by James Hanley

Thanks to all who took the time to take the IDEALog survey and report their results to me, and my apologies for taking so long to present the results. I’ll present the findings in a moment, but first some background and development (just to make this an excruciatingly long post).

Background: Liberalism v. Libertarianism

There has been an on-going discussion in comment threads between Stillwater and me about libertarianism, in which he has been pushing me on where I define the boundaries of libertarianism and I have been pushing him on what I see as “lumping” all libertarians into a group defined by a particular set of policy positions. Recently a comment of Stillwater’s made clear one way in which I had managed to confuse him about my argument, which is that I have claimed both that there is a fundamental difference between liberals and libertarians and that the two groups can come down in the same place on particular policies. As Stillwater wrote:

[Y]ou keep insisting there is this significant difference between our theories, our policies, our preferred values, our analytical methods. If there isn’t a category difference captured by all those distinctions, then we’re talking about subtle shading on the edges of things. But if there is a category difference captured by all that, then the lumping [together of all libertarians] seems entirely appropriate since there are clear-cut divisions distinguishing two schools of thought on these matters.

So which is it, a distinct category difference between the groups, or just shadings at the edges? Without doubt I have failed to be clear about that issue, so the confusion Stillwater expresses about my claims is on me. But the answer is, it’s both, depending on what level we’re looking at. I argue that there is a category difference in the way we view government and markets. Libertarians, as a whole, are deeply skeptical about government and inclined to believe markets (not businesses, markets) generally work out for mutual benefit. Liberals, on the whole, are much less skeptical about government (at least in certain domains) but much more skeptical about markets. That doesn’t mean libertarians oppose all government or that liberals oppose all markets–it just means that when a problem is perceived, liberals are more likely to be open to claims that government can provide a solution, while libertarians are more likely to be open to claims that government is actually one of the underlying causes of the problem. I think that counts as a category distinction, and if anyone wants to lump libertarians together as “market advocates, government skeptics,” they’ll get no pushback from me.

Based on that we can expect liberals and libertarians to differ on lots of policies, but “lots” doesn’t mean “all,” so there are areas where liberals and libertarians can agree (or more precisely, some liberals and some libertarians). And that’s where we get the “subtle shading on the edges of things.” As I wrote in that thread,

If the use of “libertarians think X” is related to the general skeptical approach to government, and the general favoritism toward markets, then it is all good. But nearly always when it is used…to refer to the more extreme libertarian approach to that policy; then it is not good.

In other words, even if there is a category distinction between liberalism and libertarianism, it does not follow that liberals and libertarians will inevitably disagree on each policy issue where their “isms” lean in opposing directions. Consider the following analogy:

Stillwater and I are traveling together, but we have a dispute about hitchhikers. He loves to give them rides, seeing it as a good deed and finding them entertaining on long dull trips with me. I despise hitchhikers, seeing them as potentially dangerous and finding them irritating company (in contrast to Stillwater’s sparkling conversation). So when we see a cleancut young man in neatly pressed clothes hitchhiking, whether we stop depends on who’s in the driver’s seat at that moment. Stillwater would step on the brake, while I would stomp on the gas. One time, while Stillwater’s driving, we see a guy who looks like Charles Manson on steroids, with a pistol sticking out of his waistband and a big knife strapped to his belt. As I turn to Still to plead with him not to stop, I see him looking at me with a “WTF?!” expression on his face, and am pressed back in my seat as he accelerates past the scary monster. Yet another time, I’m driving when we see a 6 year old girl in torn clothing standing by the side of the road, one thumb out, the other in mouth. Stillwater turns to me to plead that we stop, but I’m already off the gas and on the brakes. Does this show that I really am pro-hitchhiker? Does the former case show that Stillwater really is anti-hitchhiker? I don’t think so–our fundamental difference remains, but there are cases where we agree.

This is why I think Stillwater was on the wrong track when he wrote:

from my pov, any argument which says government intervention is justified to prevent X where X is above the normal courts and cops threshhold (externalities, say) is a liberal position.

This is what I mean by defining all libertarians only by the most extreme version of libertarianism–any support of any economic regulation moves a person out of the libertarian category into the liberal category, so the only true libertarians are those that reject all hitchhikers regulations.

Consider the inverse read of that statement: “any argument which says government intervention is not justified to prevent X…is a libertarian position.” Then I can define all the liberals here as libertarians, because all of you sometimes reject some government intervention, and I can claim that “true liberals are those who support all government intervention.” But somehow I don’t think that would go over well. So in keeping with my number one rule for politics, let’s pretend we’re engaged in sports, and we all have to play by the same rules, with an impartial referee. If you don’t want me to say liberals must support all government interventions, please don’t say that libertarians must oppose all government interventions. Neither is true, and that means there will be cases where a particular liberal and a particular libertarian agree on whether or not a particular intervention is justified.

That means there is going to be fuzziness at the boundaries, but having category differences with fuzzy boundaries seems to be the natural order of things. Consider the distinctions between species–nobody would confuse my Jack Russel Terrier with a wolf, and nearly everyone would agree there’s a category difference, but dogs and wolves can interbreed, and on the margins between the two it’s difficult to distinguish. Many discrete categories have fuzzy boundaries–cars are not trucks, and vice versa, but then there’s the Chevy El Camino. It’s true for religion, too. Christianity has a category difference with polytheistic religions, but then there’s Santeria and Mormonism, blurring those boundaries and creating “subtle shading on the edges of things.” So given the natural variation among individuals, why would we expect particularly sharp boundaries when we’re talking about ideological categories?

Survey Says…!

So I asked people to self-identify and give me their survey results, so I could plot them in relation to their self-identification. My prediction was that there would be a discernible gap between liberals-as-a-group and libertarians-as-a-group, but with significant overlap between the groups. That prediction was largely borne out.

Quick methodological statement:

My N=64 (I would tell my students that’s very impressive for their introductory methods course, in the range of what I would like to see for their senior project, and not nearly enough for a master’s thesis). I had about 70 total respondents, but some had to be excluded because they did not self-identify. Most respondents were Leaguers, with about 8 coming from my blog. As is inevitable when open-ended questions are turned into operational variables, I had to do some violence to people’s self-categorizations. To do so I focused on what seemed to be the central element of a person’s claim, so that a liberal-leaning libertarian is classified as a libertarian and a libertarian-leaning liberal is classified as a liberal for purposes of the quantitative analysis (a simple comparison of means). I could have excluded all those folks, but they’re actually a large part of the story I’m trying to tell. And to the extent this categorization represents an imperfection in the data, what it actually does is move the means of the two sides closer together, by including libertarian-leaners among the liberals and liberal-leaners among the libertarians, so that if there is a significant difference between means, it’s an even more powerful finding than if I just excluded those folks. I wasn’t quite sure where to put the 2 self-described liberaltarians, so I put them in both groups, which, again, has the effect of drawing the means closer together. I have also classified everyone in the broadly left-leaning camp (including the “left of center moderate”) as liberal. Some object to the term, but when we’re talking about broad categories it’s clearly the most appropriate. I recommend that you think of it in taxonomical terms–I may not have identified your species, but I have identified your genus (or at least family). For the quantitative part, some respondents were excluded because I couldn’t place them with any confidence, like the “cautiously pragmatically humanitarian leaning heavily towards civil libertarian” (I like that particular person a whole heckuva lot, but he’s just not a social scientist’s ideal respondent), or where it wasn’t at all clear which adjective modified the other (like libertarian/conservative). However, in reporting where each respondent lands on the spectrum, I have allowed more categories, trying to work with your definitions as much as possible, so that you can see where the liberal libertarian and the libertarian liberal are in relation to each other (as well as their relation to the cautiously pragmatic humanitarian).

