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JONAH GOLDBERG
Editor-at-Large, National Review Online
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Posted 04.08.05 | 3:00 PM
Dear Jonathan,
Even though debate etiquette calls for me to go last in this thing, I was planning on letting your last entry be the end of it. But I just can't do it. The e-mail chatter was a factor, but the basic reason is that I think your final entry is more bogus and objectionable than your original essay or earlier debate entries. As I've said before I think you're a very sharp guy. There are plenty of policy areas in which I would defer to your greater expertise. But this is just plain shabby and leaves you in a more intellectually offensive position than the one you started out in.
Your entire argument depends on straw men and cherry-picking who you will claim as liberals and who you want to anoint as "true conservatives." That was my point in the beginning and it is doubly so now.
You write: "You want to focus on liberals such as the lynch mob chasing after Larry Summers. I prefer to focus on liberals like, well, Larry Summers."
Okay, Jonathan. Last time I checked mobs were groups of people far larger than the quantity of one. In all the movies I've seen depicting mobs chasing some poor soul or souls, the mobs were always much, much bigger than the prey they chased. (If they weren't, someone would say "Wait a minute! Let's chase them!") You say you want to focus on liberals like Larry Summers. You're cherry-picking, dude. In your original essay you spoke sweepingly about "liberals" and "liberalism" — not "some liberals" or "the best liberals" or the "smartest liberals" or "liberals like me," but liberals, period. Now you are referring to "smart, honest liberals." When I offered the example of liberals clinging to foreign aid long after the data doesn't support that, you didn't dispute it. You simply said there are researchers like Jeffrey Sachs who hold a more "subtle" view of the subject. Big whup. I think Sachs's views are less nuanced than you do, but let's stipulate that they're more nuanced than Van Gogh. Of course there are liberals who have nuanced views. But here again, you're cherry-picking. The "mob" of liberals ain't so nuanced.
Again, your original essay would have been very, very boring if you'd said that if God came down to earth and proved that conservative economics were correct that a handful of intellectually honest liberals you really respect would change their minds but most wouldn't. Yes, speaking sweepingly about liberals and conservatives was more provocative, but it was provocative because it was so inaccurate and unfair.
You also speak of "smart, honest conservatives." You write that the "crucial difference" between conservatives and liberals is that a "smart, honest conservative will not necessarily change his mind in the face of contrary data, while a smart, honest liberal will." This is just a cruder version of your original pronouncements about "true conservatives." In other words, if a self-described, committed conservative doesn't play to the stereotype you've cast, he's either not a "true conservative" or he's not smart and honest. Who the hell are you to be declaring that?
Your False Note
Conservatism is a far more complicated, nuanced, and often self-contradictory complex of ideas and sentiments than you are even remotely giving it credit for. But empiricism has always played an important part. "Example is the school of mankind," declared Edmund Burke, "and they will learn at no other." There are some conservatives who don't consider freedom the highest value, economically or even politically. They tend not to be from the American tradition, of course. Peregrine Worsthorne, for example, once wrote a fascinating essay entitled "How Freedom Enslaves Us All." (It's not on the web, but I discuss it a bit here.) Still, I think you're being fair when you speak sweepingly of conservatives' taking freedom as an end in itself. There are exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule.
But you do more than that. You elevate freedom to a level of importance far beyond any other value or principle. Intellectually, it's as if freedom is a melody you don't like and so you've isolated it amidst an entire symphony of arguments, motives, and explanations. Every time I try to explain to you that not all conservatives see things according to your prescribed caricature, you fall back in one way or another on this argument that, well, true conservatives see things exactly as you suggest.
You offer an interesting spin on The Public Interest's history (may she rest in peace) and we could have a fun discussion about that. But while I certainly agree with you that the neoconservatism the PI represented was less hostile to the welfare state than the folks at the Cato Institute would like, this is only an interesting point if one accedes to your pontifical power to excommunicate the inauthentic conservatives. Your own magazine has contributed mightily to the notion that the "neoconservatives" have taken over conservatism and/or the White House. Does that mean the White House is admirably un-ideological in your view? Or perhaps conservative ideology is about more than you allow.
