Here’s a pretty great Bloggingheads dialogue on dating and gender roles: [Read more →]

Ezra Klein is worried that our dysfunctional debate over health care reform is symptomatic of broader problems with our democracy:

What we’re seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It’s distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the “institutional checks” that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government — and by extension, their fellow citizens — capable of.

And Will Wilkinson thinks that Ezra is being deeply – dangerously -  naive:

It requires an amazing kind of selective amnesia to think that there is “no evidence’ that the U.S. government is “capable of madness.” The government of the United States invaded Iraq and its agents have killed many tens of thousands people on the basis of the fact that some Saudis trained in Afganistan flew planes into the World Trade Center, plus some lies. Torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, etc. I call that madness. Of course, Ezra means the other parts of government concerned with domestic affairs. But not the parts that break into peoples’ houses and destroy their lives for selling contraband herbs, or that subject us constantly to mendacious propaganda about drugs. Our government — and by extension our fellow citizens — is capable of terrible things and proves it every single day. Is it really possible to love government so much, to invest so much hope in its benevolent efficacy, that we grow blind to its evident capacity for evil?

I’m inclined to side with Will here; as he notes, it doesn’t take much more than a quick glance at the past eight years (or the whole of American history, really) to understand that our government, like any other, has immense capacity for evil.  That said, I don’t want to completely dismiss Ezra.  Yes, he’s wrong about the government’s capacity for “madness” but I’m not sure that that actually invalidates his argument.  After all, even by fairly lenient standards, these protesters aren’t very informed: they don’t have a terribly sophisticated knowledge of American political history, and they almost certainly aren’t aware of the “madness” of the past few years.  In fact, if they are aware of the previous administration’s transgressions, I’d be surprised if they were actually bothered by any of them.  In all likelihood, these are the people who were stoked about invading Iraq, and cheered on the administration after Abu Ghraib.

This is all to say that Ezra is, in some sense, completely right.  For the protesters and the teabaggers, there is absolutely nothing in their political ideology which would lead them to believe that the government was capable of madness.  Yes, you could say that these are “small government” conservatives with an inherent distrust of authority, but again, most of these folks sat through – and probably applauded – the massive Bush-era expansions in the size and scope of government.  My guess is that these are folks who have completely lost their faith and trust in the ability of government to represent them in their interest.  But, insofar that they lack trust, I don’t think it’s because they are hyper-aware of the government’s various misdoings and moral failings.  Instead, they no longer believe that America has the moral bearings to choose an adequate leader.  To them, Obama is utterly foreign and it defies belief that a majority of Americans could have elected him.  That they did not only signals that the system is broken, but that they are at its absolute mercy.

It’s that, I think, which is the source of the fear, the rancor and the sheer, unvarnished hatred.

*I’ve been looking for a way to use this song as a post title for weeks.

E.D. thinks that market economics don’t apply to education.  Chris disagrees, but thinks that market economics ultimately are about controlling people and inevitably creates – specifically in the realm of education – a form of corporatism.  Chris also explains that this is why he is not a libertarian. 

I.  FREE MARKET ECONOMICS ARE NOT ABOUT CONTROLLING PEOPLE

I find these criticisms a bit off.  First, Chris’ argument against the field of economics as a form of study is almost identical to some of the arguments made by the undeniably mainstream libertarian Will Wilkinson against the practice of economics as a useful policy tool.  While I don’t pretend to speak for John, I think most advocates of free market economics would actually agree with this critique – while economics may be useful at creating the most “efficient” outcome for achieving a particular result, they are not useful as a tool for determining which results are better or worse or are more worth pursuing. 

But to me that doesn’t mean that basic economics is worthless, nor does it have anything to do with understanding markets.  It just means that the democratic value of any sort of science as a policy tool is desperately limited: it can, at least theoretically, give us a path for achieving solutions; what it emphatically cannot do is tell us what is and is not a problem, nor what would constitute an acceptable solution, and it definitely cannot evaluate whether solving the problem is more valuable than the inevitable collateral consequences. 

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It is with great pleasure that I welcome Will Wilkinson into the bosom of my ilk. [Read more →]

Yesterday, Will Wilkinson lobbed the “mysterian” stone at E.D. over his resistance to seeing happiness as something that can be scientifically quantified,

There are no doubt limits to human understanding, but where that limit is is another damned empirical question. I think the probability that we’ve approached that limit when it comes to the mind or human subjectivity or morality or the conditions of human flourishing is approximately zero. I think science is hard, but it’s just laziness or complacency to think the science of X is impossible or pointless. I think I’m trying to argue that your kind of typically conservative (intellectually, not politically) “mysterianism” is motivated by the assumption that if we actually learned something about a putatively ineffable subject matter, it might matter to how people live.

I often feel like people (albeit a relatively small sub-section of people) misuse the term mysterian when they encounter others who mount some degree of resistance to uniquity of science. Mysterianism has its roots in the philosophy of mind and is a term that has posthumously been applied to those thinkers who argued that the hard problem of consciusness (reconciling the subjective components of conscious experience with the objective information we have about the brain) may not be solvable. The New Mysterians, such as they are, have in some cases extended this sense of unsolvability to more problems than just that of consciousness. It is in this regard that Wilkinson seems to be using the term.