Results

In Figure 1 you can see the mean placement of liberals (including libertarian-leaning liberals and liberaltarians), libertarians (including liberal-leaning libertarians and liberaltarians), and conservatives. On the “Order” axis, the liberal mean is 1.66 and the libertarian mean is 1.00, a difference that is statistically significant (p=.0257). On the “Equality” axis the liberal mean is 7.44 and the libertarian mean is 2.54, which is very statistically significant (p=<.0001). One the one hand, I’m somewhat surprised that there is a statistically significant difference between libertarians and liberals on the Order spectrum (since that’s where liberals and libertarians tend to agree most frequently), but on the other hand the much larger difference on the Equality axis is precisely what we would expect to see. This supports (although it does not “prove”) my claim that there is a category distinction between liberalism and libertarianism.

Just for funsies I compared libertarians to conservatives, since so many people think libertarians really are just a variety of conservative. As seen in Figure 1, League conservatives (all 5 of them, including the person self-describing as “center-right”) aren’t, collectively, very darned conservative. In fact they appear, on average, to be pretty libertarian, with a mean on Order of 3.6 and a mean on Equality of 3.6. And just to make my expectation of a significant difference more difficult to demonstrate I excluded all the “liberal libertarians” from the analysis, including only the “pure” libertarians (those who described themselves solely as libertarians, with no qualifiers) plus the one “right-libertarian,” again to pull the means closer together. This group had a mean on Order of .93 and on Equality of 1.10. The difference between “pure” libertarians and these “soft” conservatives on both of these means was still statistically significant (p=.004 on “Order” and p=.107 on “Equality”). So next time you hear someone lump libertarians and conservatives together, be sure to pedantically point out that there’s statistical evidence demonstrating their error.

While Figure 1 suggests there is in fact a core difference between libertarians and liberals, Figure 2 shows the “subtle shading on the edges,” or as I prefer, the fuzzy boundaries. For this Figure I’ve included all respondents who self-identified, using, as much as possible, their own self-identification. As can be seen, most libertarians are solidly in the libertarian quadrant and most liberals are solidly in the liberal quadrant. But a couple of liberals are hanging out in or on the edge of libertarian territory, and the libertarian/liberal hybrids of various names are well distributed throughout both quadrants. (Note: The placements are approximate, so that multiple respondents sharing identical scores could both be made visible–any symbols that overlap actually have identical scores.)

Of course the only respondents are readers of the League and my own blog, so this is not necessarily broadly representative.  Yet I think that the League’s libertarians are, as a group, somewhat more sympathetic to liberalism than libertarians as a whole. If so, then the actual category difference between liberals and libertarians–as represented by mean positions along the Order and Equality axes, would be even greater. (And if not, it’s doubtful that libertarians as a whole are <em>more</em> similar to liberals than the League libertarians, so the statistically significant difference still remains.)

I hope the graphical presentation, as well as giving us an intriguing view into the distribution of LoOGers (and demonstrating that some people’s self-identification seems a bit off), demonstrates how the variation among individuals in each group can place them close enough to individuals in other groups that they could agree on some specific policy issues while belonging to definably discrete groups.

~by M.A.

Conor P. Williams, in Conservatism Isn’t Radical—It’s “Modular”, argues that there is a certain amount of mental jiu-jitsu involved in shifting frameworks from argument to argument. An interesting test of this very case came up this morning with the local radio talk host bringing up the topic of the death penalty in conjunction with a Time Magazine story covering the execution of one Carlos DeLuna, who a 5-year investigation has shown was almost certainly innocent of the crime he was executed for.

The argument from the talk host was that this was about “law and order” (framework #1), “justice” (framework #2), and “a state’s right to fulfill the sentence handed down by the judiciary” (framework #3, which also might involve dog-whistling of racist sentiment regarding court cases such as Leal Garcia v. Texas and Medellin v. Texas). A final framework, “the bible says an eye for an eye”, was brought up by many callers with an insistence that there is no way DeLuna was actually innocent (framework #4 the bible, framework #5 rejection of the results of the very thorough investigation).

One caller attempted to take the biblical framework and apply it more fully. The following is as close to a verbatim notation of their short conversation as I can make, allowing for shaky hands and the fact that podcasts of the show are unavailable. After the final comment, the host cut to a commercial break and dump-buttoned the caller.

Caller: The bible says thou shalt not kill. Jesus routinely stopped executions. Now we have proof that the state killed an innocent man.

Host: Well the bible says follow the law. The bible says an eye for an eye, the bible holds specific punishments and execution for murder is one of them. He was convicted so he can’t have been innocent.

Caller: And why don’t conservatives apply the bible to other things? Deuteronomy clearly says that a court system which gives more weight to the wealthy is unjust and illegal, but our court system definitely does that. The new testament and letters of the apostles talk very clearly about the responsibility of society to take care of the sick and the elderly and the poor, and you want to eliminate all the government programs set up to do that.

Host: The bible doesn’t say to pay taxes. Jesus never said to pay taxes. In fact if you look at your bible Jesus never advocated having a government large enough to do anything to anyone and he definitely didn’t advocate making a government so powerful that it took away people’s freedom of choice. If I want to donate to a church and give money that’s a good thing, but Jesus never advocated the government putting a gun to my head and taking my money and property to give it to some stinky homeless worthless bum.

At this point I was glad for a commercial break – I was quite upset at what I see as a base, ugly misinterpretation or outright misrepresentation of the holy book of my religion. Given that Jesus very clearly endorsed his followers paying their due taxes (Luke 20:25, Mark 12:17, Matthew 22:15; “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s…”) at least the bolded part of the host’s claim above was nothing but a bald-faced lie.

