Liberal Condescension

Gerard Alexander thinks that he's found a new weakness among liberals: condescension. The easy answer to why liberals think they know everything, are right about everything, and have no reason to change their ideas, is that liberals do know everything. We are always right. And the conservatives are just a bunch of ignorant yahoos. At least, that's Al Franken's point of view.

This is a long article, but it may be worth reading for some serious thoughts about why the two sides aren't listening to one another.

I think, from my own point of view, that most of the up-front policy ideas on both the liberal and the conservative side are based upon deep-down attachments to ideas that no one has examined very thoroughly, and which everybody finds rather frightening to question.

Whenever I see a reaction out of all proportion to the action which supposedly triggered it, I know that there is some underlying force that has built up on the reactor's side.

Here's an example. The Republicans are highly averse to tax increases. They are passionate about not allowing any tax increases. This is practically an article of religious faith with them, and the evil of higher taxes is so self-evident to them, that they find it difficult to articulate reasons for their position. In fact, a lot of the opposition to taxes is based on a still-deeper article of faith: You can reduce the size and influence of government by cutting taxes.

The problem is that the "starve the beast" theory has never worked. The government, whether under Democrats, Republicans or Martians (I refer to the late Bush administration), continues to spend, borrowing to make up the difference. The Republicans cannot admit that starving the beast is an ineffective strategy, however, because they don't have any other strategy for cutting the size of government, except by doing things that voters don't like.

Let's face the obvious problem: The people, in their majesty - vox populi, vox dei - want more services than they are willing to pay for. They want the government to do things that cost more than the amount of money they are willing to allow it. And they don't want their representatives to tell them that they can't have it both ways.

You can't cheat an honest man, as the saying goes, but what we have here is a dishonest electorate.

Monism and Pluralism

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read about someone warning us against some critical danger facing humanity. Global warming is the most dangerous issue facing us today, threatening unimaginable disaster. Abortion is the most terrible tragedy one could imagine, and it is vital that we do something to stop it. There is nothing more important than stopping the gay agenda, the conservative movement, religious intolerance, Islamic extremism, or corporate bonuses. Holocaust denial is undermining the foundations of Western civilization. “It’s the economy, stupid!”

These warnings have three things in common: a conviction that the issue in question is so important that we should ignore everything else and focus all of our energies and attention on it; a belief that overcoming this challenge will at least lessen, if not eliminate all of our other problems; and a tendency to view dissenters as evildoers. When I say “dissenters,” I don’t mean merely those who disagree with the speaker on the substance of the problem and its solution. I mean particularly those who don’t put the speaker’s issue at the top of their personal catastrophic hit parade.

I was taught by my first political science professor to mistrust monist explanations and to prefer pluralistic accounts. As soon as someone says, “The problem is …” my nonsense detector starts beeping. And when they say, “The solution is …” that beeping rises to a shriek. Life isn’t simple enough for any one thing to be the problem or for any one thing to be the answer to our problems.

Marx believed that everything in society arose from the distribution of economic forces. Even he, however, was forced to introduce the concept of “false consciousness,” in order to explain why people didn’t, in fact, behave according to his view of their economic interests. We have seen this variety of monism more recently, not only in James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” but from a number of analysts baffled by the tendency of working folk in the red states to persist in voting for Republican candidates. Economics is not the answer, and neither is original sin, man’s violent nature, man’s non-violent nature, women’s non-violent nature, Western imperialism, Zionism, or anti-Semitism.

There are many good examples of this sort of rhetoric in the current healthcare debate. Is the free market the solution to all of the problems we see in healthcare? Is, on the other hand, the creation of a government-owned health insurance company going to put a stop to all of the bad behavior of private insurance companies? Will the Obama administration’s efforts to extend health insurance to more people bring about the end of American civilization? Will they, on the other hand, save our society and economy from all of their problems?

No one problem is going to destroy this country, and no one government program is going to save us from all of our problems. Nor will the rejection of any one government program avert all foreseeable disasters. We have a multiplicity of problems, for which there are a multiplicity of solutions, some of which will raise new problems of their own.