The Forward Left
It is the talk of blogistan left, the controversial argument that he is a technocrat, and that being a technocrat is better than being populist.
To which I have to ask - is there really a conflict? And in response to DeLong - which center-right technocrats? The one calling for more tax cuts? The ones agitating for a gold standard? The ones running up a vast trade deficit? The "center-right" is about "stay the course" in Iraq. This is what we are told.
By personal predeliction, I too am a technocrat. Study "the problem", devise "a solution" and then go down "the decision tree" and establish "a plan" with "milestones" and procede to "execute" on that plan. It works, except when it doesn't. I've seen billions poured down holes by technocrats. This is because technocrats have an ideology just like eveyrone else, and that ideology is to minimize command and control stress on technocrats. It can't be helped, there are more problems than there are hours in a day, and more problems than leaders. There are plenty of spear carriers and pin straighteners, or so it seems until you run out of them.
However, there is a bottom line reality which, to me is inescapable: the patient always knows where it hurts. Always. Telling the patient that it doesn't really hurt there, is generally a mistake, and always a waste of time. Technocracy without populism ends up doing autopsies on the problems that were not treated.
Big Tent Democrat is right about the fundamental reality, that one always runs as a populist. The Democrats have nominated liberal technocrats, and with the exception of the three elections where those liberal technocrats ran as populists, have been wasted at the polls. DeLong is right that there has to be a game, that is, there has to be a bounded set of levers which are modelled, maped and argued over. Without populism, there is no point to governing, without technocracy, there is no possibility of governing.
But where DeLong's remarks hit a sour note with many is nailed down by Dr. Duncan Black - a PhD in economics before he was an überblogger - namely, that ideological and sensible preclude each other. On the contrary, people without understanding of their own ideology, or without ideology in an organized form are often the ones not being sensible. This is because ideology provides the aforementioned framework for discussion. The Constitution of 1787, its amendments and important constitutional watersheds - both court decisions and compromises - create an intensely ideological framework for American politics. Just how ideological it is can really only be appreciated if one goes to another country where the ideas of pluralism, majoritarian policy within consensus polity and secular supremacy are considered absurd. Free speech is an ideological position not shared by a large number of the governments that sit in the UN.
Implicit in Under-Secretary DeLong's statement is an ideology - that pareto optimality is a good that should be pursued. This, again, isn't something which people can take for granted. Indeed most people would sacrifice a better total society for their own personal good, and routinely do so.
The irony of course is that Dr. Paul Krugman is a convert to populism - in the 1990's he wrote against "policy entrepreneurs" who pushed single ideas at the expense of technocratic government. 8 years ago, Krugman would probably have made a statement closer to Dr. DeLong's than people who only know him through his New York Times editorials might guess. The reason Krugman is a convert is that he has seen that the Republican governing party does not have technocrats who drag ideologs along after them - that is the vision of politics that allowed so many to fool themselves listening to candidate George Bush, namely, that he was telling the truth to the "sensible" people, and lying to the ideologs to get their votes. It turned out that he was lying to the "sensible" people, and telling the truth to the ideologs.
Populism is often a run away bulldozer, technocracy is often fooled by its own heuristics. This is why out of the wreckage of populist movements of the late 19th century there was a new movement which combined both the moral and energetic stance of populism, and the intellectual edge of sensible elitism. That movement was called "progressivism" and it took root in the Republican Party first, and combined with Wilsonian "liberalism" in the hands of FDR. FDR's best technocrats were often ideologs. Ideologs often make good technocrats because they are absolutely driven to find a solution to a problem, no matter how frustrating it might seem. The emotional fire keeps the ideological technocrat up at night until the numbers finally click into place.
The time of "the great bi-partisan consensus" is over. It was artificially imposed by a series of external disasters - world wars, depression and the Cold War. Once the high penalty for betraying was removed, it was inevitable that actors with the ability to betray and deal the sucker's pay off to those who coöperated would do so and collect the rewards until such time as the other actors stopped coöperating. A whole fistful of "bipartisan" actors cooperated with Bush on "the War on Terrorism" he rewarded them by unleashing vicious invective and a political war on national security - in 2002, 2004 and 2006. For this reason there is palpable anger at the dead ends and false compromises of the last 6 years.