After sitting back for a bit, and looking at it through the lens of the framework theory, I think I can see it. It mattered little what the bible actually said at this point in the conversation, as the host’s duty was to enforce – per the framework theory – the jiu-jitsu that the audience was to follow in eliminating any doubt created by the point the caller had made. The way to do this was to re-enforce the “no taxes = freedom” framework regarding government programs and taxation and subsume the biblical framework for the purpose of the topic. A final, new framework was also injected at this point, a sort of monetary-morality theory that seems to pervade right-wing radio (which can be roughly translated as “those who have the money are moral and good, those who lack money are by implication immoral and bad people, you want to have money so that you can be seen as moral and good and you shouldn’t question or criticize those who have money because they are moral and good”).

At least that’s the way I see it. The framework theory seems to hold, though I worry that I’m twisting the theory to fit the conversation, and I’d like to get some alternative thoughts on the matter.

by Sam Wilkinson

Once, I was a graduate student pursuing a PhD in Political Science, a stupid idea for at least a thousand different reasons, perhaps most importantly my aversion to political science in general. I took a comprehensive exam in which I was expected to cite literature that the department had decided was important to the field. As I am wont to do, I insisted upon including a reference to Hunter S. Thompson’s “A Southern City With Northern Problems,” an essay he wrote about Louisville, Kentucky. It was an evisceration of his hometown, something written shortly after a more expansive and more widely read piece he wrote about the Kentucky Derby (“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”). Needless to say, my professors were not impressed, I was sent a not-so-subtle message that it might be time to move on, and I agreed.

Political science made a point of informing me via sledgehammer about the importance of its own literature. This isn’t a point that’s worth debating; every field has its books that greatly matter. I have to be honest though – political science books are painfully boring, especially the more modern ones, the ones that decided that emotion made books worse, the ones that decided that math made books better. This also isn’t a point worth debating, because I know that analysis matters and I know that math makes analysis easier or better or both.

But the appeal of “A Southern City With Northern Problems” is that we’re not forced to waste time, first on understanding the dataset, and then on understanding how we’re going to flog it to death. Instead, we have a simple article in a writer makes one conclusion absolutely clear: this is bullshit.

You can engage with the article on its most immediate level, in which it becomes plainly clear that blacks in America are fighting a virtually unwinnable fight against a society filled with what Thompson describes as Southern and Northern racism, the Northern variety being the harder of the two to triumph above. The point he makes, even decades later, remains salient today, but it is the larger point that matters more, the point about the absurdity of the whole thing. Thompson emphasizes the dangerous entrenchment of cultural bias, the sort of bias that cannot be done away with legislatively, but instead can only crumble under the relentless pressure of time. Things will change, in other words, so long as the aggrieved are willing to wait.

Screaming about the inherent injustice of such a necessity does about as much good as walking to the ocean to complain about the tide. There is unfortunately no better solution, such that even when we witness great progress on particular social issues (such as a sitting president endorsing, albeit cautiously, gay marriage) we still run immediately into stories like the one today out of Virginia, in which a prosecutor whom everybody (”Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria!”) agreed was eminently qualified to hold the position was nonetheless rejected because he was gay.

I get it – such bigotry or “Reasonable religious objection!” or whatever we’re using to describe decisions such as these – require considerate volleys from dedicated opponents willing to fight such behavior for generations if need be. It makes sense to me that the slow and steady approach in which hearts and minds are changed over the course of weeks and months and years does more good than anything else. Still, there are times when it seems worthwhile to take a critical view of the entire situation and mutter disgustedly under your breath, “This is fucking ridiculous.”

The swearing is off-putting maybe. I’m 31; perhaps I should have grown out of such things. But I see no decent reason to avoid the language that most accurately describes the thing. Which doubles me back to Thompson’s essay; unlike the political science research that I so loathed for its utter lack of substantive impact upon the lives of breathing human beings, Thompson saw a broken situation and said so. Although he didn’t explicitly pivot from that situation to the much larger one at play throughout the United States (a situation that still plays itself out in a million little ways as human beings try desperately to draw lines between themselves and others, often on the most ridiculous of grounds), the criticism was clear: the culture matters more than the policy, and until that changes, the disunity of our society isn’t going to change.

On my shelves, I have dozens of books that political scientists consider valuable. I wonder if any of them does as effective a job communicating a message as that one slight essay does.

~by M.A.

Fresh off of reading Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent op-ed concerning the ever-shrinking GOP tent, I had the occasion to sit around for a while listening to one of the local highly-rated talk radio hosts for my area. After about 5 minutes, I decided to grab a notepad, write down the key words and phrases, and start keeping track of how often they were uttered by either the host or call-in guests.

This is all completely unscientific; it is possible it may not be all that representative of the show, being a randomly sampled segment on a random day based on those things I found interesting. Based on the limited listening I do, however, I am reasonably certain it is relatively representative not only of his show, but of a good percentage of right-wing talk radio in general.

Here is what I found:
- In the time I listened, the host referred to President Obama not less than 40 times. When he did refer to the POTUS, it was generally in a long diatribe. The most common (used 25 times) was “the miserable failure and one term muslim president Barack Hussein Obama”, with a special emphasis on the middle name.

- At least 50 times, callers or host referred to the POTUS as either a “socialist” or a “marxist.”

- At least 70 times, the phrases “judeo-christian nation” or “judeo-christian values” were mentioned.

- At least 30 times, homosexuals were referred to as either “abnormal” or “diseased.” This may have been a result of discussions surrounding the Dan Savage controversy and a general “homosexual activists” topic of the day.

- At least 20 times, members of the Tea Party were referred to as “people who love the USA” or “freedom-loving patriots.” By contrast, at least 30 times members of the Occupy Wall Street movement were referred to as “smelly unemployed hippies” or “America-hating communists.”

- At least 10 times, Michelle Obama was referred to as “the America-hating illegitimate first lady.”

Finally and most interesting to me: mentions of banks, business owners, and companies that have shipped thousands of jobs overseas were uniformly referred to as “job creators.” This was true even for companies that in the past few years shut down local operations and put a large number of people out of work in the process.

The ugly reality of this is that it is strong evidence of how far apart the two sides of politics approaching this election really are. To judge by this and by certain national shows, it’s become a daily regimen, somewhat akin to Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate. One national talk radio host tells his listener base “Three hours a day, everyday. That’s all we ask”; my church only asks me for approximately 1 hour per week.

The more I heard the host and his call-in commenters talk, the more I felt he had practiced his various codewords and phrases over and over and over again. There was a practiced mania to the way in which he could unfailingly refer to the current POTUS in sentence-long derogatory phrases. When a young man, presenting himself as an Iraq veteran, told the host that “if you can’t have respect for the man, have respect for the office of President and speak accordingly”, he was dump-buttoned and the host let out one of the most ugly rants of the show, complete with insinuation that the caller was taking stolen valor by falsely representing himself as a US military veteran because “no self-respecting military man would defend this marxist president.”

