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| Liberalism and the Economy |
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GOLDBERG
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Posted 04.01.05 | 11:50 AM
Jonathan —
Delighted we're getting so informal, though if you could call me Thor next time I'd be really psyched. Sorry if you took offense at my not-that-into-you bit; I merely meant that I hadn't planned my column as the opening salvo of this debate. But upon plodding, humorless, reflection: You're right, I did "respond" to your article. As for my Corner post about No Escape, well, I know you're really into me and all so it may come as a shock for you to discover that when I'm operating on three hours of sleep, I find watching No Escape considerably less of an intellectual burden than debating you. Even with sleep, it takes some effort.
Nonetheless, since this exchange is starting to acquire a bit of a gangrenous smell (or maybe that's the old Almond Joy on my desk?), and since we're letting our freak flag fly here, I'm going to try to stick to the big themes.
Words, Things, Words
The first problem is all this label stuff.
You write: "But of course liberals don't want to use government to solve every problem. That's the difference between liberals and socialists."
Okay, wrong: that's the difference between the words "socialist" and "liberal" — as you define them. But it's important to say that words are not things. You cannot merely say that liberals don't want to use government to solve every problem because the definition of a liberal says they don't. By doing this you get to basically say that liberals are by definition reasonable and any overly ambitious liberal is no longer a liberal at all and therefore you don't have to defend them. By that way of argumentation your point that George W. Bush expanded Medicare is meaningless because by your own definition of conservatism, conservatives don't want to expand things like Medicare, therefore Bush isn't a conservative. Please don't make me Nexis all the times you've called Bush a conservative.
I should also add that you really shouldn't be so fastidious about the distinctions between socialists and liberals and then be devil-may-care about the differences between libertarians and conservatives. More on this in a moment. But first let me say that you make a perfectly fair rejoinder when you note that many conservatives, including myself, use the "shrink-government" formulation. But you gain fewer yards on this play than you think. I didn't say that conservatives don't want to shrink government. I said that shrinking government is a "sloppy shorthand" for the more universal conservative desire of "limited government." But because of its sloppiness sometimes the difference between shrinking and limiting is lost. (Something similar goes on when we say we want to spread "democracy" around the world when in fact we really want to spread all sorts of things which, technically speaking, aren't necessarily democratic: independent courts, markets, constitutions, etc.) Rather than "muddying" these distinctions, I was under the impression I was clarifying them.
Regardless, I doubt George Will or Ramesh or anybody else on the right would disagree with my point. A limited government is a smaller government but a smaller government is not necessarily a sufficiently limited government. Hypothetically, one could argue that government was smaller in 1934 under Franklin Roosevelt, for instance; that doesn't mean conservatives and (real) liberals were happy when FDR's government threw a dry cleaner in jail for charging 35 cents to press a suit when liberal bureaucrats in Washington insisted the price should be 40 cents. Moreover, it's just simply not true that all conservatives who believe in limited government are always and everywhere opposed to bigger government. William F. Buckley settled this issue for National Review nearly 50 years ago when he made it clear that American conservatives would support a larger defense establishment. And while it may be controversial among some libertarians, the overwhelming majority of conservatives have supported Big Government-level spending on national security ever since. Or consider the fact that conservatism is deeply split over the drug war, with many conservatives (including NR's editors) arguing that limited-government principles should call for the drug war's end while others arguing that basic moral principles require we fight the scourge of drugs.
But since you think so many of my points were an attempt to "muddy" distinctions, I'll be clear as I can (and repeat myself): Sure, conservatives believe that a "smaller" government increases freedom. Milton Friedman was right. Freedom is an end itself. And if that were your only point this debate never would have gotten off the ground. But I think you don't grasp how non-radical and, indeed, uninteresting an observation this is. Conservatives believe lots of things are ends in themselves. Security is an end in itself, prosperity is an end in itself — virtue, happiness, family: They are all ends in and of themselves for most of us. But conservatives understand — I think — that some ends cannot be infinitely pursued without banging up against other ends. Pursue security too far and you unacceptably impinge on freedom. Pursue happiness with your blinders on too tight and you might ignore the less-than-cheery work of defending the homeland. And among the diverse group of people called "conservatives" there are rich and deep disagreements about where these values bump against each other. Libertarians would let the pursuit of freedom run down the track quite a bit longer than social conservatives would, for example.
