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If Not Now, When?

During the campaign, I was frequently advised to steer clear of talking about polling, which I did not really understand well enough to discuss in much depth, and this was good advice I should have heeded early on. By all accounts, Nate Silver is an undisputed master of polling, so perhaps he ought to stick […]

During the campaign, I was frequently advised to steer clear of talking about polling, which I did not really understand well enough to discuss in much depth, and this was good advice I should have heeded early on. By all accounts, Nate Silver is an undisputed master of polling, so perhaps he ought to stick to what he knows and stay away from policy debates.

In a recent post, Silver lays out the differences between “rational” and “radical” progressivism. For someone inclined to accuse others of dishonesty, Silver is being fairly deceptive in his labeling from the beginning. Naturally, he is going to set up his own position as the rational one and the one he is attacking as implicitly irrational. That isn’t the main point here, but it is typical of the technocratic, anti-populist side in any debate to frame disagreements with their critics as a battle between reason and passion. You can find this with David Brooks’ description of anti-TARP Congressmen as “nihilists” (even though their skepticism and advocacy for alternatives were entirely warranted and correct) or any of the usual pro-war and pro-immigration advocates that seek to impute malicious intent or hatred to their opponents. This is a method used for dismissing, rather than engaging, and for treating opposing arguments as inherently unworthy of attention or serious consideration. Technocratic types prefer practicing this politics of contempt, because it automatically rules out serious objections to certain policies as automatically invalid and invests them or people like them with a certain unchallengeable authority. They tend to make respect for expertise into a debilitating inability to question experts’ assumptions and biases.

With respect to the “Buy American” provisions in the stimulus bill, which is the policy issue in question referred to in the links in Silver’s post, it has been the free trade side of the debate that has been most inclined to knee-jerk, emotional responses. The free traders pretend that these measures will spark a trade war, when they do not violate any existing trade agreements, and they pretend that they are some kind of innovation when they are applications of existing law. They sputter and shout, “Protectionist!” to shut down debate and invoke Smoot-Hawley in much the same way that warmongers always use Munich to browbeat opponents, all of which points to their own unreasonableness and ideological rigidity.

On the specific charges against Sirota, Silver is not credible. He says that Sirota is playing “fast and loose with the truth” when Sirota said, based on comments made by Rep. Rangel, that Obama may be interested in going ahead with the Colombian free trade agreement. In fact, Sirota is correct that Rangel said this, and his interpretation of what it would mean is also correct. He also claims that Sirota uses “the same demagogic precepts that the right wing does,” by which I take it he means that Sirota’s use of the phrase economic patriotism is equivalent to conventional warmongering and security state rhetoric that uses references to patriotism as a bludgeon. If that is what he means, the comparison is plainly ridiculous. Just for a start, advocates for starting wars and expanding the role of the security state are usually arguing for policies that are illegal and result in detaining, harming or killing other people. The measures to which Sirota refers are basically measures that will provide some Americans in economically depressed regions of the country with employment. Naturally, then, it is Sirota and his populists who frighten Silver, and not the technocrats who plunged the country into the abyss. After at least twenty years of technocratic demonizing and marginalizing of populists on the grounds that the technocrats knew best, we are seeing where all of this trust in expertise has led us.

Update: Donald Douglas comments, demonstrating that he has not understood very much of what I just said. He writes:

Note how Larison dismisses those like Silver, who argues for pragmatic reason over radical ideological passion, as of the same kind of intellectuals who advocate “for starting wars and expanding the role of the security state” and “for policies that are illegal and result in detaining, harming or killing other people.”

My point about Silver in that instance is that claiming to represent pragmatic reason over and against ideology and passion is itself an ideological claim and a pose that may be no more or less motivated by passions. I am saying that it is Silver who is attempting to claim that Sirota is similar to those “advocate “for starting wars and expanding the role of the security state” and “for policies that are illegal and result in detaining, harming or killing other people.” It was Silver, after all, who accused Sirota of demagoguery, but left his meaning vague. I am really just guessing as to what he meant, but given the intra-progressive nature of the debate I assume that he means to align Sirota’s arguments on trade with the sort of demagogic arguments made in support of the war over the years. Those would be the arguments that I assume appeal to Douglas, who describes himself as “pro-victory,” which is just about as meaningless a label as one can invent. I prefer anti-defeat myself. In any case, I have made no equation between Silver and pro-war figures. Indeed, I am taking for granted that Silver is hostile to these figures. Were he not, his attack on Sirota would not make much sense.

Douglas goes for the big finish:

Basically, you get a lot of guys under different monikers who get along just peachy, making no need to carve out spacy cul-de-sacs of disagreement, since the point isn’t really to debate, but to mislabel and repackage policies that have already been repudiated by traditionalists in the great silent cultural majority.

Of course, we (people at OpenLeft, TAC, the pomocons, liberaltarians, etc.) all don’t “get along just peachy” except on very specific areas where we happen to agree on particular policy questions for different reasons. In his support for “current U.S. military operations around the world,” Douglas is aligned with Joe Lieberman and Christopher Hitchens–does he “get along just peachy” with them? I doubt it.

Paleos are in sharp disagreement with pretty much all of the people Douglas mentioned on culture war issues and immigration, and we are definitely in disagreement with almost everyone to our left on questions pertaining to the role of government. Occasionally, there is some overlap with radical decentralists on the left, but this is fairly rare. The great silent cultural majority must either be very silent or perhaps it is no longer a majority. The war and illegal immigration, to cite two examples of things paleos strongly oppose, are both very unpopular. For that matter, with respect to trade the public has turned against globalization in recent years, which suggests that “pro-victory” professors in California are not very familiar with what the majority of Americans wants or believes.

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