Now, this isn’t all on one side. There is controversy right now over Dan Savage’s comments towards the Bible, ironically at the same moment as the Mitt Romney campaign expelled an openly and activist homosexual staff member after furor from the extreme-right religious groups. Right-wing religious groups are also running a determined campaign against Jon Stewart and the Daily Show following a sketch satirizing GOP laws and attitudes regarding reproductive rights with the concept of a “vagina manger.” The comedy of Bill Maher regularly involves some pretty derogatory commentary regarding both conservatives in general and specific conservatives of the moment, including words that couldn’t be broadcast over the public airwaves or even on most cable channels. Just as there are “gotcha” cameramen following right wing politicians and news sites like Media Matters scouring the airwaves for incidents when right-wing pundits and politicians cross the line, there are plenty of “gotcha” cameramen and activists from the right wing scouring newsmedia and events for gaffes and comments the equivalent of “if you’re a democrat, you’re my enemy” from the other side. It’s very possible to dredge up a whole host of insults from the left wing towards the right, and even Schwarzenegger’s relatively centrist letter contains a comment about “those whose views, I think, make them sound like cavemen.”

On the whole, I found myself starting to get slightly sick listening to the talk radio show. There was a large amount of signaling, as callers and host alike repeated the key phrases to reinforce membership in the right wing to each other. There was an even larger amount of hate being channeled; membership wasn’t enough, it was important to have a clear and present hatred to those who were not like them. Listeners were told over and over: “we love America: ‘they’ hate America. ‘They’ are trying to destroy America: we are trying to righteously save it.” I had to wonder: how many of these people might I know? Was one of these people calling in to the station, frothing at the mouth while ranting about how the POTUS is really a muslim or a socialist or trying to destroy the country, one of my friends, neighbors, co-workers? Even more innocuous words – fairness, equality, honesty, patriotism, freedom – took on a whole new meaning in the context of the talk radio show. I was shocked to hear arguments that would not have been out of place in the days when the US was gripped by fear of the Red Menace.

Personally, my politics are somewhat left. I enjoy the “new rules” segment of Real Time with Bill Maher while ignoring most of the rest of his show in an attempt to avoid boredom. I enjoy the comedy of Stewart and Colbert while recognizing that if I were the target of some of those jokes, I probably wouldn’t be laughing quite as hard – in fact psychological studies have shown that the reaction would likely be much of what the radio audience seemed to be engaged in, a definitive backfire effect.

I wound up thinking of the biblical story of the Ephraimites. For lack of the ability to pronounce a single word correctly, 42,000 of them were slaughtered. In the context of the political arguments in 2012, how long before good friendships die when someone fails to respond correctly to a code word? How long before someone launches a fist at someone else’s face, based on one of the trigger words programmed into them by hours of talk radio listening each day? How well can friendships and family relationships survive in such a poisonous political atmosphere?

“Shibboleth.”

(Image: ‘Shibboleth’ by Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo.)

~by Sam Wilkinson

This was the quote that got me:

“If the GOP is going to win elections, it’s going to win them fair and square with real Republicans, not fake ones.”

That’s from (the apparently controversial) Tom Van Dyke. referring to Senator Richard Lugar’s loss in Indiana’s Republican primary. Lugar was beaten soundly by Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party favorite who is far more conservative than Lugar. This thrills Van Dyke, as Mourdock is the “real Republican” in the quote above. Lugar, we’re lead to believe, was fake.

Fake, in this case, is defined as moderate, which Lugar was by the slippery standards the Republican Party currently has for such things. Because Republican politics have lurched so sharply right in the past few years, what were once standard positions within the party became moderate; what were once conservative positions in the party became standard.

This isn’t to quibble with that, but rather, to question the idea that Lugar’s record renders him and his entire career as fake. If we are going to accept that reasoning, we need to deal with the fact that much of the Republican Party for its recent history has been filled to the point of overflow with these fakes. Spending increased under each of the party’s last three presidents:

1. Here is a brief discussion of Ronald Reagan’s relationships with deficits.
2. Here is a brief discussion (barely) of George H. W. Bush’s relationships with deficits.
3. Here is a brief discussion of George W. Bush’s relationships with deficits.

By the standard that seems to be at play here, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush count as fake Republicans. That seems odd. Equally odd is the fakeness of most elected Republicans, the ones who vote to cut taxes without offsetting spending cuts, the ones who voted for Medicare Part-D, the ones who voted for unfunded wars, the ones who voted for budget after budget that created deficits. By Van Dyke’s apparent standard, almost the entire collective of elected Republicans were in fact fakes. How is it possible that Republican voters across the nation were routinely duped into believing that the Republican candidates that they were voting for were in fact impostors there only to deceive them?

In other threads here, I have tried to argue that actions tell us more than words. It is a holdover from my days as a social worker I suppose; a kid who tells you he wants to change is not as trustworthy as the kid who shows you that he wants to change. I am biased in this way.

This bias leads to a confidence that the actions of elected politicians tell us more about their beliefs than their rhetoric ever could. To put that another way, we should assume that any politician who claims to believe in one thing but routinely supports legislation that produces its polar opposite is almost certainly lying to us. What other conclusion can we reasonably draw?

And yet Van Dyke presents us with an alleged dichotomy that exists between “real” and “fake” Republicans, as if decades of financial malfeasance can simply be written off as the behavior of fugazis who have somehow infiltrated the party to the point of being the overwhelming majority of its elected politicians. The point here is not to battle with Van Dyke about his evisceration of Lugar, a politician who said one thing about deficits and routinely did quite another. The point is to wonder why we would assume that Lugar was the fake of the two. If Mourdock is serious about the things he claims to believe – and let’s be honest: he will almost certainly abandon these deeply held principles should he manage to get to Washington and serve under a Republican president – then he is outlier to the Republican Party’s long history of paying lip-service to debt-reduction while exploding it at every imaginable opportunity. It is Mourdock who currently stands as the fake; Lugar, by contrast, was everything that the party has stood for in practice.

by Sam Wilkinson

I have never seen the movie Alien from beginning to end. I have seen the entire movie, but only ever in pieces. I can’t bring myself to watch it in one go, if only because it is so incredibly terrifying. That is a testament to the movie’s creators. Amongst the reasons I find the film so profoundly troubling is captured here.

Because the movie was so successful, it spawned sequels, one of which was good, the rest of which really weren’t and then, having been sufficiently flogged, the field was allowed to go, for a few years anyway, fallow. But now we find ourselves on the precipice of Prometheus, Alien’s sort-of prequel. That issue – whether or not the film is a proper prequel – has been bandied about since the film’s
production was introduced. The film’s producers have danced around the issue; its Wikipedia page issue describes Prometheus as a “separate story that precedes the events of Alien but which is not directly connected to the films in the Alien franchise.”