Why you are so eloquent in explaining that liberals understand there are trade-offs in policy options but stub your toe with the first step toward understanding that conservatives grasp trade-offs as well is beyond me.
Reality Bites
I'm sure you'll say I'm misunderstanding you. You don't think that conservatives fail to grasp trade-offs; your point is that they are unwilling to make them — even when there is no trade off at all!
You write: The point is that if you could prove that some government-centric plan would control health care costs and insure every American without harming the quality of care received by anyone, I doubt National Review, George Will, or any other important conservative organ would support the plan.
This is a piñata of nonsense and really shows how after all your reading of conservative books you don't understand conservatism very well. Speaking broadly, the chief reason most conservatives and libertarians wouldn't agree to such a plan has nothing whatsoever to do with our love of freedom and everything to do with empirical fact-finding. Conservatives wouldn't agree because you cannot prove such a thing.
There's one item the U.S. Patent Office requires a working model of before it will grant a patent. Everything else simply requires the requisite blue prints, plans, etc. That item is a perpetual-motion machine. The reason you need to show a working copy of such a thing is that such a thing would defy our understanding of the laws of nature. Similarly, if all National Review conservatives opposed your dream healthcare system (and I'm not sure they would) it would not necessarily be because of the damage done to liberty, it would be because we would demand some real evidence it could work because all of the historical (i.e., empirical) evidence is that such a scheme cannot work as you describe it (particularly if "quality of care" includes the ability to pick ones own doctor). That your mind constantly conjures such hypotheticals gives your writing the whiff of utopianism just around the corner.
Indeed, one of the things you fail to grasp is that 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. My very libertarian friend Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine has been telling me for years that if socialism worked better, he'd be a socialist.
The "law of unintended consequences" is not some pie-in-the-sky "ideological" credo, it's the lesson one learns from studying previous mistakes. It is the cider in your ear that accumulates after so many people like you promise that we can have healthcare systems that do all things for all people perfectly. Indeed, the entire neoconservative project in the domestic sphere was premised on the notion that the Left's numbers didn't add up. Go back and read old copies of The Public Interest: It's chock-a-block with regression analysis and the like. Bjorn Lomborg became a scourge of the modern left because he actually checked Julian Simon's data and discovered that he was right. Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in economics. So did Friedrich Hayek. The logical upshot of your argument is that their skills at empirical fact-finding had no relationship to their ideological preferences. I promise you: They would dispute this to their last breaths.
Indeed, I am still flummoxed as to how you could lend any credence to the notions that empiricists can't believe in freedom as a good in itself and that believers in freedom as a good in itself can't be empiricists. Also, how could one possibly claim that the leading philosophers of contemporary liberalism are empiricists? John Rawls? One feels the need to offer Gregorian chants and swing incense every time one opens his books.
Indeed, the idea that liberals have been tromping through reality simply searching for the facts without any ideological agenda is laughable on its face. Forget about Clinton and welfare reform (though I maintain you're still wrong and you distorted what I said). Continued liberal support for everything from rent control to foreign aid, for job training programs to HUD, seem very hard to ground in a greater love for "fact-finding." Is the plague of St. Vitus' Dance running its course through the Harvard faculty an exercise in empirically driven disagreement with Larry Summers's data? Is the refusal to even entertain test projects for school vouchers the high-water mark of high-minded social scientific inquiry?
What's Wrong With Ideology?
You say I spend too much time talking about motives when your argument has nothing to do with them. Okay, let me use a different word: ideology. It seems to me that you use the phrase "what works" as a Trojan horse to smuggle in your ideology. Your whole argument boils down to the assertion that outcomes you prefer are outcomes that "work." The problem is that this is an ideologically stacked deck. If a policy maximizes income rather than freedom, or vice-versa, which one do we want to say has "worked"? You want to claim that only the policy that adheres to "liberal" ends worked. That's fine. But that's an ideological judgment, not an empirical one. For example, you write:
Conservatives say over and over that we have the "best health care system in the world." But that's only true by ideological criteria — which system is the best at minimizing government intrusion.