But the whole exercise of labeling those people who question science’s ability to solve all problems as mysterians speaks to the underlying bias with which many of those science resisters are often engaged: reductionism. Modern science has exclusively to do with an understanding of the world that is based upon the study of physical matter and in that regard it provides a system with extraordinary explanatory power. But the best of scientists with whom I’ve ever spoken acknowledge that to take that study one step further and forward the often unspoken premise that therefore all understanding can be reduced the study of physical matter is to misunderstand the exploratory nature of science itself.

The assumption of reductionism is that the only way to know something is to know it scientifically. This isn’t science as science, this is science as dogma. And the resulting concern is that by forfeiting all other modalities of knowing, we lose something important about our understanding of the world. Indeed, it becomes difficult to see how we go about resolving issues of, say, value and ethics, in a world bereft of subjects, where all that has ontological status are rocks, trees, atoms, and the like.

Pushing back against the primacy of scientific knowledge is not to suggest that something cannot be known and understood. It is rather to open up space for other modalities of knowing that might provide equally useful to scientific knowledge, perhaps even complimentary. So I tend to agree with Will that we haven’t come close to reaching the limits of human knowing about any variety of topics, but those limits close in much more quickly when we assume that human knowing means only and ever scientific knowing.

So last week I posted a piece saying that Republicans and conservatives were missing a golden opportunity to engage in a full-throated  reconstruction dialogue under the Obama administration and noted that to date Republicans seemed to be presenting themselves as nothing more than the Party of No. The presentation of what is by all accounts an extremely flimsy budget alternative seems to indicate that not much has changed. In that post, I said that conservatives and Republicans needed to put themselves to the formulation of a conservative movement for the twenty-first century, particularly given the tide of demographics working against them. “Old-timer” Bob rightly asked for some details on what I meant by twenty-first century conservatism and while I’m a bit late in getting back to him, I’ve been tossing the idea around in my head. Below is what I’ve come up with (in no particular order or ranking):

Go populist without going populist: I’ve spent some time warning against the dangers of populism in regards to the AIG scandal and generally, but the fact of the matter is that there is smoldering populist sentiment out there that is not completely off-base in terms of its raison d’etre. People rightly believe that their government has gotten away from them and increasingly has little to do with their everyday lives and addressing the issues present in those lives in a positive fashion and a movement/party that can present a believable narrative about how they care about the challenges facing Americans and are interested in focusing on those issues in a collaborative fashion stands a decent chance of capturing a sizable proportion of the national imagination.

Look, John McCain and Sarah Palin were on to something with their decision to go hyper-local in how they addressed supporters and finished in what was a respectable place given that this election was the Democrats’ to lose and they did very little to actually lose it. The problem is that Palin and McCain practiced actual, base-line populism that appealed to people’s lowest common denominator inclinations. Such traditional populism generally winds up looking pretty ugly as a result and will get you a certain segment of support, but doesn’t offer the means for developing a broad base of support. But if conservatives can find a way of walking the walk of populism without necessarily talking the talk of populism, they might have a recipe for success sooner than we all tend to think. Walking the walk but not talking the talk to me means eschewing notions of appealing to peoples’ lowest common denominators and meeting people where they are but challenging them to bring the angels of their better nature to the game. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s arguments around Sam’s Club Republicans come to mind in this regard, as does the kind of localism/regionalism/integrity of living articulated by the likes of Daniel Larison, John Schwenkler, and particularly Rod Dreher (though Rod runs in to his troubles in other areas). [Read more →]

Scott and Chris each take issue with my post on Liberaltarianism in a Liberal Age, Scott on the grounds that a coalition of liberals and libertarians holds the greatest promise for advancing a libertarian agenda, Chris on the more substantive grounds that libertarianism does not offer a way of providing social safety nets in an era of increased marketization (of which libertarians obviously approve). 

Despite the vastly different viewpoints of these critiques, I think they both help suggest why the concept of liberaltarianism is so essential even as I think it has taken a massive body blow the last few months due to the turn of influential liberals back towards support of broad brush regulation such as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, a general belief that all or nearly all deregulation is undesirable, and a general belief that any government spending is – almost by definition – good, “stimulative” spending. 

Ultimately, as I suggested in my earlier post, I think libertarianism will be best off if broadly defined libertarians become regular swing voters to whom both parties are willing to regularly pander.  However, I expect that at various points in time, libertarians will find relatively long-term alliances with the Left or the Right to be appropriate much as the libertarian alliance with the Right was generally deemed politically beneficial for much of the last 50 years or so. 

But in order for libertarians to more consistently act as political free agents, or even to sign on to a coalition with the political Left, something else will need to happen to free libertarian philosophy from the predispositions that have resulted from such a lengthy alliance with the political Right.  

I would propose, then, that the “something” to which I refer is “liberaltarianism,” “soft Hayek” as Jim Henley calls it, or “actual Hayek” as I like to call it.  The promise of this derivation of modern libertarianism is not that it attempts to paint libertarianism in a light that is palatable to modern liberals/Progressives, which our friend Kip rightly fears; instead, its promise is that it can help to rescue the fundamental worldview of libertarianism from the prejudices instilled in it by such a lengthy alliance with the Right.

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