8 years of bad policy...

Where Did All the Republicans Go?

Yesterday Gallup released a report on its survey of political party affiliation by voters at the state level. The results, depicted in the map above, show that only five states have a statistically significant majority of voters who identify themselves as Republicans. The data come from interviews last year with “more than 350,000 U.S. adults as part of Gallup Poll Daily tracking.”

Review: The Political Mind by George Lakoff

Owen Flanagan knocks around Lakoff's recent book The Political Mind pretty successfully.

I don't think it takes away from the merits of the book, Flanagan is making a broader intellectual history challenge to Lakoff's context.

Also I'm gonna plug Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul which is a wonderful book that I highly recommend.

The Austrian and Chicago Schools

Excerpt from History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective, by E.K. Hunt via Mark Thoma

I think the best point made is this

Every human being has ideological, moral and political views. To pretend to have none and to be purely objective must necessarily be either self-deception or a device to deceive others. A candid writer will make his preconceptions clear and allow the reader to discount them if he does not accept them. This concerns the professional honour of the scientist.

You see this all the time. I always think about Howard Zinn's you "can't be neutral on a moving train."

probability and induction

Good Political Theory post

The Fight for Science (and Justice)

Moral and political philosophers are concerned with how we ought to act, as both individuals and collectivity as societies. So we ask questions like: What makes an action right or wrong? What constitutes the “good life”? How should society distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation (like wealth, and rights and freedoms)?

As philosophers, it is not surprising that we turn to the history of philosophy to help us grapple with these timeless normative questions. So we turn to intellectual giants like Aristotle, Kant, Mill and Marx for guidance on how we can sensibly deliberate about the demands of morality and justice.....

.....But the history of Western moral and political thought is one that has, for the most part, evolved from religion or speculations into human nature. We now live in the rare and exciting times were this “veil of ignorance” is being lifted! We are beginning to see and understand how our brain works, why we age and the role genes play in things like intelligence and political behavior. Imagine if Aristotle, Hobbes or Locke were alive today. Do you think they would be flipping through the pages of philosophy journals pondering the abstract ideals of equality, or do you think they would be reading science journals and pondering the really big questions concerning the future of humanity? I reckon it would be the latter.....

....So my central point so far is this- if philosophers really “love wisdom”, then we ought to recognize the unprecedented bounty of knowledge that science now provides us with. Rather than viewing moral and political philosophy as a dialogue that occurred among the greats of the past, we should strive to connect the new empirical insights to these debates. While we may not have intellectual giants like Aristotle, Mill or Marx living among us today, what we do have is a wealth of empirical knowledge that ought to be an integral part of moral and political philosophy. No doubt some of you will still ask- “But why?” So let me come at this again from a different angle.

Moral and political philosophers should aspire to narrow the gap between science and normative theory because: (1) no other topic comes even close in terms of the important impact science has had on the wellbeing of humans; (2) these important issues have not received their fair share of attention from moral and political philosophers; and (3) if you want to teach something that will really get students excited about the relevance of moral and political philosophy to the real world, then explore the link between science and moral (be it moral psychology or applied ethics) and political philosophy (e.g. distributive justice).

Go read...

The Ideology of No Ideology by Norman Solomon right now. Do not pass go... do not collect $200. Go read it right now...

dead on.

The ideology of no ideology is nifty. No matter how tilted in favor of powerful interests, it can be a deft way to keep touting policy agendas as common-sense pragmatism -- virtuous enough to draw opposition only from ideologues.

Meanwhile, the end of ideology among policymakers is about as imminent as the end of history.

But -- in sync with the ideology of no ideology -- deference to corporate power isn't ideological. And belief in the U.S. government's prerogative to use military force anywhere in the world is a matter of credibility, not ideology.

Ideological assumptions gain power as they seem to disappear into the prevailing political scenery. So, for instance, reliably non-ideological ideological journalists sit at the studio table every Friday night on the PBS "Washington Week" program, which is currently funded by similarly non-ideological outfits including Boeing, the National Mining Association and Constellation Energy ("the nation's largest supplier of competitive electricity to large commercial and industrial customers," with revenues of $21 billion last year).