Uhh…okay. If there isn’t going to exist a direct connection between the upcoming film and the legendary franchise, there certainly are plenty of callbacks to the original, both in the film’s trailers and in Prometheus’s other marketing materials. Two promotional videos, for example, practically scream Alien: one is a TEDTalk given by Peter Weyland (presumably a reference to the insidious Weyland-Yutani corporation of the film franchise, the company that amongst other things ordered its android Ash to lead the Nostromo’s crew to its slaughter), the other is an advertisement for a David 8 android (which recalls both Ash and Aliens more friendly android Bishop). The trailer also hints at the original, what with the horseshoe shaped spacecraft that the Nostromo’s crew was summoned to explore and the presence of a morally suspect company representative (Charlize Theron inherits the roll from Aliens’s Paul Reiser, one of the stranger sentences ever written in the English language).

There are a myriad of reasons to object to prequels and sequels (the naked pursuit of money, the diminishing returns, and the suppression of original projects all come immediately to mind), but one of the most appealing to me is the damage that can be done by the introduction of additional information to a mythology. Information in it of itself isn’t necessarily bad of course but just as surely there are times when what we know is enough, and in fact, when knowing more is precisely the last thing we need. There was almost universal excitement for the Star Wars prequels, or at least until they’d actually been experienced. “When the lights came up though, something had changed. Something had
broken. The ideas were good, I kept saying as we left the theater and drank for hours afterward.”

The reason I find Alien so terrifying is that everything in it makes sense in a way that everything in most movies does not. It is reasonable for them to investigate the distress signal. It is reasonable for them to violate the quarantine protocol in an attempt to save Kane. It is reasonable for them to try to kill the alien. It is reasonable for Ash to be betraying them all. It is reasonable for Parker and Lambert to go for supplies. It is reasonable for Ripley, who rightfully recognized at the outset that bringing Kane on board was a bad idea, to be the movie’s only survivor. Because we know so little about what’s going on, what we do know and what we learn seems reasonable. In fact, at every moment that one might reasonably have a question, there is a reasonable answer on offer. This is true because at that point, the larger mythology of Alien didn’t yet exist, and fortunately, sequels can easily be ignored when it comes to the information that they add.

But the introduction of a prequel, one that seems to hint at the world as it was before the first Alien movie, threatens all of that, because the information it will introduce would presumably have had some influence over the decisions made aboard the Nostromo. It will become harder to imagine that the planetoid was unknown, it will become harder to believe that the threat was misunderstood, it will become harder to believe that nobody understood that Ash was an android, it will become harder to accept the Nostromo’s entirely obsolete technology, etc. These are amongst the key components of a classic film. Prometheus’s trailer has already introduced some of these questions, and that’s before anybody has actually seen the movie.

In short, I wonder what good can come from this sort of prequel. In the link I offered above, the one to the six-panel comic strip that captures briefly the movie’s appeal and its pain, its creator praises the movie for being a film about “a group of unlucky working stiffs having the worst week ever” and objects to the idea that Alien should have been seen as anything more. Hollywood can’t help itself of course, but I still enjoy imagining a world in which it could.

~by Conor P. Williams

I. What’s wrong?

Remember back, if you can, to January 2009. It seemed to be a completely untainted transformational moment. To hear the Beltway chatter, this was the final unraveling of the Reagan Era and the dawning of a new progressive movement that could redeem the Bush Administration’s multifarious failures. Four years on, and those memories are sepia-stained by an infusion of Tea Party vitriol. Indeed, for all that 2009 resembles the Left’s current situation, it could be a story from the original American progressives a century ago.

American leftists are divided on what caused the collapse. Yes, our current national challenges are vast. Yes, the Bush Administration left the economy and our global standing in even worse repair than most realized. Yes, American politics is pendular—it usually repays a list to the left with an ensuing roll to the right. All of these are facts, though there’s little that progressives of the electoral class of 2008 could have done to avoid or alter them.

But if the eclipse of the new progressive era has many causes, one stands out: the American Left has no coherent or compelling moral vision to justify its policy aims. It frequently can’t articulate why it is it believes what it does. Leftists are philosophically adrift. To a substantial degree, this is because American liberalism has become a haven for wonks. Many prominent leftists seem to believe that political debates are won and lost by econometric analysis. This undercuts their willingness (and their capacity) to justify their projects.

Take President Obama’s various defenses of health care reform, for example. He only emphasized the justice of the effort after first emphasizing that it would save the country money (and that many prior presidents had failed to fix the health care system). By the time he got around to defending its moral worth, his opponents had conclusively painted health care reform as a dictatorial power grab. Even though conservative rhetoric about “state socialism” and “death panels” was egregiously untrue, it was still a powerful moral indictment of the president’s (alleged) goals. The president explained that health care reform would work, and his opponents replied that it was unjust. Obama carried the votes and still lost the public debate.

Of course, wonks are sometimes essential. Once everyone’s on board with a political objective—developing green jobs, say—wonks assess the efficiency of the available policy options. But they have little to say to someone who doubts that the given objective is worth pursuing. They’re more or less out of ammunition. “Coal is the energy of the past! What about our natural resources?” the wonks splutter. “Ethanol is an emerging market!” Without any principled explanation of why Americans ought to sacrifice their dollars or short-term comfort, it’s a rhetorically toothless position.

Why? Political arguments are always about both means and ends, but wonks think almost exclusively about means. Though there are plenty of efficient policy proposals out there, we can’t choose one unless we’ve settled the ends we want to pursue. For example, eliminating the Department of Education would reduce federal paper consumption, but most of us would argue that this is a wrongheaded approach to fiscal and education policy. However, if we’re trying to support the American logging industry, a ban on federal workers’ email usage might do the trick. We can’t really measure a proposal’s effectiveness unless we’ve settled the end we’re pursuing.

Even if we have a clearly-defined goal, the most efficient policies aren’t always the right policies. For example, if we want to promote economic growth for our ethnic community, it might be “effective” to slaughter or expel other ethnic groups, but most of us realize that efficacy is irrelevant when it leads to injustice. When a political fight boils down to a choice between “efficacy” and “freedom” (or “life,” or “dignity,” etc), the argument’s over. That’s because we always consider the ends we’re pursuing in terms of other powerful moral considerations.

We don’t pursue goals in a simple sequence or in isolation; when we choose a path, we consider (for example) whether it is just, compassionate, and efficient. We make political choices by weighing any number of incommensurable, competing goods against one another. For example, we balance mutual prosperity against individual freedom, the rule of law, human dignity, and much more. We evaluate our actual options in terms of our various moral ideals—“our moral vision.” Without a comprehensive, coherent moral vision, these sorts of arguments are easily overlooked. Contemporary leftists rarely reflect on their moral vision.