We now live in a situation where trust must be based on internal dynamics, and that means a political system that must be much more willing to take out the katana and swing for the neck than was previously the case. The bi-partisan era was also over-rated, it exists more in our imaginations than it did in reality. We had Red Scares, political machines, and hard ball politics through out the bi-partisan era. What we didn't have was relentless gaming of the system in the form of impeachments over a blow job, unsigned 5-4 supreme court decisions deciding elections, mid-term redistricting and "The K Street Project." Thus even centrists like Kevin Drum want to see evidence that there can be center out coalitions before he signs on board.
In short, the sensible, empirical, technocratic decision is that there are few people on the right to talk to, and many of them aren't sensible people protecting their own careers by participating in the standard operating lies of an executive which is Nixonian in its deceptions - but often ideologs of the right. Senator Coburn of Oklahoma is an ideolog, but he is one of the few Republicans willing to act to cut out earmarked pork in transportation projects. He is far right wing, but being an ideolog who actually believes what he says, and does it, one can at least do business with him on areas where his principles are in play, which is why Senator Barak Obama is co-sponsoring an sweeping bill to more or less put the exact beneficiaries of the Federal budget online. Now if that were matched with tax policy, we might have something.
Progressivism threatens technocracy because it says that vision and visionaries should be setting the goals. But progressivism also jostles with populist paranoia and rage. The progressive has no truck with crypto-racism, however popular and populist it is.
DeLong makes a final mistake in saying that the avant-garde of the right didn't get what they wanted. They did, they got a society run by rich people. Whatever else they said, that is what they wanted. And for the very wealthy, we really do live in a pretty libertarian place - drug and sex laws don't apply to them, nor are the taxed in any meaningful way, the have the best justice they can afford, and can shop for which government to locate their assets and protect their interests. They also have socialism - in the form of massive government bailouts. Best of all worlds. The mavens of plutocracy did indeed get what they wanted. For themselves.
To repeat in a different form the bottom line: government is about doing the greatest good for the greatest number in the most sustainable fashion, and that means addressing the ills of the present real people who are doing the living and dying out there in the world. It cannot be any smarter than the people who run it, or who live under it. If an idea can't be put in a populist sense, from its core, then ordinary people aren't going to be able to implement it. A constitutional order must have a mandate, a mechanism and a meaning which joins the two. This is because while we have time and brain power to argue over a limited set of problems, most decisions have to be made real time on much more limited information. We can no more plaster populism on top of a complext technocracy and hope it works, than we could teach children to cross the street by using calculus.
This is why there has been an emergence of the forward left. Yes, there is a drive to move the country in a particular ideological direction, but it is because that ideology provides a framework for examining problems, creating solutions, and implementing them with direct and aggressive action. It diagnosis ills that others did not see until too late, it creates a system of checks and balances, both social and intellectual, and it improves in quality as solution gathers buy in. Rather than a continual watering down to a lowest common denominator of an original idea as the old top down system had, it is the progressive improvement of an idea by the greatest common product.
And that is why ideologs on the left are uncomfortable with DeLong's statement. That and the fact that he moonlights with the shrill. Afterall, he's said "impeach them now" at least as often as I have, which any technocrat would know isn't a reasonable plan of action when the party in control of the House is loyal to the President. History suggests you at least need to get the party to throw the President out first.
Instead of a dialog of the muddled middle, the process that should be in place would be one of a dialog between ideologs on the left, who are deeply wedded to the vision and the means of political change, with the intellectual and technocratic wing of the left, who are able to examine solutions and lay out the cone of alternatives which must be balanced. The left is willing to make hard decisions and accept trade offs, and that is what makes it fundamentally different from the right, which, from empircal observation, is unwilling to make trade offs, except where they can externalize the cost. If this sounds unreasonable, realize that the last 25 years have mainly been a dialog between the ideologs of the right and the technocrats of the right about how far to go to the right how fast.
There's certainly a conflict between technocrats and populists. You pretty much admit that in your post.
Like you, I really like science and so I tend to be swayed by data when I form my own opinions. But, I also see that, from a populist angle, that sometimes people want what the data won't support and I don't think it's moral to discount their desires -- sometimes you have to force the data to adapt by making fundamental changes.
