The sword of epistemic closure cuts both ways

As noted by Liberty Central, polling firm Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner have some pretty dire numbers for Democrats out in  work the firm did for Citizen Opinion. The take away? The economy continues to suck and voters are gearing up to blame Democrats for it. How much blame can Democrats expect shoveled their way? According to the seventeenth slide in the report, a lot.

When asked about the vote in November, 52 percent plan to vote Republican to protest the direction of the economy – 11 points more than voting Democratic to not jeopardize the recovery.

An eleven point spread, that’s even more generous than anything Rasmussen has reported since the beginning of the Administration’s term. I bear in mind comments made by well known pollster J. Anne Selzer of Selzer and Company when I traded a few emails with her on Gallup’s two-week Democratic bump, ” until other polls show something similar this will be treated as an outlier, I would think.”

The questioning used by GQR is certainly more focused than your average midterm generic ballot poll. But even moderating for general trending, the results essentially buttress what has come to be the accepted narrative leading up to the midterms: Democrats are lining up for a drubbing of some kind on November.

The numbers also reinforce the analysis that said drubbing is due primarily to factors beyond Democrats’ control. However, I found slide nineteen showing a belief that Obama and the Democrats are, “more concerned with bailing out Wall Street,” (47%) than they are with, “creating jobs for average Americans,” (41%) interesting vis-a-vis my griping about the need for strong financial regulation reform over at True/Slant.

The larger pivot of this variety would be progressives arguing that what these numbers really show is that the President and Democrats should have heeded their advice and acted more boldly on things like economic stimulus and financial reform. Though, of course, the rejoinder to any such argument will involve a reminder about political constraints. And in some instances, repudiations will refer to the malice and threat these progressives represent to the larger interests of the left, boomeranging the fault for the President and Democrats’ gloomy numbers back into the hands of overly critical, loud, and utopian-minded dissenters.

The imagined back and forth brought me to what I considered an interesting question that I’m not sure I’ve heard asked in the never ending saga of Democratic/liberal/progressive “cake or death” in fighting. The question: assuming that liberal/progressive critiques do exacerbate Democrats’ November losses, are those additional losses worth the benefits Democrats realize as a result of having the debate in the first place?

My answer is an unequivocal, yes.

I’ll of course grant you that the point of politics is to win elections so that you can enact your particular public policy agenda and generally steer the country in a direction deemed more beneficial by your party and its members. In this regard, any exacerbation to Democratic losses — including, contra a recent DCCC memo, the possibility of losing the House — are by definition bad and to be avoided.

But there are short term and long term formulations of those dynamics.

The numbers — including the GQR results — leading up to the midterms point to a short term loss with relatively specified implications. In the GQR response, respondents specifically indicated that their vote was a protest vote in response to what they perceive to be failures — rightly or wrongly — on the part of Democrats in turning the economy around. These are obviously very time sensitive feelings that have a strong historical correlate, at least insofar as Democrats’ fortunes are tied to the President’s.

The president’s solace may be his comparison to Ronald Reagan – the last president to take office in the midst of a recessionary gale. In an ABC/Post poll at about his year and a half mark, and with unemployment then at 9.8 percent, Reagan’s approval rating was 49-47 percent – almost precisely the same as Obama’s now.

It’s nothing new: These two presidents’ approval ratings have correlated at a remarkable .9 (1 is a perfect fit). The challenge for Obama is that Reagan continued to slide, bottoming out at 42 percent at the two-year mark. Remarkably, though, he lost only 26 House seats en route – about the average first-midterm loss, and a performance Obama may ardently hope to match.

But over the long term, demographics still strongly favor Democrats. So while it is true that short term losses are, where ever possible, to be avoided, that doesn’t mean that they always outweigh potential long term gains. The question, then, is whether there are long term gains to be had in the debate currently roiling through the Democratic Party. I’m inclined to believe that there are.

Democrats have always been a bit of a motley crew that lack the same kind of party discipline that their Republican counterparts seem able to command. For many observers, particularly people of Lanny Davis’ persuasion, that lack of discipline is an almost constant source of frustration and an overwhelming weakness of the Party. “If only we could be as regimented as conservatives and Republicans,” the arguments goes, “we could finally and really get something done.” You can see this type of thinking running through Davis’ mid-June screed against progressives linked above.

The fact of the matter, though, is that the raucous nature of the Democratic alliance is in fact one of its greatest strengths, even as it might contribute to dips in power. For a good demonstration of why this is the case, one need only look at the Republican Party.

If there is a single greatest factor that seems to be contributing to the overall decline of the Republican Party in American politics despite this sudden and likely burst of energy — and there are, of course, many factors — I would offer it is the term that Julian Sanchez so aptly (re)introduced back in March:  epistemic closure.

This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile. Think of the complete panic China’s rulers feel about any breaks in their Internet firewall: The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It’s not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative. Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter.  If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely—maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation. A more intellectually secure conservatism would welcome this, because it wouldn’t need to define itself primarily in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy.

And at no time has this sort of epistemic closure taken greater hold of Republicans than it did during the Bush presidency where and when dissent and criticism were mortal sins. While there were certainly handfuls and pockets of dissenters sounding muted alarms, in the main conservatives and Republicans kept their mouths shut even as the entire charade dipped ever more gracefully into a full blown nose dive.

The order of the day was discipline, this seeming panacea to all governing challenges. After all, Karl Rove was finally organizing a lasting and permanent conservative majority. Every other concern was subsumed to that ultimate goal.

The results; however, speak for themselves. And demographic advantages aside, to think that Democrats aren’t open to precisely the same kind of ruin is a piece of epistemic closure all its own.

Per Sanchez’s piece, the best bulwark against the kind of insularity that has beset Republicans is vigorous and intellectually rigorous intra-party debate.

However, as Davis himself notes in his missive, when Blue Dog Democrats generate voting blocks that demand certain concessions for their support, they effectively do nothing more than demonstrate that, “the Democratic Party still stands for the centrist, Clintonian combination of fiscal conservatism, cultural moderation and progressive social programs.” Even when this very approach to governance lies at the core of the problems that America’s 44th Congress seeks to address, nary an eyebrow is raised nor an arrow slung at their defiance because it largely reinforces the norms by which the Party has defined itself for decades now.

But when progressives dare to raise their voices over concessions that in their minds hurt the most desperate and disenfranchised members of the country and offer substantive policy alternatives that would better accomplish the spoken goals of the Party the long knives really come out. Regardless, progressives have come to the realization that in some respects they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, so they might as well throw off the dampening cowl of resignation and voice their concerns loudly and unapologetically.

Progressives do so  not just because they are sick and tired of not being heard, but also for the long term health of the Party. So while it might be true that progressive critiques are not assisting Democrats in current midterm polling, I would offer that Democrats owe progressives a debt of gratitude for their persistence and determination.

There are, we know, fates worse than a 50 seat loss in the midterms.

Tagged as: democratic party, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, intra-party debate, Julian Sanchez, Lanny Davis, midterm elections, polling, progressives