Along the way, the ideology of no ideology can corral even normally incisive commentators. So, over the weekend, as news broke about the nominations of Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers to top economic posts, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote an article praising "the members of Obama's new economic team." Reich declared: "All are pragmatists. Some media have dubbed them 'centrists' or 'center-right,' but in truth they're remarkably free of ideological preconception. ... They are not visionaries but we don't need visionaries when the economic perils are clear and immediate. We need competence. Obama could not appoint a more competent group."

Competence can be very good. But "free of ideological preconception"? I want to meet these guys. If they really don't have any ideological preconceptions, they belong in the book of Guinness World Records.

As for competence, it seems that claims of non-ideology often go hand-in-hand with overblown claims of economic mastery. "Geithner and Summers are credited with expertise in crisis management," economist Mark Weisbrot pointed out on Monday, "but we better hope they don't manage the current crisis like they did in East Asia, Russia, Argentina or any of the other countries that Treasury was involved in during the 1990s with their help. They helped bring on the East Asian crisis in 1997 by pressuring the governments in the region to de-regulate international financial flows, which was the main cause of the crisis. Then they insisted that all bailout money go through the IMF, and delayed aid until most of the damage was done. Then they attached damaging conditions" to the aid.

After all is said and done, the ideology of no ideology is just like any other ideology that's apt to be much better at promoting itself than living up to its pretenses. No amount of flowery rhetoric or claims of transcendent non-ideology should deter tough scrutiny. And Judge Judy's injunction should apply to the ideology of no ideology as much as to any ideology that owns up to being one: "Don't pee on me and tell me it's raining."

dead on.

critique of enlightenment thinking

The Limits of Individual Knowledge

As Barack Obama is putting together his team that will help "fix the economy", we need to keep in mind that in a world with nearly 7 billion people all acting in their own self-interest, no one person or one group of people can ever have the knowledge to successfully tinker with the economic system.

Case in point: Less than three months ago, Hurricane Ike hike the Gulf Coast and already sky-high gas prices shot even higher. After more than than seven years of increasing gas prices because of terrorism and two Middle Eastern wars, everyone just knew that the old ways of American life were over. From business to politics to media to the arts, everyone in the American elite called for a "rationalization" of American energy policy.

I commented:

I think the Kennedy administration proved that the technical class isn't all knowing.

Well, in reality... look at any elite group since the beginning of time. There will always be those who promise salvation or claim some group will bring it to us.

That's not how salvation works, and that's not how human knowledge works. Another failure of enlightenment thinking really...

Also moving from theory to real world. I don't think terrorism, and two middle eastern wars, were the only contributors to our transportation crisis. Bad Transportation policy and bad governance doesn't help... as Doug noted:

there is no way any group of people - no matter how smart - can have enough knowledge to successfully plan the economy. The world is just too complicated, and the only way to efficiently allocate resources is through the market economy.

Throwing up our hands and saying here is the only solution, be it certain market approaches or the hands off "the private sector is the best way to address these issues"--the way people too often do. Has reaped the mess we are in (mind you bad transportation policies are supported by Dem's too!). This situation and many we fcae right now are of the "hands off" descent. This fact would fall within the logic of the post as well.

Thinking we can determine the most successful plan without using our best understanding of markets and the tried and true test-- what happens and is happening in the real world when we implement it--would be a stunning failure of human thinking.

Not that such is anything outside of the norm (myself included).

Policy is not pretty, representative government and the compromises and deal making it entails is most definitely not pretty. Life isn't fair... we just roll up our sleeves and try to find policies that work.

Chomsky

Brooks hits a homerun...

The Class War Before Palin

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, “Rebel-in-Chief,” Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

Sometimes a blog quote is just golden...

"This opinion is based on an empirically sound foundation of absolutely nothing." --Ezra Klein

this was on the question in regards to October polling numbers and the vote on election day.

ASK A POLITICAL SCIENTIST!

You're seeing a lot of talk lately about how closely October's polls correlate with November's results. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels e-mails:

Historically (since 1948), about 75-80% of the margin in a typical October poll has lasted until Election Day. If that holds true this year, the current best forecast of the popular vote based on the polls is that Sen. Obama will win by about 6 points.