Indeed, this is one of the hysterical ironies of your entire argument. While you complain that conservatives define limited and smaller government as the sine qua non of liberty and liberty as the sine qua non of conservatism, the conservative movement is in the midst of a wrenching debate about how Bush is a "big government conservative." Moderate republicans, libertarians, economic conservatives, and traditional conservatives are wrestling with each other and amongst themselves about what to do and say about "compassionate conservatism" and all of the bells and whistles that come with it. But despite your humble claim to be merely describing "the political world that we actually live in," you ignore this enormous herd of elephants in the corner. Indeed, while you can't resist zinging Bush for enacting, in your words (and mine), the "biggest entitlement expansion in four decades," you refuse to accommodate this fact into your own schema. Is Bush not a "true conservative"? What about Newt Gingrich? He supported that awful legislation too.
But forget about contemporary politics for a moment because they tend to muddy the distinctions you're claiming to clarify. Take the sainted Irving Kristol, the founder of The Public Interest. The guy was a central player in the rise of supply-side economics. More recently he's voiced quite a bit of skepticism about Darwinism. He's carried more water than Gunga Din for the conservative movement and his fingerprints (or DNA) can be found in almost every major conservative success of the last 30 years. By almost any liberal's definition of "conservative ideologue" he fits the bill. But in the hope of repeatedly banging square pegs into round holes, you suggest that he's less ideologically conservative than a "true conservative." Why? Because he's got an empirical bent.
Your Alternative Reality
In the same spirit you write, "The contemporary economic debate revolves around issues where conservatives have an a priori philosophical position, and non-conservatives don't." "Social Security," you write, "is a perfect example" of this schism. To bolster this point you write:
The distinguished conservative economist Robert Barro wrote a column a few years ago dismissing basically every empirical defense of privatization. But he still supported it. "In the end, I favor personal accounts for Social Security not because of the possible savings boost or the claimed superiority of rates of return," he wrote. "For me, the crucial points in favor of them are those regarding property rights and choice."
Jonathan, you've got terrible timing. The same week you wrote that, Barro wrote a column that begins:
I once thought personal accounts for Social Security were a good idea but have changed my mind. Personal accounts have some virtues, but the common arguments, both pro and con, are myths. Overall the accounts are a bad idea.
So much for the poster boy of conservatives who refuse to change their mind despite the data. By writing this, is Barro suddenly — abracadabra! — not a conservative anymore? You can't get over this hang-up about a priori principles even though you obviously have them yourself. What seems to bother you is that conservatives admit theirs.
Of course, I'm not conceding that you and Barro are right about Social Security and private accounts as an empirical matter. There are other distinguished economists who make strong, empirically grounded arguments about private accounts. Recent Nobel Prize winner Ed Prescott and Harvard's Marty Feldstein come to mind. (See anti-empirical Larry Kudlow here, by the way.) But, oh right, they don't count because your version of empiricism says that "true" economic conservatives, who ground their positions in facts and data, only live in the parallel universe where Spock has a goatee and the Federation is evil. In this corner of the space-time continuum they are a null-set.
Healthcare Boring, Losing Consciousness…
I'm not going to reopen the whole topic of healthcare. But I'd like to make some quick points. You assert — i.e., you don't demonstrate — that I'm wrong about the notion that our healthcare system could be called the best by some legitimate criteria. For the record, I think much of our healthcare system stinks. But you claim that the inefficiencies — i.e., investments into innovations don't equal better outputs — tolerated by conservatives are "bad" independent of any value judgments. Okay. So what? In that sense the inefficiencies tolerated by liberals — long lines, less choice, etc. — are bad regardless of value judgments, too. But how that means saying we have the best technology and the best doctors in the world is illegitimate is beyond me. If I said we have the best hotels and restaurants in the world, I don't have to take into account all hotels and all restaurants, do I? I can leave out Bob's Chuckwagon and the Motel Six with coin-operated beds, right? You want to score the healthcare system by the aggregate results for everybody. I think that's perfectly legitimate, but I think it's a way of understanding things through a prism of value judgments (egalitarianism, utilitarianism, etc.). I should also mention that many of the health problems in this country have less to do with the healthcare system per se and more to do with our lifestyles. That's one reason so many liberals are trying to police what we eat and drink to the extent that they are: another way in which liberals demonstrate that to them, freedom isn't an end in itself.
