Quiet Declarations

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had any trouble wrapping my mind around the U.S. budget problem or the available solutions — I simply scale the national debt figures as if they were for an individual household, and all becomes clear.

Let’s assume the U.S. government is an average U.S. family — the Joneses — earning the median household income of $52,000.  Last year, the Joneses spent $85,000.  To make matters worse, the Joneses are currently holding $337,000 in debt, of which $80,000 is the interest alone.

The Joneses aren’t sure exactly how they’re going to balance the budget for next year.  Mrs. Jones thinks they should cut back on lottery tickets, and Mr. Jones is thinking about asking his boss for a 30% raise.  Probably they’ll compromise eventually by buying only half their normal number of lottery tickets and asking the boss for a 20% raise.  If the boss is extremely generous, the economy improves, and advances in technology mean the HDTV they intend to buy will be $100 cheaper, they’ll probably end up earning $62,000 and spending $75,000 next year.

Note that, even if we assume that Mr. Jones can extort his boss for a raise at gunpoint (which he could if we keep the analogy consistent), his company only generates $350,000 or so in annual revenue, most of which has to go to normal business operations or the whole thing will fold.

Let’s say you were advising the Joneses on their financial situation.  What would you tell them to do?  Personally, I’d buy them a copy of Dave Ramsey’s book, black out the title with a magic marker, and tell them it’s a copy of the Bible.

Or, to be more accurate, one reason I don’t respect partisans who believe party loyalty is some sort of virtue.  Radley’s analysis certainly corroborates what I’ve seen as well.  The “if only I could get elected/re-elected/everyone who agrees with me elected/my party returned to power/a filibuster-proof majority/the other guy’s party discredited to the point that their ideas aren’t even part of the debate, then I can really start doing good things for the world” is a special kind of schizophrenia associated with people who respect parties more than ideas.

I really do appreciate the sentiment of these analyses — now that the health care legislation has passed, it seems like we should test the hypotheses of health care proponents.  If even their most conservative predictions bear out, that might well be an argument to support other policies that are presently contentious.  If their predictions turn out to be a colossal overstatement, they should eat crow and we should look for a better way.

The only problem with asking proponents of this bill to relocate their money in the direction of their mouth is this fundamentally misunderstands what just took place.  For the vast majority of the ground troops, the calculus wasn’t that x billion over x years is okay if it saves x lives and reduces the debt by x percent.  The calculus was either “universal enrollment good, costs be damned” or it was “Democrats good, Republicans be damned.”  Everything else was daily talking points to persuade independents.

Libby puts it another way:

Supporting health care reform is kind of like turning your twitter avatar green, or having one of those Jesus fish or Free Tibet stickers on your car; it’s supporting a cause that you think is righteous, without personally doing or sacrificing anything. Much like an audience at a play, you know how you expect events to play out morally and logically, and when reality agrees with your expectations – math and finances be damned – you’re happy and you feel like justice has been served. If not, then a great injustice has occurred, the nation is ungovernable, the other team is being underhanded and deceptive, and the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Don’t believe me?  Ask yourself how many ardent supporters of this bill would have backed off if the CBO estimate had come back a trillion dollars higher.  (Many ardent supporters lamented that the bill wasn’t expensive or sweeping enough, you will recall.)  And I’m not even trying to pass moral judgment here — maybe achieving universal enrollment or Democrats beating Republicans really are victories worth limitless cost.  I don’t think so, but I suppose I could be mistaken.  I’m just saying that, short of actual catastrophe, I don’t think ardent supporters would care one bit if the figures they cited in order to get the bill passed turned out to be horribly incorrect.  The bill passed, end of story.

The Post reports on Nancy Pelosi’s comments Monday:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”

As of this writing, InTrade currently shows 77.5 on the question of whether health care will become law by the end of June, which is up considerably from Scott Brown’s election.  It turns out if you’re willing to skirt the 60-vote obstacle, ignore polling data, eliminate transparency, and risk getting your entire congressional representation voted out of office in November, a president really can bring people together to get things done in Washington.

I would have preferred Gerard ask why leftists are so condescending toward all non-leftist views, but the point remains largely unchanged: anyone who disagrees must be sinister, stupid, prejudiced, or driven by emotion at the expense of reason.

I won’t quote much from the article as it’s better read in its entirety, but I will excerpt a fairly incensed critic of the article in Matt Yglesias:

I have a condescending attitude toward this op-ed. Of course I think my views are correct and based on fact and reason. If I thought my views weren’t correct and based on fact and reason, I would adopt different views—correct fact-and-reason based ones. Does Alexander really think that conservatives don’t think their views are correct? Does Alexander not think his own views are correct? Not based on fact? Not based on reason? I’m not sure it’s possible to be condescending enough to this op-ed.

