in the workplace, the future of poverty
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If the problems of health care and global warming are not sufficiently difficult to solve, there is another issue looming on the horizon that I have been worrying about for some time. Gregory Clark in the Sunday NY Times gives it some exposure.
…the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology’s role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.
The battle will be over how to get the economy’s winners to pay for an increasingly costly poor.
As Clark points out, despite the steady advance of technology during the industrial revolution, unskilled labor was still very important to the economy and was paid rather well, especially in the late 20th century. Machines have not been able to replace human communication skills or fine motor skills.
But in more recent decades, when average U.S. incomes roughly doubled, there has been little gain in the real earnings of the unskilled. And, more darkly, computer advances suggest these redoubts of human skill will sooner or later fall to machines. We may have already reached the historical peak in the earning power of low-skilled workers, and may look back on the mid-20th century as the great era of the common man.
We can now carry out complicated transactions by phone with no human interaction and machines are increasingly able to perform routine physical tasks. ATM machines and automated food service kiosks are only the tip of the iceberg. There are now fully automated factories in the U.S., and with increases in computer processing speed and improvement in the software to drive voice and vision recognition systems, there seems little doubt that the workplace will become increasingly automated.
Clark asks the important question:
So, how do we operate a society in which a large share of the population is socially needy but economically redundant? There is only one answer. You tax the winners — those with the still uniquely human skills, and those owning the capital and land — to provide for the losers.
It is hard to imagine our current ethical and political systems, which presuppose a work ethic, individual responsibility, meritocracy, and powerful resistance to taxes, adapting easily to these changes. We must learn to think otherwise, perhaps along the lines of an ethic of care.
Some people, such as Robert Reich, see the increasing importance of symbol analysts as a source of new jobs but Clark is skeptical that everyone will have the cognitive ability to perform this work. The number of people dropping out of high school or finishing high school with few literacy or math skills supports Clark’s view.
Thus,
In the end, we may be forced to learn to live in a United States where, by stealth, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” becomes the guiding principle of government — or else confront growing, unattended poverty
I hope Clark is wrong about this, but he is not obviously wrong. The increasing importance of robotics looks inevitable to me.
It is impossible to predict how soon this will come about. But it is worth noting that today it was reported that in the second-quarter, non-farm productivity rose at a 6.4 annual rate, during a time of burgeoning unemployment. This means firms are squeezing more out of the workers they have. Many will be reluctant to hire those workers back—especially if new technology can replace them.
This brave new world may come sooner than we think.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
American Id August 11, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Political Philosophy, politics.Tags: anti-government animus, health care reform and conservatism, the new conservatism
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The conservatism that liberals love to hate is dying—a victim of the Bush Administration’s disastrous attempt to govern by its principles. But, as is evident in the health care reform debate, a new conservatism is arising, more volatile and dangerous than the old one. If it is to be neutered we must understand it.
In 2005, Thomas Frank’s important book What’s the Matter With Kansas dominated discussions of the nature of conservatism. Frank was attempting to explain why working and middle class, conservative voters vote for politicians who harm their economic interests by advocating corporate-friendly policies that destroy jobs and ruin communities.
Frank’s answer was that conservative voters are duped and distracted by right wing media and political campaigns that pander to religious preferences and focus on moral issues such as abortion and gay rights while ignoring the real economic issues that ought to be more important to them. According to Frank, this “bait and switch” strategy was exacerbated by liberals who failed to develop a populist economic program that was attractive to the middle class, co-opted as they were by corporate interests as well.
I never found Frank’s thesis persuasive because (1) I don’t think most people are dupes, (2) conservative voters were genuinely concerned about the religious and moral issues on which they voted, and (3) conservative voters were morally committed to principles of free market capitalism despite their being harmed by them.
Conservatism was a place where people of sincere moral conviction, however misguided, could reside. Thus, I argued in Reviving the Left, that liberals lacked, not an economic agenda, but a moral agenda that could compete with conservatism.
That version of conservatism is now in tatters. The conservatism of the Reagan-Bush years rested on three pillars: (1) religious fundamentalism, (2) free-market fundamentalism, and (3) anti-government animus. Today, the public seems to have lost interest in religious fundamentalism’s moral crusade as a political force, and some evangelicals are having doubts about the marriage of politics and religion. Abortion is only a marginal issue and society is increasingly more accepting of gay persons, as gay marriage makes inroads in a number of states. In addition, free-market fundamentalism has lost any plausibility it may have enjoyed as a guarantor of prosperity or meritocracy in the wake of the collapse of the housing and financial markets and the display of incompetence, corruption, and greed that precipitated it.
That leaves anti-government animus as the driving force behind contemporary conservatism, a disposition clearly on display in the health care debate. Conservatives rail against the Democratic health care plan claiming it will cause old people to be euthanized and the disabled to be killed, turn the U.S. into the Soviet Union, lead to toilet paper rationing {?}, while suspecting that Obama is keeping an enemies list of reform opponents. Most of the ordinary citizens who repeat this drivel seem oblivious to the fact that any of them could lose their health insurance at any time should they get sick or lose their job.
Like the earlier conservatism, in this new version, some sort of “moral” conviction trumps economic self-interest, although not because the Democrats have failed to offer an alternative. It is the alternative that has conservative voters incensed.
Furthermore, although professional Republican operatives and media hacks are driving and funding this allegedly “grassroots” movement, it would be a mistake to think the anti-government disposition of ordinary people is not genuine.
Opposition to government is deeply embedded in the American psyche. The anti-tyranny rhetoric of the American Revolution and the staunchly self-sufficient characters that populate the “myth of the frontier” provide powerful images that resonate with the conviction that the government is always tyrannical or ineffective.