For comparison’s sake, take a gander at the conservative rhetorical armory. Many decry the last three years of right-wing foot-dragging, but few notice the rhetorical discipline sustaining it. Conservatives have spent many decades explaining that the federal government threatens freedom—this is a project that dates back at least to Barry Goldwater, if not before. The Right reaps the rewards of this discipline every day (while the country reaps the ugly economic consequences). They win public debates because they work exceptionally hard at setting the ethical parameters of discussion within the confines of their moral vision. This means that leftists usually start from a rhetorical deficit. Whatever else they think of conservatives’ anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government rhetoric, they can’t deny its appeal to a broad swath of the American population. This isn’t some stroke of conservative good fortune—it’s the product of decades of coordinated effort.

His own struggles notwithstanding, the president’s rhetoric is actually better organized than most left-wing leaders. Few leftists do this well—especially after Anthony Weiner’s self-incapacitation. That’s why exceptions like Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren attract so much attention. No one loves Warren because of her sophisticated understanding of the technical intricacies of federal regulation. On the contrary, they love that she is uniquely willing to make a strong moral case for liberalism.

The breakdown in the blogosphere is similar: from Ezra Klein to Matthew Yglesias to Mike Konczal and beyond, nearly all of the most prominent leftists are concerned with the technical details of public policy. Mainstream media pundits are no different: Paul Krugman occasionally ventures into justifying a left-wing vision for the future, but he is usually content to demonstrate the empirical debility of various conservative canards. E.J. Dionne’s communitarianism stands out as a lonely example of left-wing commentary with a vision.

Still not convinced that leftists have a justification problem? Take a gander at the resources that conservatives invest in developing a compelling moral vision to justify their objectives. The list of right-wing think tanks working these fields is long and diverse: the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, Claremont Institute, Liberty Fund, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and many other organizations all work on justifying why conservative policies are the moral answer to America’s troubles. Call it a vast right-wing conspiracy, call it the “Kochtopus,” call it whatever you’d like—but rest assured that it’s real. Conservatives take moral arguments seriously.

The left-wing response? Mostly crickets. There’s not much beyond the Progressive Studies Program (PSP) at the Center for American Progress (disclosure: I’ve co-authored several PSP essays with John Halpin). Most left-leaning think tanks spend their time on policy development and analysis. Scan their websites: you’ll see a rainbow of policy ideas with precious few moral arguments behind them. Check the event listings: you’ll see a panoply of roundtables on social media’s effects on elections, new strategies for improving federal foreign aid programs, comprehensive studies on teacher efficacy, and so on and so forth. You won’t find many events exploring why political leaders or voters ought to care.

 II. How did this happen?

 When (and why?) did leftists get so uncomfortable with mounting a moral defense of their vision for the country? It’s partly due to a division within the American Left—one which philosopher Richard Rorty spelled out in Achieving Our Country. Some leftists are concerned with addressing public exclusion or bigotry. Rorty called them the “cultural left.” Other leftists are more concerned with preventing economic exploitation, defending collective bargaining rights, and defending progressive taxation. Rorty termed them the “reformist left.”

Each of these projects requires a different approach. The contemporary cultural left often aims to limit the scope of government. Those facing public intolerance fundamentally want to be left alone. Whatever else they support, cultural leftists want government out of their bedrooms and medical dispensaries. But hands-off government doesn’t fit the reformist left’s project. Reformists are concerned with protecting the American middle class from wealthy rapaciousness. They argue that democracy needs a baseline of economic justice to survive. As we’ve learned over the last few decades, even minimal levels of equality disappear without government regulation.

The reformist left has always aimed to rehabilitate the American tradition, while the cultural left hopes to redeem and supercede its blemishes. Reformist leftists generally frame their arguments in terms of restoring the American democratic wager. They often take American archetypes as their guiding lights, from Jefferson’s “yeoman farmers” to the blue-collar middle class. Meanwhile, the cultural left’s focus on sadism led naturally into cultural criticism. By exposing and delegitimizing sadistic treatment of African-Americans, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups of human beings, the cultural left highlighted the American tradition’s sins.

It’s hard to develop a compelling moral vision with this disagreement at the core. Should government be vilified? Defended? Does it empower us? Does it limit freedom? It’s no wonder that the answer is muddled: “All of the above, but not all of the time!” Since leftists can’t agree on these questions, they’ve stopped trying to answer them.

This is hardly all. Many leftists also suffer from victors’ complacency. Whatever else divides the cultural and reformist wings, most agree that history is progressing (hence the resuscitation of the term “progressive”) towards leftist goals. Why waste time explaining your objectives when history’s on your side? After all, cultural leftists can proudly point to a long-running American trend towards broader tolerance of humans of all races, genders, and sexual orientations. Meanwhile, reform leftists could (until the 1980s) proudly celebrate decades of increasing social mobility. Leftists won big chunks of the twentieth century—and promptly forgot that victories don’t come cheap. Leftists of all stripes are only just waking up to the fact that history doesn’t move in a single direction.

There’s undoubtedly more behind left-wing discomfort with moral arguments. Here are a few other possibilities:

• Perhaps it’s the legacy of the original American progressives’ enthusiasm for political science. John Dewey, progressivism’s leading intellectual, argued that Americans could save democracy from the nineteenth century’s ills simply by applying the scientific method to politics (and ethics).

• Perhaps it’s due to the proliferation of technical policy degrees and jobs requiring these credentials. In the professional political world, an M.P.P. (Masters in Public Policy) usually trumps a liberal arts degree.

• Finally, perhaps it reflects neo-liberalism’s enormous influence on recent American politics. Neo-liberals accept conservative accounts of political economy, which makes alternative conceptions of political economy both unnecessary and unconvincing.

The list of possible causes is endless, but the wonky left is clearly here to stay. Fortunately, its technical work is necessary to political success. Unfortunately, it is not sufficient on its own. Political success requires both facts and persuasion. These reinforce one another. So—how do leftists rejuvenate their moral rhetoric?

III. What’s the lesson?

Leftists of all stripes need to put more thought and resources into defending their moral vision from increasingly radical conservative arguments. If they don’t, political irrelevance will be the rule, not the exception. But how?

Here’s an obvious first step: leftists need to reverse the Reaganomics equation. For thirty years, conservatives have argued that politics preys upon individual freedom—which they usually view in economic terms. They view humans as primarily economic beings, which permits them to denigrate politics. Most American conservatives believe that government hovers parasitically above humans’ natural producing, trading, and consuming activity. That’s why they believe that every political problem is best abandoned to market forces. If leftists have the argument within these confines, they’ll win only by default—when conservatives are hamstrung by catastrophic baggage like the Bush Administration’s compulsive mismanagement or wholesale candidate ineptitude (Cf. O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, etc).