The problem with our technocrats is that, for all of their knowledge, they're basically telling people what they should want. Another problem is that they're sometimes so caught up in their own models and methods that they need to be jarred back to reality by outsiders. Technocrats are certainly well placed in a specialized economy like ours, but specializing has the weakness of compounding errors (imagine you were a specialist in map making during a time when people thought the Earth was flat).
Populism certainly has its flaws as well. The current anti-immigrant sentiment in America strikes me as one of them. But, it has the virtue of giving the government a clue about people's desires.
You suggested there's no conflict. But I think you concluded that we need a bit of both. That's no empty call for bipartisanship -- I think this debate goes beyond left and right.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
September 3, 2006 6:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Without populism, there is no point to governing, without technocracy, there is no possibility of governing.
You can have all the good ideas in the world, like Al Gore has. But if you don't have the passion like a Bill Clinton, those good ideas go for naught.
September 3, 2006 7:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
As best I can recall, it was Clinton's passion that caused his problems.
Best, Terry
September 3, 2006 8:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good quip, it made me laugh. But, seriously... weren't his passions both the source of his success and of his problems? Sometimes, that happens. Seems to me that without the passions that made him great, he'd have just been another honor's student from Arkansas, probably running a successful furniture store. For all the pains his appetites caused him, they also drove him to extraordinary heights.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
September 3, 2006 8:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
The opportunity being handed to the Democratic Party is the energy of the Irate Moderate.
Tempermental and emotional moderates, like Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman, are sucking it up and acknowledging that the times call for more partisanship. Politicians like Webb in Virginia or Lamont in Connecticut -- ideological moderates or conservatives -- are expressing the same impulse.
The Irate Moderate was a key to the great realignments of 1860 and 1932, and if a realignment occurs, in reaction to Bush 43, it will center on the Irate Moderates -- the shrill DeLong rather than the technocratic DeLong, but still DeLong.
The problem with technocrats as politicians is that no one cares about "how" you intend to do something; they care about "what" you are going to actually try to do, and the values applied in the doing. We live in a Representative Democracy, and trust in the Representative is critical. We trust, based on what we are told about "what". "How" is what we are trusting the Representative to deal with, with the help of technocrats.
The large mass of "swing" voters is chronically and deeply uninformed. The Know Nothings are forever the American third Party. Technocratic Democrats always fail with those people, because those ignorant, "independent" Know Nothings cannot figure out what the differences are between the Parties or the candidates. Technocratic DeLong presumes that his Republican counterparts share his goals -- foolish certainly, but that's his rhetorical stance, and a Know Nothing catching a glimpse of that thinks Reps and Dems want the same things.
Everyone talks about how Rove has revved up the base, but that's a bad analysis. Rove is a genius at mobilizing the Know Nothing voter. A large part of the Bush's "base" has no idea what he favors or what he's done. No friggin' clue. And, the Democratic technocrats, debating "how"s are not going to tell them. Every Republican fax and talking point includes a vicious bumpersticker characterization of the Democratic Party's "position" on issues.
But, Democratic faxes and talking points are often technocratic in their outlook. They weakly criticize the Republicans for failing in the "how", and never clearly set out the "what" for the all-important Know Nothings. Brad DeLong, in his technocratic mode, is especially guilty of this; in his mind Greg Mankiw wants what he wants, a better world (yeah, right).
If the Irate Moderates would just pull themselves together long enough to simply "tell the truth on those bastards" as Harry Truman might say, the Democrats might make some headway.
The key to successful populism is winning the trust of the People, but populism's penchant for corruption also makes it populism's weakness. Republican favor business interests, so Republican corruption is usually just crossing a line on the timing of self-enrichment. For a Democratic Populist, however, corruption is hypocrisy, and undermines the Trust of the People.
Much of the Democratic center-right -- the DLC and the New Democrats -- are corrupt, and their corruption is going to be a serious problem for Democrats seeking to establish some credibility with populism.
But, really the Democrats don't need populism, per se. They just need sharp partisanship, and some terms of cooperation-in-power between the moderate center of the Party and the progressive Left.
If the Democrats could make themselves believable as a Party, which is willing to make progressive, practical compromises between an uncorrupted center and a pragmatic left, but committed to non-intercourse with the crazy radicals of the Right, I think they could gain a presumptive majority in a political realignment.