You made this point in your original article and again here so I assume you really mean it. But do you understand how ideologically loaded this is? The only way you can say our system is the best is by ideological criteria? Jonathan, what are you talking about? America leads the world in terms of innovation. It leads the world in terms of our investments in R&D. It leads the world as a magnet for young doctors from all around the world to train. It leads the world in terms of high-end procedures performed. There's a reason people drive down from Canada for medical procedures in the U.S. There's a reason aging potentates and princes fly to America for treatment.
What you are really saying is that America's healthcare system doesn't meet your ideological criteria for what would make it the best in the world. That's fine. From your articles, I gather you're more utilitarian, believing that the best healthcare system would do the most good for the most people at the cheapest price. That's perfectly reasonable and there's nothing illegitimate whatsoever about arguing from that perspective. But you pull this nonsense — so amazingly typical of smart liberals — that people who disagree with your ideological criteria are the only ones being "ideological."
Indeed, what is wrong with "ideological criteria"? You use the phrase like it means "the enchanted land of leprechauns and harp-playing fairies" — as if ideological criteria have no empirical basis in reality, never mind moral legitimacy. Ideology is merely a checklist of priorities and principles we bring to the real world. You have an ideology and I have an ideology. I can admit it, you refuse to. As I said before, my ideology includes the notion that freedom is an end in itself. Your ideology — ironically called "liberalism" — does not. I made this point before and you let it go unchallenged. If this is really the case, if liberalism doesn't consider freedom an end in itself, than liberalism is more than "bookless" — it is a moral shambles, a hollowed-out crust that maintains the label "liberal" but nothing else.
But Chait, There's More
But that's a taunt. So let me finish up instead by simply summarizing where I'm coming from. You insist that liberalism is better suited to empiricism than conservatism. This is an ancient form of argumentation for the Left. Does nobody remember scientific socialism? You are living up to the finest traditions of your magazine by asserting — just as John Dewey, Charles Beard, Henry Wallace, George Soule, et al. did before you — that people who disagree with your ideological premises really just don't understand the facts. Other liberals have argued — and continue to argue — that political conservatism is in fact a psychological dysfunction which can and should be considered a medical condition rather than a real disagreement. If I'm wrong for thinking that you were adding your own drop to this ocean of ad hominem argumentation, I apologize.
Meanwhile, I don't think you are in fact a socialist, but I think you fail to grasp that you have far more in common with socialists than you think. There are plenty of socialists — real, self-described socialists — who don't want the government to solve every problem. They just draw the line of where the government's authority ends a bit higher than liberals do. You have offered no principled reason why you are different from a socialist. Your semantic distinction is that liberals don't always want to use government to solve problems. Fine. But your ideologically loaded "empiricism" (i.e., "Scientific Socialism Lite") means that the only reason liberals like you show such restraint is that they don't think they have the governmental answer to the problem — yet. This is not liberalism properly understood at all. It is a writ for liberal social planners to enact whatever idea they've convinced themselves "works." Yes, there is an important difference between a monarch who murders his subjects willy-nilly and a monarch who merely reserves the right to murder his subjects willy-nilly but instead chooses to be more selective. But there is no principled difference between the two systems of governance. If I could convince you that socialism would "work," you've given me no reason to believe you wouldn't be a socialist. Why? Because you don't see freedom as a end in itself, and that's the first step on the Road to Serfdom.
Sincerely,
Thor
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CHAIT
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Posted 03.31.05 | 12:55 PM
Dear Jonah,
(I've unilaterally decided that I'm going to switch to the second person.) I'm sorry that "reasons largely beyond your control" have intruded on your participation. (I suppose that the decision of some programming executive to air "No Escape" on Tuesday night is indeed beyond your control.) But that's no reason to lash out with your Stockdale-like "Who am I? Why am I here?" intro. You write:
In one extended section of the second column I used Jonathan's essay as one example among many. Jonathan takes that column as a "response" to him. It wasn't. As much as I respect Jonathan and his intellect, to paraphrase a current bestseller, I'm just not that into him.