Instead, leftists should remind Americans that politics is a primary human activity. The politics we have affects the economic activity that we get. In other words, actual liberty rests upon public institutions. Life isn’t freer without government—it’s chaotic. Markets only work in the presence of public goods like social peace, a working infrastructure, untainted common resources like air and water, and much more. Stable and effective political institutions make modern economic life possible. Absent government, markets cannot function, develop, or grow. From Aristotle to the original American Progressives, numerous political philosophers have argued that political institutions are a prerequisite for meaningful individual liberty and robust economic activity.

Fortunately, leftists have made this argument before (and lonely exemplars like Elizabeth Warren and E.J. Dionne still do). For example, the Left had to justify a public safety net before it could be built. When energy companies resisted regulation of leaded gasoline in the name of free markets, leftists argued that public health was a collective and individual good worth protecting. Leftists explained how government action was linked to moral principles like freedom, justice, equality, and prosperity.

Such arguments have huge potential. They allow leftists to shift the ground of political arguments by refusing to define government in opposition to individual liberty. This reveals debates over the size of government to really be debates over the type of community life we want. Cultural leftists are often most interested—and justly so—in establishing a decent society where differences are tolerated. While this often requires less government, that’s not always the case. Civil rights legislation is proof positive that properly configured public institutions can actually encourage cultural pluralism. Put simply, if leftists effectively explain how public institutions make freedom possible, they can focus on arguments about the quality of these institutions instead of getting bogged down in arguments over the quantity of regulation.

But in the post-Citizens United world, it’s not enough for an idea to be good. Only ideas with organizational backing get a public hearing. Leftists must build a counterweight to balance conservative investment in developing strong moral arguments. This sort of energy isn’t spontaneous. It takes committed resources. When prominent conservatives—from the Heritage Foundation to Glenn Beck to The National Review—launch wild-eyed attacks equating the American Left with Marxism, fascism, elitist technocracy, support for eugenics, etc, the Left needs to defend its history and its moral vision (to say nothing of its backbone). This requires progressive institutions that can balance the slate of conservative think tanks doing this work.

It all boils down to a simple problem: leftists need to think harder about why they believe what they do. Elected leftists and left-wing pundits should be prepared to creatively (and repeatedly) explain why their political goals are worthwhile—rather than solely trotting out novel policy tools for pursuing them. As the world clambers from the ruins of recent economic troubles, this case is easier than ever to make. It’s time to re-explain liberalism to a country that’s frustrated and ripe for its message. Otherwise leftists will be doomed (or damned?) to have the 2012 argument on conservatives’ turf.

~

Conor Williams is a freelance writer and a Doctoral Candidate in Georgetown University’s Government Department. Past work published by Dissent, The Washington Post, The Center for American Progress, and elsewhere. See more at http://www.conorpwilliams.com or on Twitter: @conorpwilliams.

~by James Hanley

Fellow reader Stillwater, responding to my critique, writes:

you [Hanley] keep insisting there is this significant difference between our theories, our policies, our preferred values, our analytical methods. If there isn’t a category difference captured by all those distinctions, then we’re talking about subtle shading on the edges of things. But if there is a category difference captured by all that, then the lumping seems entirely appropriate since there are clear-cut divisions distinguishing two schools of thought on these matters.

That’s a worthwhile question, and I want to look at it in a round-about way. Consider the image at the top of this post.

It’s the result of a 20 question ideological placement quiz associated with a leading American Government textbook. The flag shows where (the authors say) the general public falls, and the dot is my placement. In response to Stillwater’s objection, I have two questions:

1. Who’s the real libertarian, A, B, C, D, or me?
2. What’s the difference between D and Y?

I’m not going to attempt an answer those questions, but I’m going to make a request. Would League readers please take the quiz the image comes from and send me their results, while self-identifying–regardless of where the quiz places you–as liberal, libertarian, conservative or communitarian? It will be easiest for me if you send me the image of your results, but that requires a screen-capture program (you can’t just right click and save the image), but you could also send me the numerical results that are reported under the image. I will not identify any person’s placement, but I would like to see we find self-identified libertarians clustering distinctly from self-identified liberals and self-identified conservatives. If you have some friends who would be willing to take the quiz, too, please invite them to do so (more data is generally good–at least I don’t anticipate hitting the point where it is not).

Some of you will have criticisms of the quiz. I don’t claim it’s perfect, but I do claim that of all the ideological placement quizzes I’ve found on the ‘net, it’s the best one (methodologically, it’s got the best-written questions).

If you are willing to do this, and I really hope you are, please email your results to james{dawt}e{dawt}hanley{at}gmail.com.

By Sam Wilkinson

In my (unpopular) arguments about the relativism with which I approach art – that all art is equal, that all consumers are equal, and that nobody is substantively wrong – I have repeatedly struggled to find a way to make the argument in a persuasive and compelling fashion. This, I suppose, is my own failing.

If I have remained ineffective at convincing people of the rightness of my position, I have remained equally unconvinced by the positions they have presented to counter my own. My own response to arguments about hierarchies within art are that such structures tend in almost every example to overlap with remarkable consistency to whatever the person doing the advocating happens to personally enjoy. It is just the damndest coincidence.  (I have, predictably, other objections, but they are not for this post.)

Instead, I present the video below. It is a video of a man who seems to spend most of his days detached from the world, a detachment that can seemingly only be broken by what would appear to be the music of his younger, healthier days:

His before (a quiet man with his head down, either unable or unwilling to speak) and after (a dancing man with his eyes open, answering questions), is as simultaneously shocking as it is uplifting. While the playing of music certainly would not do for all people what it does for this man, the idea that it might is pleasant thing to think about. If we can agree on nothing else, we can almost certainly agree upon this.

But there are implications even here for our back and forth about art. Specifically, how do we deal with the fact that this man’s favored music is performed by artists (like Cab Calloway, whose most famous song is below) who do not appear on the lists compiled by the sort of aficionados that various people here (including, most compelling, Rose Wodehouse) generally reference when it comes to the assemblage of canons that ought to be understood as bodies of work superior in nature?

Is it that this man is simply ignorant to the greater music available to him? Perhaps. Is it that this many is simply intellectually incapable of understanding how much better other music is? Perhaps. But surely we can agree that both of those are egregiously ugly conclusions. The problem with insisting upon the hierarchies of art though is that one of these two conclusions has to be true. If the hierarchies are true, then there has to be some problem with the man or else he would not preference Cab Calloway in the way that he obviously does. But if these hierarchies aren’t true? Then this becomes simultaneously easier and less judgmental. We can acknowledge that, for this man, Calloway is the peak of the musical achievement, even if this is not the experts’ conclusion. Understanding Calloway’s superiority within this man’s world then might help us to understand how the music can be important enough to him to literally open his eyes.