The Republicans have had to take radical stands, because they cannot acknowledge practical considerations or costs. They need issues like abortion for their deviseness, and so have to inflexible in their ideological stance and in their policy proposals. Democrats could actually make pragmatic compromises on such issues, pushing programs, which cost actual money, but actually work to reduce the number of abortions, without taking away choice, by further empowering people.
In the same way, the Republicans cannot take effective measures on terrorism, because their politics can not stand the acknowledgement of limits, which that would entail. Republicans have to promise to be doing absolutely everything possible to make people safe, and they have to keep the terror and anxiety alive at the same time. Democrats can acknowledge that it is not possible to make anyone absolutely safe, and some measures are not worth taking, while other measures are very much worth taking; and, by the way, prohibiting nail clippers and shampoo in carryons is silliness.
Populism is not necessarily a sound solution to the problem of the low information, Know Nothing voter, even though clear characterizations of "what" are to be preferred to wonky discussions of "how", particularly wonkiness, which in any way legitimizes the craziness of the Republican politics. Clearly and simply identifying for the Know Nothing what Bush and the Republican Party are all about -- the "what" of Republican politics -- and contrasting the "what" of Democratic politics, is the critical task.
The Irate Moderate may be quite effective at that critical work, but I don't know if populism is entirely necessary, just to make the "what" of Democratic politics a clear contrast to the "what" of Republican politics.
September 3, 2006 10:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't read Brad DeLong often, perhaps because he thinks of himself as a technocrat. But if technocrat, a confused one, and his confusion is behind Newberry's disagreement with him, with which I agree wholeheartedly.
DeLong says;
If he parses his own sentence he'll see it falls into two parts, in the first he expresses his technocrat side...policy wonkism, statistical odd-setting and the like. But look at the last half of this sentence...the "goals we all share" bit. What are these goals if not progressivism and populism modernized? Do we in reality share these goals with the right? I think one could make a pretty good argument that these goals are no longer shared. Or perhaps it would be better said that the way DeLong expresses these goals makes it nearly impossible for the right and left to share them. Who on the right really believes in "safety nets"?
I see this as a confusion of means and ends. Progressivism and populism are about ends. The technocratic outlook is about means. Means are value neutral...I'm reminded of Tom Lehrer's song Wernher von Braun (be warned there's a rinky-tink mp3 file running.
So, be as technocratic as you like, but serve a philosophy/ideology which is populist/progressive/humanist. Nice post, Mr. N.
aMike
September 4, 2006 5:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not passion. Lust.
September 4, 2006 7:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I believe that this is exactly the formula the Bush administration has applied since taking office in 2001. You can see it demonstrated in the way the Iraq war was pursued: Why we went to war, who we sent to Iraq to contract out the occupation and the continual bleating about eventual victory defined by ideologues as the establishment of a democracy in Iraq.
Domestic policy here at home is rife with ideology as policy: Medicare Modernization Act 2003 pays doctors less to get them to cut costs while at the same time overpaying by subsidy the insurance companies to set up Medicare Advantage - HMOs with a track history of failure; tax cuts that created an economic environment that was very good for shareholders of equities (especially Exxon, BP and the like) and holders of Treasuries (as is GWB) but not so good for the lower 80 th percentile who earn wages but are in jeopardy of losing their jobs either to outsourcing or recession.
Stirling has done a grand job posting on the economic policy of this administration. I refer you to his last several posts.
The point is the means matter. Words do not. The upshot of this administration's past 6 years is they did what they believed in and called it something else. And nary a soul took them to task until lately.
I don't think better late than never will work this time.
September 4, 2006 8:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Pragmatic compromise" is what leads to states like South Dakota having one abortion clinic and abortions only when doctors in MN are able to fly in for the day and fly out the same day. Such "pragmatic compromise" may be fine for cool upscale progressive men in NY or DC but it doesn't do much for a pregnant 15 year old without even a car to drive across the snow driven prairie to the other side of South Dakota in the hopes that a plane with doctors might fly in for the day.
Sure, abortion is one issue and not a pleasant issue but the eagerness to "pragmatically compromise" the practical ability for individual people to exercise rights or satisfy survival needs is what differentiates a technocrat from a populist. Technocrats care about policy. Populists care about people. Technocrats care about means and medians and statistical assessments of on average or the top or bottom quintile. Populists just might care about that specific family down the street.