In the column I refer to, you devoted 1,347 words — which would consume nearly a page and a half in TNR — to my piece, quoting from it at length and disputing my logic virtually point by point, under the headline "THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CHAIT." How is that not a response? Is there some word, other than "response," I should have used to describe its relationship to my piece that wouldn't lead you to imply that I'm some kind of deluded solipsist?
My fundamental point is that conservatives see smaller government as an end in itself, while liberals do not see larger government as an end in itself. Your latest response seems to be an effort to muddy that distinction. You begin by insisting, "it isn't accurate to say that all conservatives believe that merely 'shrinking' the government increases freedom." Then why do conservatives, including those at your magazine, use that formulation or ones similar to it constantly? In the February 25 National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru calls conservatism "a political movement trying to shrink the government." You wrote last year, "All good conservatives want smaller government." This is not some slur I've invented.
You note that in my essay I quoted Milton Friedman, who wrote that "[F]reedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself." You then try to isolate Friedman as unrepresentative of conservatism. But I also quoted a National Review editorial and George Will as saying essentially the same thing. And those were just examples I had seen in the few weeks before writing that article. It's a very common conservative sentiment.
You also try to muddy up the distinction by defining liberalism as, essentially, an ideology that sees bigger government as an end in itself. You use the analogy of "if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail." But of course liberals don't want to use government to solve every problem. That's the difference between liberals and socialists. Elsewhere, you write that economic liberalism amounts to "Uncle Sam's hop-scotching from one good deed to another, la-de-la." This is the same error. Liberalism does not consist of expanding government everywhere. I'd point out places where liberals do not want to expand government, but then you'd go back to your "see, we're right about everything!" victory dance.
My essay, you write, "nowhere in fact demonstrates that liberal positions are empirically better." Isn't demonstrating the empirical superiority of liberalism in every facet of domestic policy a bit much to ask of a single magazine article? Can't I lay out the general ideological differences that make economic liberalism better disposed toward empiricism without proving it in every single instance? Otherwise, you'll have to give me a multimillion dollar research grant, a staff of researchers, and ten years or so before we can resume this debate.
I did provide some examples in my article, but you did not mention them. One was health care. Conservatives say over and over that we have the "best health care system in the world." But that's only true by ideological criteria — which system is the best at minimizing government intrusion. By objective criteria — cost and health outcomes — our system is poor. Its exploding costs are also causing massive problems for businesses and governments. There are things about health care that make it particularly unsuited to pure free-market solutions. But conservatives are by and large unwilling to deal with that fact. I could go on in more detail, but you asked me not to get too wonky, remember? The point is that if you could prove that some government-centric plan would control health care costs and insure every American without harming the quality of care received by anyone, I doubt National Review, George Will, or any other important conservative organ would support the plan. Whereas if you could prove that tax cuts for the rich really could produce enough growth that the revenue would replace itself, every important liberal pundit would support them anyway.
You seem hung up on the question of motives, which plays little role in my argument. You cling to a clearly erroneous view that Clinton reformed welfare only because Republicans made him, even though he ran on reforming welfare before Republicans gained control of Congress. You write that I describe Clinton as having "the grandest of motives," but that's an obvious caricature. Every politician has at least some political motivations.
If you really want evidence that the public arguments George Bush made for his tax cuts were not the genuine ones, you can start here. The examples are legion. But frankly I don't understand what this has to do with our argument. I'm not arguing about motives. Conservatives think smaller government means more freedom which means a better world. That's a good motivation. Now, it's true that they have to find ways to sell their policies to people who don't share that view. (They may share it as an abstract principle, but they don't want to extend it to things like Social Security or Medicare.) In any case, I honestly don't understand what that has to do with the point at hand.
You end by citing the guy who signs my paycheck bashing liberal ideas. I'd point out that Marty is not exactly a knee-jerk liberal, and even Marty would concede that he's not so all-knowing that the mere fact that he takes a position establishes its truth beyond all doubt. Tell me what kind of liberal books you think don't exist — policy blueprints, big think ideological manifestos, whatever — and I'll gladly cite some for you. They get less attention for the obvious reason that they matter less when conservatives have more political power. Heck, I read conservative books more than liberal books for the same reason. It's a result and not a cause of who has political power.