And then you write:
Indeed, your insistence that liberal policies can't be right makes my point for me. You compare a workable liberal health care plan — any workable liberal health care plan — to a perpetual motion machine. Aren't you willing to consider the possibility that your opposition to this government intervention will be proven as wrong as conservative opposition to previous government interventions?
This is just shabby on your part. You didn't propose a "workable" healthcare plan, you proposed a "government-centric plan [which] would control health care costs and insure every American without harming the quality of care received by anyone." That's a far cry from a "workable" plan. It is a perfect plan. A utopian plan. A plan that doesn't allow for trade-offs. All of the evidence is that the pursuit of such plans is a fool's errand. I'm sure you think the data is encouraging, but I don't. I also don't know very many people who've had to live with Swedish, Canadian, or British healthcare systems who think they're peachy, never mind remotely close to a perfect system. And the people who do love these systems tend to be making "ideological" arguments for them, not "empirical" ones.
Politics & Ideology
Let's get back to that. You concede, wisely, that there are plenty of liberals — a.k.a. the inconvenient "mob" — who are not of an empirical bent, so I will spare you a list of predictions liberals made about events that did not turn out to be true. I will also spare everyone a long recitation of liberal clinging to ideas and positions that are no longer supportable by the facts. This would be pointless, because every time I do such a thing you simply say they aren't the liberals you're talking about.
But I do think your response about rent control is revealing. You argue that there's "no intellectual support" for rent control but many liberals support it simply because they benefit from it. Eggggggzaaactly!
You imply that "real" liberals don't support rent control because there's no intellectual support for it. Wrong. I know very, very well that plenty of liberals support rent control despite the fact there's no intellectual support for it. The thing is they don't think there's no intellectual support for it. But according to your logic, these liberals aren't really liberals because they're wrong on the facts. According to my Earth-logic, they are liberals and they are merely wrong.
I should add that the notion that liberals — or conservatives, or even humans — make clean and sharp distinctions between interests and ideas is poppycock. Many liberals have invested their careers and their lives to the centrality of the state in public policy. Of course that infects their thinking. Of course many liberals oppose vouchers and social security privatization because they think it will undermine the role of the government or the power of teacher's unions and, hence, their own careers (in much the same way some rich conservatives probably like the intellectual case for tax cuts because it is beneficial to them). I'm not going to get into a big spiel about public-choice theory and rent-seeking, but I'd like you to ponder that the confirmation bias I accused you of is at least partially at play in your constant assertion that liberals are the "fact-finders."
Similarly, what drives me nuts in your argument is that when conservatives, including Reagan, make predictions obviously corrupted by political self-interest you assert that these are ironclad examples of conservative ideological rigidity and otherworldliness. When liberals make equally corrupted predictions about, say, vouchers or rent control, you give them papal dispensation saying that has nothing to do with liberalism you're talking about. When I note that liberals disagree on policy, you say these are good faith disagreements about trade-offs. When I note that conservatives understand trade-offs, you say "true" conservatives don't. When I say politics played a big role in welfare reform, I'm flat wrong. When Mickey Kaus says it, he's an expert. When I say liberalism is out of ideas, you call it an absurd and baseless "taunt." When Marty Peretz says it, you say it's just a considered opinion. And so on.
The Feelings of the Fact-Finders
Ultimately, the problem with your argument is the problem with liberalism in general: emotionalism. I find it impossible to comprehend that a party that believes the government should "feel" the pain of the public and whose standard-bearer today (Hillary) won an election by bragging that she was more "concerned" than her opponent is also claiming to be the party of slide-rules, green eye shades, and regression analysis. Perhaps yours is an attempt to overcompensate for this reality. You emphasize the cold, hard, just-the-facts nature of liberalism, even as you've now conceded that you're really just talking about a relative handful of liberals. But your argument boils down to name-calling, gussied-up with words like "empirical" and assurances that you think conservatives are decent in their hearts. You objected when I made this point before. But I was right. The rigid categories you try to apply to conservatives are made of straw. You cling to them in an attempt to discredit conservative arguments about "good" and "bad" outcomes by claiming that their conclusions are driven by ideology and therefore a priori suspect. I don't think ideology is what you think it is, but you do use it the way liberals do: as a cudgel and an accusation. "Oh, those conservatives, they're just being ideological" is to most liberals akin to saying, "Oh those conservatives, they're just nuttier than a Snickers bar."