That's why you might be better off knocking on the door of a right wing populist than at the door of a progressive technocrat. The populist might see you as person in need. The technocrat is going to tell you how he designed a program to end welfare.
September 4, 2006 8:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
amike,
I don't think DeLong is using "populism" in the way you do, as the name for a program of political and policy ends that is not much different from "progressivism."
DeLong appears to be using "populism" as a name for a style of political campaigning that succeeds by appealing to the deisires of the untutored masses, even where those desires are not "smart", as he would have it.
It's a bit hard to see exactly what DeLong is objecting to, aince he does accept the need for electoral politics, including the need to "frame" the policies in one's agenda in such a way that they succeed in attracting votes:
The aim of governance, I think, is to achieve a rough consensus among the reality-based technocrats and then to frame the issues in a way that attracts the ideologues on one (or, ideally, both) wings in order to create an effective governing coalition.
So, on his view, it is the job of technocrats to come up with the agenda, and the job of politicians to sell it. What's the issue then. DeLong appears to recognize the need for generating popular appeal. I suppose it's something this: Suppose the technocratic elite comes up with a a policy agenda consisting of 100 oh-so-smart items. Now suppose the skilled politician/salesman comes to you and says this:
"I simply can't sell that entire agenda. It contains several items that are firmly oppposed by every potential majority I can build; and there are several other items that are not on the agenda - apparently because you don't consider them smart - that are wildly popular with among most of these potential majority electorates."
"However, if you let me take these five "smart" items of the policy agenda, and let me replace them with these other five "no-so-smart" items, there is no doubt at all that I can sell them. We will win, and you will get 95% of what you want. The alternative is losing, but going down with the principles of the technocrats intact, and the purity of 100% smartness maintained."
Now I take it that the current debate, in the mind of someone like DeLong, is over the opposition between the 95/5 approach or the 100/0 approach. But if DeLong is on the 100/0 side, wither goes his vaunted moderation and practicality. Wouldn't practicality and moderation in electoral politics recommend the 95/5 approach? If, on the other hand, he does recognize the need for the 95/5 approach, then what is his beef with populism?
Maybe what DeLong is getting at is that he thinks "populism" is characterized by a lower smart/dumb ratio - maybe 75/25 or 60/40. He also thinks we don't need to sink to populist appeals because "there is hope that they [reality-based Republicans] will come to their senses and that building pragmatic technocratic policy coalitions from the center outward will be possible and is our best chance." DeLong apparently hopes for a triumph of the "moderate" technocrats, in which they seize control of the policy-making apparatus and political themes of both parties, and then govern from a centrist coalition of the smart.
Yet I wonder, is this "hope" really a reality-based inference form the evidence, or is it merely an expression of blind faith and wishful thinking?
Perhaps another issue is the degree to which politicians should engage the emotions of the voters, including the emotions of anger, fear and resentment. He quotes, without comment, Rauchway's characterization of populism as "a movement championing the downtrodden, wielding the symbols of oppression against the oppressor."
Do DeLong and Rauchway doubt that there are people who are downtrodden and oppressed, and others who are oppressors? Or do they just fear the consequences of building a movement that recognizes and existence of oppression, and makes use of the emotion-laden symbols of oppression to struggle againt the oppressors. Maybe they just think that recognizing oppression, and empowering people to do something about it by legitimizing resentment, is too dangerous and the masses must be kept under control by suppressing their desire to give vent to their outrage and act upon it.
After all, if the masses get too uppity, they might get together start undermining the economic interests of Berkeley professors, and then where would we be?
September 4, 2006 9:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
DeLong indulges in some standard identifications in his posts: pragmatism, moderation, practicality, intelligence, reality-based discourse, etc. All of these go together in his thinking.
Like many self-described moderates, he appears to see political disagreement - at least among the smart set - as mainly disagreement about the best and most efficient means to "ends we all share". These ends allegedly include:
world peace, world prosperity, equality of opportunity, safety nets, long and happy lifespans, rapid scientific and technological progress, and personal safety
I think this oversimplifies matters just a tad.
Let's just take one of these to start: rapid scientific and technological progress. First, people seem to differ greatly with respect to the degree of rapidity they prefer in scientific and technological progress overall. And among those who disagree wildly in their preferences it appears, many are equally smart. There is always a choice being made among the displacements and stresses causes by technological and scientific progress against its benefits, and some people measure the relative values involved in these conflicts this very differently.
