The Continuing Assault On Reason

by digby

A few years back Al Gore wrote a book called “The Assault on Reason.” I’m sure many of you read it. We were in the middle of that bizarroworld period after 9/11, when post-modern “conservatives” were openly admitting to creating their own reality:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

That Bush official (*cough Rove *cough) was talking specifically about foreign policy (I think) but it is really much bigger than that. It’s the basis of the conservative worldview. Gore wrote in his book, with the same sense of shocked incredulity I felt every single day:

Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: “What has happened to our country?” People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it…

We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong.

He wasn’t. But I think for some reason many of us made the mistake of ascribing this to the particular malevolence of Dick Cheney or the empire fantasies of Straussian neocons and failed to recognize the fact that a good portion of this country is simply living in another dimension of the public square from the rest of us. They create their own public square with its own logic, its own reality. And we are seeing this play out once again with the economic meltdown.

Powerful Republicans are now talking about spending freezes because if the average American has to pull in its belt then the government should too. For years, they told us the government should be run like a business. Now it should be run like your household budget. And perhaps we could chalk that up to simple economic ignorance, not a break with what we know to be reality (even if it is beiong said by one of the most powerful men in the world.) Except today we get news that Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina is now seeking to redefine what stimulus is:

Now we’ve got South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford announcing that he will ask President Obama for a stimulus “waiver” that will allow him to apply $700 million worth of stimulus funds to paying down South Carolina’s “very sizable state debt and contingent liabilities.”

Aside from not appearing to understand what the word “stimulus” means, Sanford is displaying a distressing level of ignorance as to the nature of our current economic problems. In a letter to state legislators, Sanford wrote that “[W]hen one is in a hole, the first order of business is to stop digging.”

That kind of thinking might apply to, oh, I don’t know, enacting tax cuts without matching spending cuts, or waging a war without coming up with a source of revenue to offset its cost. But it does not apply to the problem of confronting a collapse in demand. To put it in Sanford’s own terms: to stop digging now runs the risk of making the hole much bigger.

Krugman had to explain the “paradox of thrift” yesterday on television, something that seems pretty elementary to me just from my rudimentary understanding of Keynesian economics, but is apparently something that is entirely rejected by most conservatives. It’s not that they don’t understand it, it’s that they refuse to believe it. They make their own reality (or, as I used to say during the Bush years, it’s the politics of “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes,”) by building an edifice of knowledge and scholarship to make it appear that their “revisionism” is common knowledge. They are not content (or able) to make their arguments from the standpoint of a commonly agreed upon set of facts. They insist on offering a completely alternate narrative based on entirely different facts — post modern politics at its most sophisticated.

For instance, back in the beginning of this financial meltdown I observed in passing that Amity Schlaes was to this crisis what Laurie Mylroie had been to 9/11 — crackpots who nonetheless find their way into the highest circles of conservative intelligensia and end up having enormous influence within the Republican establishment and the right wing media. (Clare Starling had a similar influence on the conservative thinking about state sponsored terrorism back in the 1980s.) They have a need to base their worldview on common received wisdom from an designated oracle of the moment.

Jonathan Chait has reviewed Schlaes’ New Deal revisionist history called The Forgotten Man, which is now the economic bible of the conservative chatterers:

A generation ago, the total dismissal of the New Deal remained a marginal sentiment in American politics. Ronald Reagan boasted of having voted for Franklin Roosevelt. Neoconservatives long maintained that American liberalism had gone wrong only in the 1960s. Now, decades after Democrats grew tired of accusing Republicans of emulating Herbert Hoover, Republicans have begun sounding … well, exactly like Herbert Hoover. When President Obama recently met with House Republicans, the eighty-two-year-old Roscoe G. Bartlett told him that “I was there” during the New Deal, and, according to one account, “assert[ed] that government intervention did not work then, either.” George F. Will, speaking on the Sunday talk show “This Week,” declared not long ago, “Before we go into a new New Deal, can we just acknowledge that the first New Deal didn’t work?”

When Republicans announce that the New Deal failed–as they now do, over and over again, without any reproach from their own side–they usually say that the case has been proven by the conservative columnist Amity Shlaes in her book The Forgotten Man. Though Shlaes’s revisionist history of the New Deal came out a year and a half ago, to wild acclaim on the right, its popularity seems to be peaking now. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard recently called Shlaes one of the Republican party’s major assets. “Amity Shlaes’s book on the failure of the New Deal to revive the economy, The Forgotten Man, was widely read by Republicans in Washington,” he reported. “So were her compelling articles on that subject in mainstream newspapers.”