In any case, you didn't attempt to address the substance of my rebuttal. You argued that, "It's not that liberals have maturely adapted to new data, it's that they've been proven wrong so often — either empirically or at the polls — that they've had to change." I replied that conservative predictions about the disastrous effects of the minimum wage, child labor laws, the income tax, environmental regulations, and so on have all been repudiated, both politically and intellectually, without conservatives having acknowledged their errors. I further pointed out that Ronald Reagan warned Medicare would be the end of freedom in America, but George W. Bush radically expanded Medicare. It struck me as a convincing rebuttal, but of course I'm somewhat biased. Do you care to defend the point?
I know you said you're not that into me, Jonah, but guess what: I'm really, really into you. Really into you. Like, bought-the-T shirt-of-your-dog, have-a-Goldberg-shrine-in-my-room, plan-to-name-my-next-child-boy-or-girl-"Jonah" into you. Just so you know.
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GOLDBERG
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Posted 03.30.05 | 9:30 AM
First, an apology: I intended to respond to Jonathan yesterday, but for reasons largely beyond my control I couldn't. I imagine all those readers who were crowded around the bars of the Opinion Duel thunderdome all day yesterday chanting "Two men enter, one man leaves!" were mighty disappointed. Sorry about that.
Second, let me say I'm a bit disappointed. Frankly, I'm not quite sure I understand what I'm supposed to be doing here. I wrote an admittedly too lengthy, two-part column trying to beat back this flatly absurd notion that liberals are demonstrably and obviously more "reality-based" than conservatives are. In one extended section of the second column I used Jonathan's essay as one example among many. Jonathan takes that column as a "response" to him. It wasn't. As much as I respect Jonathan and his intellect, to paraphrase a current bestseller, I'm just not that into him.
But here we are. So let me start by clearing some brush.
Jonathan begins by restating his argument that "conservatives believe that smaller government is an end in itself, because it promotes freedom. Liberals, on the other hand, do not see bigger government as an end in itself. Therefore, on economic policy, liberals are much more interested in what works than are conservatives."
Already we have flags on the play. Let me explain what conservatives — or at least the ones Jonathan is referring to — do and don't believe. It's true that some — and I hope most — conservatives still believe that limited government is a good in and of itself. Smaller government — which I like very much, by the way — is a sloppy shorthand for the conservative's true desire for a government that has very defined responsibilities that it does not exceed without very good cause. Hence, conservatives who believe in limited government also believe in a government that protects us from foreign enemies, enforces contracts and civil rights, etc. A government that isn't activist in upholding the rule of law endangers freedom. I bring this up because it isn't accurate to say that all conservatives believe that merely "shrinking" the government increases freedom.
Then there's the second flag. I don't care whether or not liberals see "larger" government as an end in itself (though I think the claim that they don't is a more contentious declaration than Jonathan realizes). What liberals certainly do believe is that government can have a role in any problem and that very often government is the best means to their ends. This is particularly true on economic policy. The old adage that if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail comes to mind. I will concede that most liberals don't see the hammer as an end, but they do have a well-deserved reputation for bringing a hammer to every problem and saying "Hey, will this work?" Jonathan sees a man willing to pound a broken vase with a mallet and says, "Aha! A pragmatist!"
"True" Conservatives vs. "True" Liberals
Jonathan insists that I'm wrong to interpret him as accusing conservatives of bad faith. I think this whole thing is a bunch of mush and gets to the heart of Jonathan's misunderstanding.
The reason it seems so mushy is that there are at least two ways of reading Jonathan's argument. One makes it very uninteresting, the other makes it very wrong. The uninteresting argument is that if God — or some other objective, irrefutable authority — were to demonstrate perfectly that liberal social welfare programs were beneficial, fairly low-cost, and in all ways worth the investment, some conservatives would still argue that the costs to personal liberty and the concomitant expansions in government would still constitute real costs for such programs. In other words, some conservatives would say, "The economic benefits don't outweigh the costs to our constitutional liberties."