Thus, some people have convinced themselves they prefer a life governed by “you’re on your own” instead of “we are all in this together” despite the fact that none of them could last a day if they were really “on their own”. As much as they claim to hate the government, they seem to enjoy their social security, government sponsored research, consumer protections, military adventures, and federal subsidies to rural locales, which per capita gets more development aid that the rest of the country.
Among the humorous episodes of this debate over health care are the many instances of conservatives insisting that the government stay out of Medicare—which is of course a government-run, medical insurance plan for people over 65.
Conservatives have always harbored such contradictions but they made sense of them by appealing to religious conviction or moral beliefs about prosperity or merit—God and capitalism inevitably serve the good so any outcome must be perfectly just. But this new version of conservatism is so unreflective and devoid of thought that it barely qualifies as hypocrisy let alone a serious attempt to find moral meaning. Furthermore, putting aside the corporate interests driving the recent protests, the populist version is neither a cynical strategic ploy to win votes nor a naked expression of self-interest since many would benefit from health-care reform.
We seem to have a new beast on our hands.
To be sure, this anti-government stance is so delusional precisely because the moral justification for it has collapsed. As the moral justifications slip away, the belief system finds no anchor, especially without men in power who could authorize their delusions as Reagan and Bush so often did. That in itself would explain the incoherent, inarticulate babble that passes for political discourse among conservatives these days.
But it doesn’t quite explain the rage. Self-interest or ideological differences exist with every policy debate. They typically don’t produce the venomous, paranoid ravings that are now standard fare among conservative media outlets and ordinary citizens, which suggest an origin in the darker caverns of the human psyche.
The current attempt to defeat health care reform has to be placed within the context of the birther movement, the backlash to Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation, the debate about “real Americans” during the election, and the simmering controversy over immigration. The common denominator is nativism, anti-foreignness, and racism.
I doubt that opposition to health care reform is solely about health-care reform. Neither are the “tea-parties” about tax policy. Any proposal by Obama, regardless of how sensible, seems destined to be trashed by vile insults and fear-mongering.
The ugly, brown shirt tactics and threats of violence we see at town hall meetings are based on animosity toward a black man who is now in power. In the absence of any moral context in which to place recent events, conservatism is giving expression to America’s darkest impulse—racial animosity over the loss of white privilege.
Thus, this “new conservatism” no longer rests on a moral vision of proudly self-sufficient individuals willing to forgo the ministrations of government even when crushed by bad fortune. They are more like cattle on the range who, having been fed stories about wolves their entire lives, stampede at the mere sight of the magic negro.
Liberalism was not successful at stopping the rise of the old conservatives. Will it be more successful this time? I suspect that some so-called moderates are not thrilled with the prospect of being associated with these “new conservatives”. Senators Baucus, Nelson, Snowe, and Collins have an existential choice to make—join the bigots or try to find a solution to our health care problem.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
Alpha Males No Longer Dominant August 10, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Science.Tags: David Mech, misuse of science
3 comments
The phrase “alpha male” gets a lot of work in popular culture, referring to “a dominant, aggressive male who gets all the females”. The phrase in its popular usage suggests that a propensity for testosterone-fueled one-upsmanship is the key quality in a leader.
The phrase apparently originated with David Mech’s book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species originally published in 1970. But in this video, Mech argues that subsequent science shows that it doesn’t apply to wolves. Apparently, wolf packs are essentially families related to a mother and father, and the term “alpha” now refers to breeder.
I have no idea if the term still applies to primates or other mammals—Mech suggests it might apply to mixed packs that contain unrelated animals.
But it clearly is an abused phrase that neither describes human social organization nor is it universal among mammals.
Like earlier interpretations of evolution that assumed competition between individuals was biologically pervasive and inevitable, references to “alpha males” borrow their illicit legitimacy from an oversimplification of science.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
Justice and an Ethic of Care August 9, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Criminal Justice, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, ethics of care, Political Philosophy.Tags: ethic of care, restorative justice, revenge
1 comment so far
I am often asked what a justice system based on an ethic of care would look like. This is a difficult question because a justice system must be guided by impartial rules and procedures that seem incompatible with the partiality and context-dependent judgments of an ethic of care.
Bloggerheads recently hosted an interesting discussion between two psychologists—Michael McCullough and Dacher Keltner–on the evolutionary role of revenge and its place in contemporary society.
The whole discussion is worth listening to but about 28 minutes into the videocast they discuss the idea of restorative justice, which takes repairing relationships to be central to the idea of justice. Repairing relationships is the main feature of an ethics of care as well, and it seems to me this is where an ethic of care is able to fill out our notion of justice.
In restorative justice, the person who is guilty of a crime takes responsibility for her actions, and the person who has been harmed receives an apology or some other form of reparation directly from the person who has caused them harm. Encouraging dialogue between the offender and the victim is crucial.
Restorative justice is important because it provides us (society and the victims) with information about the perpetrator’s continued intent to harm. It also requires the perpetrator to accept personal responsibility as a result of direct personal appeal. (Yes, he or she can fake it although that is harder than one thinks, psychopaths excepted.)
One of the psychologists reports data showing that most crime victims are emotionally dissatisfied with the outcome of legal proceedings even when the perpetrator goes to jail—they are looking for a sincere apology and the willingness of the perpetrator to suffer some psychological pain regarding what they have done.
Other data they report suggest that, with restorative justice, victims are 26 times more likely to feel they received a convincing apology, desire for vengeance drops fourfold, willingness to forgive doubles, and recidivism is substantially reduced, all for the cost of a conversation.
Of course, restorative justice doesn’t replace punishment. Neither does it lead to victims and perpetrators being BFF. But it does reestablish the basis for further cooperation, which should be the aim of a justice system.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