As for your own ideology, you insist you really don't have one, even as you object to the accusation that liberalism is merely defined by doing good things. Indeed, you write that you are working from a different definition of liberalism than I am. But you won't explain what yours is. Twice, I have all but dared you to clarify whether or not you see freedom as an end in itself, and twice you declined. Instead you say liberals might be "worried" about freedom given a different political landscape, which I read to mean that you're not worried about it now. I constantly harp on principles, while you shy away from such Asgardian discussions. Indeed, from a quick perusal, you don't use the word "principle" anywhere in your entire discussion to describe what liberals themselves believe. In my mind this underscores how liberalism is a Potemkin label for an ideology that really doesn't have anything to do with liberty. Take back the word "progressive" and be done with it. That way the good libertarians can have liberal back and the anarchists and liberals will be able to play against each other in the ideological softball league rather than getting stuck on the same team.
As this is certainly my last entry in this debate, let me apologize for not sticking to the schedule properly. As an empirical matter, life does tend to intrude. I should also apologize for writing at such length. But I figure people who dig this stuff don't mind reading.
Also let me thank you for a spirited and interesting discussion. Obviously we didn't change each other's minds. But I think we might have illuminated some interesting things for the readers who've stuck it out.
All the best,
Jonah
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JONATHAN CHAIT
Senior Editor, The New Republic
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Posted 04.05.05 | 8:35 AM
Dear Thor,
Sorry for my plodding and humorless insistence that your reply to my piece was a "reply." We empiricists can be so literal that way. And I certainly didn't mean to imply there was anything wrong with you watching No Escape with Ray Liotta rather than filing your debate entry. As anybody who knows me could attest, me castigating you for putting off your work to watch a B movie would be like you castigating me for name-calling. (Oh, wait: You did that. Nevertheless, the point stands.) As a matter of fact, at some point I'm sure I put off work to watch the same movie. I've actually seen it twice. If you think debating me requires more mental energy than watching it, then you're either overrating me or underrating the narrative complexity of the film.
Anyway, thank you for the long and very smart reply — er, debate entry. (I don't want to have to argue about that term again.) I think you've brought up a lot of interesting intellectual threads that we could tease out if we didn't have jobs and families. But I think your response suffers from some small misunderstandings as well as a general tendency to wallow in abstractions and philosophical absolutes. So I'm going to try to bring this debate from Asgard, or whatever elevated plane you reside on, back down to Earth a bit.
You're arguing against a definition of "liberal" that's very different than the one I'm using. You repeatedly raise areas where you say liberals have ignored empirical evidence. You bring up rent control. In fact, rent control has essentially zero intellectual support. It exists only because its beneficiaries lobby for it, and since those beneficiaries are urban renters, they happen to be liberal. Farm subsidies are the same way. Those who benefit from them are rural and therefore conservative, but that doesn't mean conservatism supports farm subsidies.
You say liberals oppose voucher experiments, but in fact they only oppose experiments they think will be stacked by draining more promising students away from public schools. You think "foreign aid" as a whole has been discredited by evidence, but there are plenty of researchers, like Jeff Sachs, who have a more subtle view. You defend the superiority of the U.S. healthcare system by invoking our advanced technologies, but the whole point is that those technologies don't produce superior health outcomes. There are countless studies showing that Americans get all sorts of expensive medical interventions that don't make them any healthier. Saying that's bad is not a value judgment. If you take away the stuff you get wrong, there's little left in your argument to support your contention that liberals cling to empirically discredited policies.
Still, I'm willing to concede that if given enough time you could think of some very silly things that many liberals support. In part this is a difference in emphasis. You want to focus on liberals such as the lynch mob chasing after Larry Summers. I prefer to focus on liberals like, well, Larry Summers.
Conceptually, your focus is just as good as mine. Likewise, in the world of philosophical absolutes, it would be interesting to debate whether my belief in empiricism could lead to socialism. (Short answer: My objection to socialism is practical and not ideological, so yes, in theory, no in practice.) You're right that if the political center were much further to the left than it is, liberals would be worrying about government programs impinging upon freedom. What you've shown is that if you stretched my argument out to sufficiently extreme examples, it would lose its explanatory power.