Look, Matt’s point in isolation is impossible to disagree with, but it also completely misrepresents what Gerard is saying.  At least to me, it seems Gerard is pointing out that by-and-large leftists aren’t seriously entertaining the right’s positions simply because they aren’t the left’s positions, and then finding post-hoc excuses to avoid thinking more critically about them.

And by the way, I don’t want to put Matt into this category directly.  Pompous as he is about his own views, he takes the right’s arguments about as seriously as any mainstream leftist pundit, and he deserves credit for that.

Gerard’s article reminds me of a different but nonetheless excellent point by Will Wilkinson in a debate with Ezra Klein over the use of the filibuster:

I may be mistaken, but I could swear that Ezra has portrayed Democratic support for health-care reform as grounded in a good-faith desire to secure social justice, reduce suffering, and save lives. Well, whatever that incentive is, that’s the one congressional Republicans have to help Democrats reduce unemployment and avoid fiscal disaster.

[I]t is not really surprising, is it, that Democrats and Republicans disagree about the policies that would best achieve these aims? Indeed, these differences help explain why the Democratic and Republican parties are different parties. If the Democrats tomorrow announced support for the kind of employment-stimulating and deficit-reduction policies generally favored by Republicans, we’d suddenly see once “difficult” legislation sailing through the Congress. But given the reality that the Democratic Party and its supporters think these are the wrong policies, what incentive does the majority party have to help the minority party lower the unemployment rate and sign on to painful decisions that will avert a fiscal crisis?

…

When Lieberman effectively nixed the public option, Ezra suggested that callous indifference to mass death was at work. If supermajoritarian rules are bringing this kind of monstrous pathology into play, then by all means let’s get rid of them! But, as it is, those rules aren’t even capable of preventing the congressional majority from imposing massive unpopular institutional changes on a reluctant public. That Ezra sees these evidently manageable constraints on the majority party as a positive danger to the public interest suggests that he sees opposing views as unworthy of respect.

If Gerard is correct, one problem leftists will run into in holding these kinds of views about non-leftists is that they will tend to accept their arguments as self-evidently true by any coherently-thinking person, and they won’t focus their energy on strengthening the intellectual foundations of their arguments.  Indeed, Gerard suggests that conservatives may be gaining ground in this area:

Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush’s aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin’s college-hopping and occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning think tank scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.

(I would have called that scholarship more libertarian than conservative, but whatever.)

On the question of who’s proposing a more rigorous intellectual defense of their principles, I have to side with Gerard here — and hopefully not because I’m sinister, stupid, prejudiced, or driven by emotion at the expense of reason.

I’d never support this as a mandate, but I’d gamble that if every public official elected, appointed, or hired was required to test competency in ten books relevant for the office — five chosen by the left and five chosen by the right (or three by each and four by libertarians if you want to go with the Boaz and Kirby data) — you certainly wouldn’t see subsequent intellectual movement toward the left.  Notwithstanding how public choice theory could very seriously undercut the results of my experiment, of course… but if you buy public choice, you’re probably already on the way to proving my point.

How would you handle a disagreement with a colleague who is normally very reasonable, but seems to become unreasonable with respect particular issues?  I’m not talking about deep-seated positions on hot-button issues like abortion, where civility seems to evade everyone.  I’m talking about an acquired inability to examine certain issues with the same lens that seems so effective in reasoning through other issues.  I’m talking about positions so unreasonable that deep down inside the person in question probably knows the position is unreasonable, but still has no intention of giving it up.

This seems to happen most often once someone has concluded that a particular side is disingenuous.  For example, I don’t get the sense from Paul Krugman’s writing that it’s possible to engage him in a reasonable discussion about Republicans, because he’s decided they are monolithically evil.  I suspect many people encountered doctrionnaire conservative or leftist family members like this over the holiday break.  And I wonder about which issues I’ve become this extreme myself; if one issue stands out more than others it’s probably my position toward soft paternalists, whose alleged selflessness I find myself increasingly calling into question.  Maybe I have others?  I dunno, you tell me.

My distaste for this behavior is one reason why I enjoy associating with moderate libertarians.  It’s definitely not that I always agree with them (although I seem to agree much more than I used to), but rather because the ideological foundation of their positions combined with their persistent minority political status necessitates advancing their views through reasonable debate.  Although this certainly doesn’t mean all libertarians are immune to the dilemma I presented; take, for example, the challenge of debating some anarchists who choose to draw the argument toward the “government as armed robber” analogy as quickly as possible.