Even among those who are inclined toward equal levels of overall scientific progress, in some abstract sense, there can be massive disagreements in the kinds of progress sought.
There are also people who do not value "world peace" at all, or in anywhere near the extent that some others do. Some of them believe such things as that "war is the health of society", or that that fairly vigorous levels of violent conflict are both natural and desirable, and their opposites unnatural and sickly. Sometimes the belief is based on other beliefs about which kinds of activities are conducive to progress in other areas. But sometimes pro-conflict attitudes seemed to be based on the notion that conflict and struggle themselves, and the excitement of threats and a life lived on the edge of pain and mortality, are in themselves components of the most satisfaction-rich kind of life. Now, there are people like me who are temperamentally averse to living in such a world, who thus want to create a different one to live in. Am I smarter than them? Or do I just attach more value to different sorts of things: such as repose, contemplation and serenity?
Or consider "world prosperity". Even if we accept that that very abstract goal is something we all share, and that other things being equal people prefer a higher level of aggregate wealth over a lower level. Still it might be possible to achieve a certain level of aggregate wealth in radically different ways.
It is also the case that the production of wealth itself must be weighed against other values. What if we could build a society in which a much slower pace in the growth of aggregate global economic prosperity is the cost of the realization of several other social and moral values which are not economically quantifiable? Is there only one rational way to settle the dispute, or is it at bottom a temperamental difference not susceptible of rational adjudication?
Choices among conflicting policies and activities always involves some judgment about the weight to assign to conflicting values. Where the values are all instrumental values, and there is agreement about the relative values to assign to certain proposed ultimate ends, the basis for the judgment can be objective and rational. But perhaps the relative weights one assigns to ultimate ends are not objective and rational choices, but simply reflects irresolvable temperamental differences among people.
I suspect DeLong believes that among the various conceivable policy agendas that might be proposed, there are actually a rather small number that meet the "smart test", and that the mean ideological difference, so to speak, between agendas in the smart subset is much less than the average among the set of all agendas taken together. Thus smartness = convergence and centrism. The more one restricts the sample to smarter and smarter policy agendas, the more these agendas tend to cluster around some center point. Is there actual evidence for this - evidence that accounts for the self-selection effect among the self-appointed smart? Anecdotally, there is ome reason for thinking that ideological differences among intellectuals are greater than those among ordinary people, who often seem to hold all views at once in an incoherent mix.
I would suggest that there can be social agendas that are (a) equally smart (b) radically different in outcome. Restricting ourselves to only those agendas that meet intellectual criteria of coherence, causal realism in adaptation of means to ends, and justified empirical assumptions about human nature and sustainability may still leave us with some mighty large choices to make.
September 4, 2006 10:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Screwtape berated his apprentice devil for not realizing that lust can turn into love.
September 4, 2006 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course Lehrer also wrote about at least one set of progressive humanists
Every one of us cares ,
We're all against poverty, war and injustice
.....
Unlike the rest of you squares.
September 4, 2006 11:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
C.S. Lewis from the preface to his book:
Touche, just the same.
September 4, 2006 1:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you misunderstand the import of my comment, which I am sure is my fault – an inarticulateness, which I regret.
I absolutely agree with you that South Dakota's situation is a horror. And, it is, as you say, the consequence of compromise: an inappropriate compromise with people, whose political agenda is so extreme as to be properly termed, insane, is not my idea of progressive, pragmatic compromise. The "pro-life" wing of the Republican Party, so artfully exploited with the most extreme policy proposals and rhetoric, refuses, as a matter of design, to be at all realistic about the policies it advocates, to consider for one moment the consequences of what it does. That divorce from reality, which I term, "insanity", is sold as a matter of high moral principle, but it is really a matter of cynical political manipulation. The incongruity of George W. Bush, who has happily executed criminals and started an unprovoked war, as a "pro-life" moralist reveals the truth about the underlying politics.