But what I'm trying to do is describe the political world that we actually live in. And in that world, the majority of the public does not see the government that emerged from the New Deal as a significant impingement on freedom, whereas conservatives do. You cite The Public Interest, a journal that you correctly note was extremely interested in data. That's a great example, one that I intended to include in my original essay but had to cut for space. It actually bolsters my case, not yours. The founders of The Public Interest supported the New Deal ideologically. Now, that journal happened to come into existence at a time when there were lots of government programs rushed into existence without much empirical basis. So that put them on the "conservative" side, just as people like Larry Summers or I, who are on the left today, would have been in the center or even center-right thirty years ago. But The Public Interest's founders did not see smaller government as an end in itself. That's exactly why they had such an interest in which government programs worked and which didn't. That is to say, their lack of ideological conservatism was a cause of their empiricism.
Iceberg, Goldberg, We're All the Same
The contemporary economic debate revolves around issues where conservatives have an a priori philosophical position, and non-conservatives don't. So conservatives may have empirical arguments, and they may believe them, but basically those arguments don't matter.
Social Security is a perfect example. While most conservatives think Social Security restricts freedom in a meaningful way, most Americans don't. So conservatives argue for privatization on practical grounds: as a way to improve retirement security. Their arguments center around rates of return and insolvency dates. If they're proven wrong, though, it changes nothing. The distinguished conservative economist Robert Barro wrote a column a few years ago dismissing basically every empirical defense of privatization. But he still supported it. "In the end, I favor personal accounts for Social Security not because of the possible savings boost or the claimed superiority of rates of return," he wrote. "For me, the crucial points in favor of them are those regarding property rights and choice."
That is the crucial difference between conservatives and liberals. A smart, honest conservative will not necessarily change his mind in the face of contrary data, while a smart, honest liberal will. You focus on liberals who aren't open to data, but that only shows that there are liberals who aren't smart or honest, just as there are conservatives who aren't smart or honest.
A huge part of your argument rests on the premise that, essentially, liberals can't be right. You portray economic conservatism as driven by practical experience:
[A] great many conservatives--particularly "economic conservatives" (which I use as a shorthand for libertarians too) — became conservatives not so much because they loved liberty more than anything else, but because the empirical evidence mounted that socialism, "economic planning," statism, etc., just don't work as well as liberty, markets, etc.
But conservatives have been proven wrong time after time. As I noted before, they predicted that things like child labor laws, the minimum wage, the Clean Air Act, and so on would destroy American business. They predicted Medicare would enslave us by putting all medical decisions in the hands of Soviet-style bureaucrats. They predicted Clinton's tax hikes would strangle growth. None of those things happened. But none of those results changed the conservative position.
When policies like wage controls or welfare have proven ineffective, on the other hand, liberals have abandoned them. Not just as a concession to political reality, but as a goal. Read any issue of The American Prospect as closely as you want. You won't find anybody pining for wage controls or a restoration of the pre-1996 welfare system.
Another major theme of your reply is attempting to show that we're both equally ideological. "You have an ideology and I have an ideology," you write. "I can admit it, you refuse to." Yet to sustain that argument you have to caricature my ideology. Where I point out areas that liberals don't favor government intervention, you reply, "the only reason liberals like you show such restraint is that they don't think they have the governmental answer to the problem — yet." Actually, on the basic questions that have vexed the left over the last century — ownership of the means of production, allocation of labor and capital — liberals have sided with the market. The rest of our agenda is simply handling the rough edges of the market. We don't pretend to know all the answers.
Indeed, your insistence that liberal policies can't be right makes my point for me. You compare a workable liberal health care plan — any workable liberal health care plan — to a perpetual motion machine. Aren't you willing to consider the possibility that your opposition to this government intervention will be proven as wrong as conservative opposition to previous government interventions? I'm not open to trying conservative policies that have already been tried and failed, but I'm certainly willing to entertain the prospect that new ones, especially ones I haven't heard of, might work. I'm very skeptical about vouchers as a large-scale solution to public education. But I admit they might work.
Since this is probably my last entry, let me say thanks for your thought-provoking comments.
Best,
Jonathan
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