Meanwhile, Jonathan concedes, other conservatives would not make such arguments. Ho-frickin'-hum. I agree completely with him. Indeed, I would add that many liberals would have the same reaction, depending on the economic policy in question. Surely, at some point, some liberals would object to the mass seizure of private property — even if it "worked" to help the poor — on principled grounds having to do with liberty and the rule of law. If not, then Jonathan's distinction between socialists and liberals is meaningless. Speaking broadly, socialists believe the redistribution of private property is a good in and of itself. If liberals are persuadable of the same, but just need a bit more data to be convinced, then liberalism isn't a distinct philosophy, it's merely a doughy socialism in need of a few more minutes in the oven.
Anyway, it clearly isn't Jonathan's intent to argue that some conservatives are reasonable, empirical-minded fact-finders and that some are not. And not just because such an argument would be so hum-drum. Rather, it is his argument that, in his words, "true conservatives" are ideologically hidebound while any fellow-traveling empiricists in their midst aren't really "true conservatives."
He writes: But, for a true conservative, whatever ends they think smaller government may bring about — greater prosperity, economic mobility for the non-rich — are almost beside the point. As Milton Friedman wrote, "[F]reedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself."
I like Milton Friedman, a lot, but it is worth noting that the man Jonathan considers the purest essence of conservatism does not in fact call himself a conservative. Indeed, Jonathan surely knows that what Milton Friedman champions was once called "liberalism" and still has a greater historical claim to the word than the stew-cooks of so-called liberalism today. Friedman's statement is not an irrefutable fatwah against all government interventions. Rather it is a fairly mild claim that government interventions come at the expense of some personal liberties. Historically speaking, it is stunning to hear a self-described liberal object so strenuously at an idea he should accept with an "Oh, that's obvious" shrug. Maybe Jonathan doesn't think economic freedom is a form of freedom. Or maybe he doesn't think freedom is an end in itself. But if it's the former, why does he want to give poor people more "opportunity," and if it's the latter what the hell is he calling himself a liberal for?
Jonathan Chait's liberalism is quite representative of liberalism in general today. It's an instrumentalist argument in favor of a list of nice things. Philosophy, principles, ideology — these things get in the way of what government should really be about: Uncle Sam's hop-scotching from one good deed to another, la-de-la.
But what's interesting is that Jonathan nowhere in fact demonstrates that liberal positions are empirically "better" than conservative ones. Nor does he demonstrate, empirically, that liberals are better empiricists than conservatives. Rather, he simply takes it as a given that the government intrusions he likes have already been empirically declared the winner by some dispassionate band of fact-finders somewhere. As Will Wilkinson notes — quite tartly — Jonathan is a one-man parade of confirmation bias.
Jonathan does list a few cases in which very liberal and somewhat liberal people compromised with political reality (i.e., conservative arguments about plain old reality). He says that Mickey Kaus proved that welfare reform was all done with the grandest of motives. Mickey did no such thing. Indeed, last June, Mickey said Clinton's own memoirs suggest the conservative interpretation might have weight. Unfortunately, Mickey seems to be operating under the assumption that when a conservative makes an argument it must not be rooted in the facts, but when a liberal — including himself — makes the same argument, or at least concedes its plausibility, it must be all about the facts.
This gets us back to the core problem with Jonathan's initial article and his follow-up. It still broadly falls down to name-calling. Conservatives aren't open-minded, liberals are. Nyah, nyah. When I point out that there are disagreements between liberals on what the facts are (vis-a-vis welfare or free trade), Jonathan says that's just because liberals have good-faith disagreements and often bring "different value judgments" to specific policy questions. But when conservatives disagree on the pragmatic trade-offs between one policy and another (even when God Himself has settled the question!) it's a battle between "true conservatives" and not-real conservatives. George Bush et al. were lying about their intent for cutting taxes when their real motives were known (Jonathan offers no proof to back up this assertion). But when Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it" he was being entirely sincere. As, no doubt, he was when he swore that his would be the most ethical administration in history. Again and again, Jonathan assumes good faith on the part of those he likes and bad faith on the part of those he dislikes. And so adamantine is his conviction on these scores, he refuses to acknowledge that these are opinions and not agreed-upon facts.