This is no exaggeration. The Forgotten Man has been publicly touted by such Republican luminaries as Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, Mark Sanford, Jon Kyl, and Mike Pence. Senator John Barrasso was so eager to tout The Forgotten Man that last month he waved around a copy and announced, “in these economic times, a number of members of the Senate are reading a book called The Forgotten Man, about the history of the Great Depression, as we compare and look for solutions, as we look at a stimulus package.” Barrasso offered this unsolicited testimonial, apropos of nothing whatsoever, during the confirmation hearing for Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Chu politely ignored the rave, thus giving no sign as to whether he had heard the Good News. Whether or not The Forgotten Man actually persuaded conservatives that the New Deal failed, in the time of their political exile, which is also a time of grave economic crisis, it has become the scripture to which they have flocked.

I leave it to Chait to thoroughly dismantle the book. (It is not really a book about economics and Schlaes isn’t an economist, so it’s not all that hard.) His larger observation about how the whole Republican establishment has adopted her thesis is what interests me. As St Ronnie famously said, “there they go again.”

When reality doesn’t fit their worldview, they simply create another reality. For example, when 9/11 happened, they didn’t know or care about terrorism. Their worldview was formed around the threat from totalitarian states. Therefore, they had to blame a totalitarian state for 9/11. Voila, Laurie Mylroie and Iraq. Today, the economy is melting down as the result of wild speculation and deregulation of the financial markets. The conservative worldview was formed around the idea that unfettered free markets cannot fail. Therefore, they have to blame interference in the unfettered free market for the failure. Voila, Amity Schlaes and New Deal Failure.

Obviously, the one thing we have going for us is the fact that they lost so much credibility on Iraq that they are not running things at this crucial moment. All you have to do is watch John McCain’s gibberish to know how important this really was. And they are still hugely influential, especially in the media, which sees these discredited thinkers as valid since they are so fully embraced by the Republican Party. Among the Republican base it’s as if we are back in 2002 listening to the 101st keyboarders insisting that Saddam has to be taken out or we will all be killed in our beds. (Read the comments to Chait’s piece for an excellent education on just how fully the hard core right believes this propaganda. It’s startling.)

Right now it seems to be a waste of time to even think about what these people are saying. Their movement has lost all discipline and they are fighting among themselves. But at this point we have no way of knowing how bad things are going to get and it would be unwise to ignore how successful these people were just in the recent past. Things can change quickly. As bizarre as they sound in light of the current crisis, it’s still important that they be challenged. Worse things can happen.

In today’s Financial Times, Martin Wolff writes the first in a series they are calling “The Future of Capitalism.” He makes the observation that this is one of those moments, like the Great Depression, where everything is up for grabs. He reminds us:

Remember what happened in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment rose to one-quarter of the labour force in important countries, including the US. This transformed capitalism and the role of government for half a century, even in the liberal democracies. It led to the collapse of liberal trade, fortified the credibility of socialism and communism and shifted many policymakers towards import substitution as a development strategy.

The Depression led also to xenophobia and authoritarianism. Frightened people become tribal: dividing lines open within and between societies. In 1930, the Nazis won 18 per cent of the German vote; in 1932, at the height of the Depression, their share had risen to 37 per cent.

As I have written before, when I was a kid it was just accepted, even in my conservative home (where Roosevelt was not popular, by the way) that he saved capitalism and prevented a possible revolution. Now, that’s an unknowable thing, and could well be hyperbole, but that’s how we thought. It wasn’t that everyone was convinced that everything he did was great, far from it, it was that everyone knew that if he hadn’t taken drastic measures something far more terrible could have happened. And that’s because everything was unstable and bad things were happening all over the world.

The 2000s have been fraught with crises with the United States at the center of all of them. The actions of this government are going to be decisive for the next few decades. And we are dealing with a Republican party and a conservative movement which is still living in their alternate universe of unreason and faith based reality. They are weak today, but until their worldview is successfully dismantled they will remain a serious impediment to successfully navigating this crisis. If things don’t turn around quickly, and they are able to regain their discipline, there is every reason to fear what might happen if they regain power. If the invasion of Iraq was a bad decision, just imagine what they will do if these fantasists get back in power during a depression.

Update: Here’ the current intellectual leader of conservative economic thought:

Every administration has its movie. George W. Bush seemed too often on the wrong side of guerrilla warfare in “The Battle of Algiers.” Bill Clinton mixed business and pleasure with the predictably messy results of “The Apartment.” Now Barack Obama has dropped us all into “The Matrix.”

In the Obama Era, it seems, we all pick our way through anxious lives that have something to do with software. Like Keanu Reeves’s Neo, we realize hour-to-hour that we are being manipulated by a system that has its own larger plan.

If only we keep a cool head, we tell ourselves, our powers of logic will help us escape the web. But each move we make, even the one that feels independent, takes us deeper into the Matrix.

Peggy Noonan must be pea green with envy that she didn’t think of that first.

h/t to bb

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