Ev Ehrlich's Everyday Economics

The New Radicalism

I was going to write about Greece this morning and the emerging fiscal crisis that threatens the very existence of the Euro. 

It was really going to be a good entry, I swear, replete with historical references and elliptical propositions that all somehow land in the right place and in the end make sense – the more I thought about it, the more excited I got.  I even had a great title for it – Greeced PIGS – you see, the four countries with the biggest fiscal deficit problems in Europe are Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, or PIGS. 

Actually, Ireland belongs in this group, but that would upset the acronym, and, besides, princess Margaret told us long ago that the Irish were pigs already.    (Please do not climb on my rear end about this last reference.  I am, as my late, sainted mother-in-law used to say, IBM – Irish By Marriage.)

Well, that was the plan, until I opened today’s New York Times and went apoplectic over my bran flakes once again.    Here’s the second paragraph of the article that got me going;

In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss “the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories,” including “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”

And this bill is actually called The Kentucky Science Education and Intellectual Freedom Act.  It was written by a state representative named Tim Moore, who joined the Annals of Phenomenology with his remark, “our kids are being taught theories as though they were facts.”  Take that, Copernicus!

There are any number of places to go with this, but I’m going to limit myself to two.

The first is this; science – indeed, reality – has become the new radicalism. 

This is a remarkable switch in the morphology of the political landscape.  Forty years ago, when I was a New Left agitator, the essence of the political left was a rejection of reality.  Sure, some of it was the drugs, but it was far more than that.  It stemmed from a conviction that the agenda was too dominated by the world around us, that we should spend less time discussing “what is” and more time discussing “what ought to be.” 

In fact, perhaps the pinnacle of the Left in our lifetimes – OK, my lifetime – the pinnacle of the Left in some of your lifetimes was Dede Scozzafava dropping out of her Congressional race  – the Presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy, was premised on his aching quest for a better world that couldn’t be found except in his imagination --   There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were, and ask 'Why not?'  Contrast this to, say, President Obama, who might have said, “I look at things as they are, and think, how the hell do I fix this mess?”, or, say, the new right-wing radicals – like Kentucky’s Tim Moore – who dream of things that never were – like an intelligent designer whose creations filled The Ark – and say, “Sounds right to me.”

And this new line-up – the Left as the champions of scientific reality[i] and the Right as adherents to a shared, alternative fantasy – is a complete reversal of the historical norm.  The Left has traditionally been an inwardly-directed, cultish social force, one based on a shared, separate view of the world, one that sees the starting point of what is here and now as a distraction.  Whether it was Maoist hare-brained Leaps Forward that envisioned making steel in backyard ovens or the citizenry of the French Revolution, and later the Paris Commune of 1870, who renamed the months of the year,  the Left has always been good at ignoring what’s going on in real life and pressing ahead with its own agenda.  And that has traditionally given the Left in America a kind of “otherness,” as if they were in a secret Club of sorts with a secret handshake and a subscription to the Nation.

But that cultish quality has now been completely usurped by the Right.  Part of this transformative switching originated with Reagan, who brought idealism and a Kennedyesque sense of “why not?” to conservative politics that you didn’t associate with such realpolitik Republicans as Nixon, Dole, or Ford. 

Not only did Reagan bring this kind of vision to the Right, but as reality began to confound him – tax cuts didn’t pay for themselves, weapons dealing with Iran, the disappointing absence of any real welfare queens driving Cadillacs, that sort of thing – it became convenient to abandon it.  When Reagan’s successor, Bush the Father, opted to deal with budget reality at the Andrews Air Force Base budget summit in 1990, his own people turned against him, and the role of reality in Right politics disappeared. 

Perhaps Pat Buchanan – who defeated Bush in the latter’s 1992 re-election effort despite losing to him at the convention -- was the real landmark in the Right’s de-tethering, the first conservative politician to be evaluated purely on the quality of his vision.  But as hard as his 1992 speech was – Dick Cavett famously remarked that he liked it better in the original German – it’s mild compared to what we hear in recent weeks.         