I hoped to defend my initial argument that liberals aren't more "reality based" than conservatives, but Jonathan's dogged determination to paint a world in which liberals always deal with the facts and tackle every new problem with an open-mind [stop laughing] seems to make that argument for me.
Lastly — and I know I'm running long — Jonathan in effect accuses me of name-calling (an accusation that is often true, though I've been trying to cut it out). He says the accusation that liberals are out of ideas is a "taunt." "We've all heard this line about liberals having no ideas before," he writes. "It's cheap." Maybe so, maybe not. But I do have no doubt he's heard it before. In fact, this argument appeared just a couple pages before his own in The New Republic. Martin Peretz, the longtime publisher of that magazine, wrote, "It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying." In his powerful cri de coeur he continued, "Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really. What's left is the laundry list: the catalogue of programs (some dubious, some not) that Republicans aren't funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country." Peretz concludes, "Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength."
I can only assume that Peretz is an empirical fact-finder, so maybe Jonathan should debate him?
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CHAIT
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Posted 03.28.05 | 9:25 AM
Last month I wrote an essay for The New Republic making what seemed to me a simple and incontrovertible point about liberal versus conservative economics. The point, in short, was that conservatives believe that smaller government is an end in itself, because it promotes freedom. Liberals, on the other hand, do not see bigger government as an end in itself. Therefore, on economic policy, liberals are much more interested in what works than are conservatives. If you're a conservative, who cares if a given social program can achieve its goals at no cost to economic growth if the very existence of that program impinges upon our economic freedom?
Nonetheless, some conservatives, notably National Review's Jonah Goldberg, have taken umbrage. Let me try to address Jonah's objections.
I began the piece with a thought experiment. I imagined God intervening to support every conservative empirical claim on economic policy (tax cuts encourage massive growth, regulations are costly and ineffective, etc.), and alternatively intervening to support the liberal side. I argued that liberals would have to change their minds if the data was proven to work against them, whereas conservatives would not. I used God as a device simply to imagine an incontrovertible authority.
Jonah begins his response by immediately misunderstanding my point. In his telling, I argue that "most of us [conservatives] would tell the Big Guy Upstairs to butt out, we know what we're talking about and He doesn't." But I don't argue that at all. If God were to declare that Bush's tax cuts retard economic growth, that would not be the same as God saying the tax cuts should be repealed. Conservatives could still defend them on the grounds that they allow people to keep a greater share of their own income. They would simply have to retreat from an empirical claim (tax cuts cause a rising tide of growth) to a normative claim (it's our money).
Moreover, as I specifically noted, there's nothing wrong with that. I offered the analogy of observant Jews and pork. If you could prove to an observant Jew that he would find pork tasty and healthy, he still wouldn't want to eat it, which is perfectly understandable. What wouldn't be understandable would be that Jewish person insisting that everybody else forego pork — suppose he was in a large group that had to vote on a common diet — on the basis that pork would be unhealthy.
That's probably why Jonah interprets my argument as an "accusation of bad faith" — I'm arguing, he says, that conservatives use empirical arguments in a purely dishonest way. To some extent, I think that's true. There are times when conservatives recognize at some level that the majority does not share their preference for smaller government, and knowingly adopt misleading empirical rationales. To use my favorite example, President Bush and his allies insisted in 2001 that their tax cuts would not put any pressure on popular spending programs and that the largest share of benefits would accrue to the lowest-earning workers. In fact they wanted to cut taxes precisely in order to put pressure on popular programs and to reduce the progressivity of the tax code.
But often the dynamic is subtler than that. If you prefer smaller government as a matter of ideology, you'll probably be receptive to data that shows that your preference makes empirical sense. And, as I noted, sometimes you'll be right. More often, there won't be a clear-cut right or wrong answer. So it hardly disproves my argument to note that there are conservative policy wonks who truly believe in what they're doing.