When I read Stirling Newberry’s excellent posts, I often think on the possibilities for political realignment, and that’s what I was thinking, here. Realignments occur when a shift in the locus of power coincides with events, which imprint a lot of people with a political party identity, which, in turn, tends to stabilize the pattern of partisan divide and decision-making. So there are two issues at stake, here: the locus of power and political identity (i.e. whether a person thinks of himself as Republican or a Democrat or an unidentified independent). Bipartisanship has been the locus of power in American politics since the New Deal; the bipartisanship of FDR’s day has morphed and decayed and been revived many times, but, mostly, bipartisan compromise has been how policy has been made – that’s what I mean by identifying bipartisanship as the locus of power -- it’s the place where policy is made. As Stirling has pointed out, bipartisanship has decayed to the point, where it is useless and destructive, which I take it to also be your observation.
The locus of power has shifted, under Bush and his Tom DeLay Congress, into the hands of extremists, corrupt corporatists and partisan manipulators entirely within the Republican Party. Bipartisanship is just a stage show, now, used by the Republicans to legitimate their destructive and foolish policies to old people, who remember bipartisanship as something else. The moderates in the Republican Party – the people, who benefited the most from FDR’s bipartisanship, by FDR’s design – are now a nearly extinct handful, excluded from power. The technocrats were key to FDR’s bipartisanship, because FDR designed it that way. The whole point of FDR’s bipartisanship was to exclude from national power, the crazies in both Parties, and to make government policy rational and effective: to build a sustainable national economy and win a World War. DeLong, a self-identified technocrat, is mourning the loss of power for technocrats. The tradition of an elaborate “policy process”, as instituted by FDR and elaborated through the 1980’s by both Presidents of either party and Congress and the Federal bureaucracy, is completely gone from the White House, moribund or eroding in much of the Federal bureaucracy, and completely absent in the proceedings of Congress. Those with Power, in this Administration and Congress, are building a quite different apparatus, and, really, have no use for genuine technocrats, except for show, since they are really not concerned for the consequences of policy, as a technocrat (or rational and deliberate person) conceives of consequences. If an authoritarian and inflexible abortion policy has cruel consequences for women and children, that really is of no concern, whatsoever, to the Republican Powers-that-Be. Their only concern is about the electoral consequences, and will use their control of all the tools of Propaganda – i.e. all Media – to suppress any debate over policy, which brings rational attention to consequences.
When I wrote about "pragmatic compromise", I was expressing my hope for a realignment, which shifts the locus of political power into the Democratic Party, where it might rest in artful, progressive, pragmatic compromises between reality-based moderates and liberals, who are concerned about the consequences of policy. I hope that Democrats might be able to sell the idea that they can be trusted with the locus of power, in part on the basis of a prolonged experience of policy failure under Bush. I think compromise within the Democratic Party could satisfy a substantial majority of Americans, who are not radicals or insane, and who do care about consequences, when they are made to think about them for more than 30 seconds at a time. Without endorsing him as a candidate, let me present John Kerry, a Roman Catholic, whose opposition to the death penalty and history of antiwar activity are consonant with a genuine “pro-life” position in a way Bush’s record is not, as the kind of Democrat, I think, who can be trusted to participate WITH other Democrats in fashioning policies on abortion, birth control, sex education and family planning, which might actually have the consequence of reducing the number of abortions in the United States, without compromising the fundamental autonomy of the individual, represented by recognition of a constitutional right to privacy, and keeping that option practical. I would like to think that would be regarded as worthwhile progress to most Americans.
September 4, 2006 6:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ah yes ,but how trustworthy is Lewis ?
September 4, 2006 6:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
aMike
September 4, 2006 6:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
As a cafeteria Catholic of the Kerry kind myself, I think what the technocratic compromisers miss is that some issues are over very real core values. Your compromise becomes surrender when confronted with an authentically values driven opponent. Changing the abortion debate to one over a discussion of reducing the number of abortions essentially concedes the issue to the opponent. The simple way to reduce the number of abortions is to simply ban abortion. If you don't have the courage to make the case for the autonomy of the mother (and that's a case that won this Catholic to the pro-choice side), then you surrender the debate over two competing values.
I see the centrists doing this all the time on health care. They frame the health issue as one of reducing costs and what bean counter can't figure out a way to slice and dice costs, but they don't have the courage to make the case on a human right to health care.
Values of life and death be they expressed over abortion, war, health, safety can't all be reduced to some technocratic model. They're about the choices we make as humans in prioritizing values and making values live in policy.
September 5, 2006 4:53 PM | Reply | Permalink