But without Buchanan, there’s no Palin, no Tim Moore, no dismissing climate as a “hoax” or calling evolution or the Big Bang one of many competing versions of events.  And the line of descendants include the folks who call the president a Socialist, or call what proves to be an innocuous health bill a government takeover of health care, or cling to fantastic visions of markets fixing the health care sector or the crisis-riddled financial industry, when, as The Roosevelt Institution puts it so well in the latter case, the point is to let markets function properly, as opposed to cutting them loose.

I’m writing about this today not just because Kentucky State Representative Tim Moore reminds me of a friend of one of my kids who, in middle school, once told him that “you can put a monkey in a cage for a million years and it’s not going to turn into a person.”  I think I was also set off in this direction in part by a news item I saw earlier in the week about an organization called “The Coffee Party,” an alternative to you-know-what. 

The unfortunate name speaks to the problem.  Many of those who identify with the Tea Party “movement” are already in a political and social cocoon of sorts, one with precise boundaries that define their orbit.  Fox informs them, Limbaugh provokes them, perhaps some religious institutions nurture their separation.  In this manner, they resemble the Left of decades past, which lived in a similarly self-defined cocoon. 

“The Coffee Party” is an attempt to mirror this self-contained isolation, driven in part by (begrudging and unspoken) admiration for their discipline and success in turning a bizarre vision of Mao and Gramsci under beds into a functioning organization.  (Yes, Gramsci!   He was the Flavor of the Month in my Godless Communism Study Group in 1973!  See this report from the New York Review of Books…)    I hear this all the time – why can’t progressives have a Limbaugh, or a Fox News, or Tea Parties?  Why can’t progressives develop the discipline and cohesion reflected in these people and institutions? 

MSNBC satisfies this yearning to some extent – it’s the intellectual equivalent of having dessert -- but it will never be the equal of Fox, or Limbaugh, or the other institutions of the Right, because those institutions provide a much-needed alternative framework for their participants. 

The Right needs this “alternative framework” to believe that climate science or evolution is a hoax or “just a theory” (like, say, gravity), or to live through the dissonance of being against “government-run health care” while supporting Medicare, because reality is too dissonant.

The Left needed this kind of framework in its incarnation of 40 years ago – it needed the badges, behaviors, and other paraphernalia (a well-chosen word) to be a “counter-culture” much as the Right has become one today.  But the Left doesn’t need those today, and for that reason it strikes me that efforts to emulate the Right’s cocoon are going to fail. Because today, the Left is integrated into the world around itself – it needs no cocoon.  It is in touch with science, rationalism, empiricism, and the other tools of civilization.  Its level of dissonance has never been lower.

The Administration, loosely part of the Left (hysteria about Bolshevism notwithstanding), has to play this hand out.  Like the Little Red Hen, it’s busy dealing with reality – failed military adventures, a financial crisis, a foundering health care sector, a planet rapidly moving towards potentially cataclysmic change. 

The disadvantage of that position is that it has to have its hands in the mess and take positive action that exposes it to criticism.  It can’t sit back and wait to play a rhetorical finesse.

The advantage is that the cocoon that sustains its opponents is inherently self-limiting and takes more effort to maintain.  And when the terms of debate are about a shared fantasy, competition for leadership and attention naturally leads to the tendency to float away.  Witness the CPAC convention, where cocoon denizen Glenn Beck derided the idea that Republicans needed “a big tent,”  or the Tea Party speakers who rattled on about Bolshevism.  It’s a competition to see who can float away the furthest the fastest.

My former boss and mentor Alice Rivlin once described herself as a “raging centrist.”  But she defined her centrism in the context of how to respond to reality.  That common starting point is absent – the Right, which once nurtured it, has walked away from it.  Science – once the starting point -- is the new radicalism. 

And that was just the first point I wanted to make.  The second – still about Kentucky State Representative and Flat Earther Tim Moore – goes to the economy, and will have to wait.

 

 

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[i] With the exception of their opposition to genetically modified food, which I can’t get over – Jack, you’ve been eating genetically modified stuff since before you were weaned – everything has been genetically modified – the only person who doesn’t understand that life on Earth is a process of ongoing, long-term genetic modification is Kentucky State Representative Tim Moore!