This is really not a trivial issue.  I don’t believe taking a relativistic position, or no position at all, is all that useful in advancing an argument.  I much prefer the person who takes a side, attempts to defend it coherently, and revises her position should she find herself at some point unable to hold the line without reducing her argument to absurdity.  But to argue in this manner persistently without coming off as hostile or closed-minded is something of an art form that can be difficult to master.

So, do you pretty much stop arguing with someone once you realize it would take too long to find common ground?  Do you just keep your mouth shut and “agree to disagree?” Do you take pot shots whenever you can?  Or perhaps you seize every opportunity to reengage the argument until you’ve become “those guys” whose friends always have to change the subject?

Most importantly, do you ever call people out when their line of argumentation is unreasonable compared to how they approach other issues?  And if so, how does it usually turn out?

I don’t think it’s fair to conflate persistent obstructionism with being devoid of ideas.  Basically all major leftist public figures, not to mention a good number of libertarian and conservative ones, having been throwing around phrases such as “complete obstructionist nature of Republicans ” or “Republicans with no intention of solving any problems” (quotes lifted from the SEIU’s Andy Stern in this particular case), and it’s clear that they’re trying to find ways to say “support Democrats regardless of what they propose, because at least they have ideas.”

To be sure, the GOP doesn’t want to hand Congressional Democrats or the Obama administration anything resembling a legislative victory that they could campaign on in the next election.  Their obstructionism is absolutely a unified political strategy.  It’s also worth noting that in this climate it’s politically safer for a Congressional Republican who only agrees with 40% of a bill to vote against it, because right now the media is reporting on the GOP as a monolithic bloc whereas they’re writing long stories about the individual Democratic senators who are basically selling their votes.

But I disagree with the more general insinuation that a strategy of obstructionism is only pursued by people who have no interest in improving America.  The problem is that in this climate and for the issues currently on the table, the Overton window of political possibility has shifted away from more universally palatable ideas.  The GOP saw this firsthand when they did present a rival healthcare plan and were roundly laughed out of the room.  It’s a PR challenge, but not necessarily an intellectual or moral deficiency, to respond by attempting to hold the line until the political climate turns more favorable.

By the way, I do not mean to in any way suggest that I agree with the GOP’s healthcare plan, or that Republicans would actually focus on palatable ideas were they to return to the majority.  Most likely they’d find some dumbassness of their own to propose.  I’m simply saying that as a general rule, I think it takes a pretty narrow mind to claim that the absence of a politically feasable alternate plan, and the subsequent decision to be obstructionist, represent either a willful desire to be unproductive or an absence of legitimate ideas.

Some people get their news from The Economist, all I need is this Slate feature.  Check out several new updates since I last mentioned this guilty pleasure.

Frank Rich gets it right in today’s column — about Jimmy Carter, about Glenn Beck, and about pretty much everything else he says.  Maybe there are people out there for whom disagreeing with the president is about race, but it’s insultingly naive to believe that’s all it’s about.  I’m more inclined to agree with Rich: “[t]his is right-wing populism in the classic American style.”

Tyler offers up an intelligible (and more importantly, charitable) definition of progressivism, and Matt responds with his case for libertarianism.

I tried to keep the title of this post from being misleading.  I really did.

I get busy for a couple of weeks and Slate publishes three new feeds!  Read them here.

“Such a pleasant honeymoon — yet all we got was this lousy stimulus bill.”

A column worth reading by Michael Gerson.

The latest installment is here.

This is the best new semi-regular feature on Slate.  Previous entries here and here.  That is all.

This is precisely my view on judicial empathy:

Empathy is a vital virtue to be exercised in private life — through charity, respect and loving kindness — and in the legislative life of a society where the consequences of any law matter greatly, which is why income taxes are progressive and safety nets are built for the poor and disadvantaged.

But all that stops at the courthouse door. Figuratively and literally, justice wears a blindfold. It cannot be a respecter of persons. Everyone must stand equally before the law, black or white, rich or poor, advantaged or not.

Obama and Sotomayor draw on the “richness of her experiences” and concern for judicial results to favor one American story, one disadvantaged background, over another. The refutation lies in the very oath Sotomayor must take when she ascends to the Supreme Court: “I do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich…. So help me God.”

And, in the same article, this is precisely my view on what conservatives should do about Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation:

Make the case for individual vs. group rights, for justice vs. empathy. Then vote to confirm Sotomayor solely on the grounds — consistently violated by the Democrats, including Sen. Obama — that a president is entitled to deference on his Supreme Court nominees, particularly one who so thoroughly reflects the mainstream views of the winning party. Elections have consequences.

Read the whole thing.