Jonah proceeds to argue that, according to me, "this [conservatism's more ideological nature] is true not just of economics but of everything." Actually, my argument is confined to economics. Somewhat understandably, Jonah was confused by my mention of welfare reform, which he regards as a non-economic issue but I do not. Jonah seizes upon welfare reform to make points against my argument, but makes two errors of fact. First, Jonah claims that President Clinton only reformed welfare because "Republicans forced him to." He seems to be forgetting Clinton's 1992 pledge to "end welfare as we know it," in addition to a host of other facts disproving his narrative. (Welfare-reform maven Mickey Kaus convincingly rebuts Jonah here.)
Second, Jonah paints mainstream liberalism as unalterably opposed to welfare reform. He quotes a New York Times editorial denouncing the welfare bill. But, as I wrote in my piece, most mainstream liberals objected not to the concept of welfare reform but to the way in which it was carried out — extraneous punitive provisions, not enough money for child care, etc. The very same Times editorial he quotes as evidence that liberals "swore there was nothing wrong with welfare" calls the welfare bill "flawed," with "tiny virtues" and "large faults." So Jonah's own example backs up my assertion that liberal critics supported some kind of welfare reform, and disproves Jonah's thesis that they considered welfare perfect.
Building upon these factual errors, Jonah then makes two purportedly decisive counterarguments. First, he says my argument "cannot explain liberals who disagree with [me.] Are liberals who oppose free trade simply morons who can't do the math? Was Hillary Clinton less of a liberal because she opposed welfare reform? ... If liberals always go where the facts take them — you in the back, stop laughing — how is it that liberals ever disagree?" But the "facts" are not always perfectly clear and definitive guides — there's no liberal consensus as to the one ideal solution to health care reform, for instance.
Moreover, even when liberals agree upon certain facts, there's room for differing value judgments. Clinton and his liberal critics mostly agreed upon which elements of welfare reform were good and which were bad. Pro-welfare reform liberals thought the good outweighed the bad. Anti-reform liberals thought the opposite. Same goes for free trade. Clearly, free trade makes a country as a whole better off. It also makes certain people worse off. Your stance on free trade depends on how you value those trade-offs.
Jonah then uses his misunderstanding of welfare to perform a victory dance in my ideological end zone. "It's not that liberals have maturely adapted to new data, it's that they've been proven wrong so often — either empirically or at the polls — that they've had to change," he writes. Ah. So it's just a matter of time before liberals accept that the income tax, child labor laws, environmental regulations, the minimum wage, federal food inspectors, and so on will cripple American business. And that's why Ronald Reagan's prediction that if Medicare was enacted, "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like in America when men were free" is conventional wisdom today. Oh, no, wait: President Bush just enacted the biggest entitlement expansion in four decades, didn't he?
Warming up to his triumphalism, Jonah concludes by claiming that liberals are "atrophied, rusty and calcified ... the status-quo based community. They wish to stand athwart history yelling 'Stop.'" We've all heard this line about liberals having no ideas before. It's cheap. Whenever you lack political power, you have to concentrate on stopping the other side's bad ideas. Weirdly, Jonah tars liberals for "standing athwart history" when of course that very line was used by William F. Buckley to describe National Review's founding purpose. Having cited an analogy that undercuts his own argument, Jonah attempts to recover. "The Buckleyite formulation of standing athwart history yelling 'Stop' was aimed at a world where the rise of Communism abroad and soft-liberalism at home were seen as linked trends. Today, liberals yell 'Stop' almost entirely because they don't enjoy being in the backseat." This distinction makes no sense whatsoever. Why is Buckley's opposition to liberal policies rooted in conviction while contemporary liberal opposition to Bush's policies is mere petulance? Trust me, Jonah: We genuinely disagree with Bush's policies. We'd be happy to let him drive if he had good ones.
The "liberals have no positive ideas" line isn't an argument. It's a taunt. A common one, alas. Just last week, Lawrence Kudlow wrote in NRO that "Republicans have all the good ideas nowadays," and credited Cheney with having generated them. In the previous paragraph, he wrote, "Cheney's basic belief system has been set in stone for more than three decades." So, liberals are "calcified," which is bad, but conservatives are "set in stone," which is good. Do I have that straight?
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