Why then pivot from that bit of reasonableness back to a conclusion where this man’s experience exists as some sort of outlier, as if arts of all kinds do not create precisely the same emotional response in all of us? For the record, when I argue for relativism, I am not arguing against the ordering of works of art within given critical schemes, but rather, the acknowledgement that those critical schemes are the creations of human beings almost certainly driven by their biases, their preferences, their pleasures, and their pains. They have arrived at their own lists of accomplished jazz (like this one,or this one, or this one). But the man in the video is driven in precisely the same way, by his biases, by his preferences, by his pleasures, and his pains. He has arrived at Cab Calloway.

Neither of them is right generally. They are, instead, right for themselves specifically. Instead of insisting upon the superiority of some of those conclusions, we should revel in the peculiarity of our individuality which, incidentally, seems to exist long after the suffering of life takes over physically.

by Renee

Hi there! Welcome to my sci-fi-political lab. That’s right! We use 24th century technology today to answer those tough questions about politics. No, I’m not a political scientist or a physicist – just your standard mad scientist – but thanks for asking. What can my equipment do? Well – I’m not sure I can explain – maybe I can show you. First we need a topic . . .

The commentariat sure seems interested in the Supreme Court decision regarding the ACA individual mandate these days. Maybe we could explore that? The conventional wisdom seems to be that the conservative justices will vote to strike down the mandate while the liberal justices will vote to uphold it. The case will probably hinge on Kennedy’s swing vote. (Please remember the part where I’m not a political scientist – this is not an analysis, just the CW).

I know that thought experiments about “what if” scenarios get tiring after a while. But today you are in luck! That machine you are leaning against (yes, it would be better if you don’t touch that) is the Counter-factuator! It allows us to see what is happening in worlds that differ from ours because of some past fork in the road. Hmm? Yes, yes, everybody wants to see what would have happened if those shots in Dallas went wide. I’m sick and tired of it. No, I will just type into the navigation unit . . . Bush . . . 2005 . . . health care reform vice social security reform . . . OK . . . let me spin this large wheel that appears to serve no purpose . . . and . . . could you throw that switch that is labeled cyclotron? Great. Here we go . . . I’m starting to get an image . . . and audio . . . adjust tracking . . .

————————-

The year is 2005. President Bush is in the White House. Republicans control both chambers of Congress (having gained seats in both in the 2004 election). The Supreme Court is composed of 4 liberals, 3 conservatives, and 2 swing votes (both appointed by Reagan). The country is involved in two wars. Iraq is starting to fall apart. Liberals are increasingly furious with Bush’s “imperial presidency”: Abu Ghraib is starting to make the news, the Plame leak is still in recent memory, the status of prisoners in Gitmo is being questioned, waterboarding hasn’t yet been banned, Kucinich has introduced legislation to impeach Cheney, etc. The partisan divide seems to be growing wider every day. Liberals are proudly putting up “Dissent is Patriotic” stickers. Man – all of this feels really familiar.

Zooming in a little closer we see the President himself in the oval office. Let’s listen: “All right. Now heads is for Social Security reform and Tails is for Healthcare reform. (flip). Healthcare reform it is.” Wow. He is the decider. We fast forward and see him explaining to the nation that the medicare/medicaid system is unsustainable and needs to be revised. Bush calls in the CEO’s and lobbyists and has closed-door meetings with Pharma, major Hospitals, and Big Insurance. He calls in Speaker Hastert and Senate Majority leader Frist and delegates the writing of the legislation to them. They announce that the goal is to eliminate or drastically reduce the size of Medicare and Medicaid. To make it happen they decide to borrow from a plan that the conservative Heritage Foundation has come up with to expand coverage. This plan includes a mandate that all individuals carry health insurance through a private company — if you don’t have coverage than you must pay a penalty (raising taxes is anathema to Republicans) through the IRS. But the plan expands coverage by requiring insurers to cover people, regardless of prior-existing conditions. Democrats derisively refer to the plan as Dubyacare (Bushcare simply has no ring to it) and do everything they can in their minority position to stop the bill.

Unfortunately, the resolution of the counter-factuator is not good enough to actually read the bill (and who would want to!). But from what we can make out of the national conversation: Dubyacare has the individual mandate/pre-existing conditions combination. It allows the elderly to use Medicare, but will slowly phase it out over the years. The poor will be directly subsidized to buy private insurance and Medicaid will also be eliminated.

Although the Democrats throw every possible legislative roadblock in the way, they simply don’t have the votes to stop Dubyacare and it passes the house by a narrow margin. The Left is apoplectic. “How can the government force you to contract with big insurance companies? This is just another case of Bush delivering our country to be governed by corporations.” So they craft a legal argument that the individual mandate is unconstitutional under the commerce clause. After all, if the government can force you to buy insurance because it wants to privatize the healthcare system, what’s to stop it from mandating that each person buy a handgun and begin to privatize our national security? What are the limits to government mandating anything it wants? The Right meets this challenge with scorn – nobody is suggesting that the government could make you buy a gun. That would be ridiculous. Besides where in the constitution does it say that the federal government can manage health insurance like Medicare and Medicaid? So this plan allows the elderly and poor to escape the tyrannical monopoly of the government systems and increases liberty and freedom of choice. The mandate is a a tiny price to pay for that.

Ahh – now it is time for the oral argument in front of the Supreme Court. The government lawyers seem to really getting hammered by the liberal justices on what limits government would have if they uphold the mandate? Justice Breyer brings up the “Gun Mandate” argument and the government concedes that it would have the power to mandate gun ownership, but that it would be very bad policy. Liberals are overjoyed that things went so well during the oral argument.

The conventional wisdom is that the conservative justices will vote to uphold the mandate, the liberal justices will vote to strike down the mandate and the case will be decided by the swing justices.

I can’t wait to see what happens . . . the court is about to hand down the decision . . . Wait! What is happening! Everything is growing fuzzy . . .Was that the TARDIS that just flew by? . . . Oh no . . . Not Again! FISH FISH FISH! Run for your life! The whole lab is going to blow . . . . . . . . [Explosion].

——————————————

Dang. That’s the third Counter-factuator I’ve lost in as many months. I was sure that counter-balancing the flux capacitor with a Mark III Boseian condenser would do the trick. But it must be something else . . . .

Anyway. What do you think happened? Was the conventional wisdom correct that the liberal justices would vote to strike down the law while the conservative justices would uphold it? If so, isn’t it weird that that is exactly the opposite of the conventional wisdom of our world? If not, why do you think that is?

This whole Counter-factuator experience has really disillusioned me. First, it means I have to build a new freaking machine. But also, it suddenly seems to me like the court justices vote for their preferred policy outcome. Whereas before I was convinced that they were really applying the process of law to come to a decision. Am I wrong? I hope so. Please tell me why . . .