Hackery and Being Right
Filed Under Big Ideas, Politics, Porchy | 1 Comment
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There are hacks on both the political left and right…and in those not-quite-left and not-quite-right ideologies too. Humans, as we are learning (or confirming) through advances in psychological testing and assessment, are sort of inclined this way. It’s hard, if not impossible, to be critical and skeptical all the time. We have to rely, sometimes, on the expertise of others, or the supposed expertise of others in order to develop opinions on anything.
That’s the nice way of saying that sometimes we’re hacks when we don’t even know it. The test of intelligence, or at least a test of intelligence, is not whether you are always skeptical, or that you are always skeptical at the right times, but whether, when the opinion you hold has been shown to rest on unstable if not inaccurate foundations you adjust accordingly and not just double down on your own ignorance(s).
I guess what I’m curious about is why someone might consciously choose to be a hack. So as not to confuse the argument with current-current events, let’s take Rush Limbaugh. There’s no way that Limbaugh believes half of what comes out of his mouth. He couldn’t because one half refutes the other half. But he is invested in bringing down liberal and Democratic politicians. He does so through misleading his audience with half-truths, rhetorical sleights of hand, and bathetic thundering. We rightfully call these tactics “cynical” because in order to engage in them Limbaugh must believe two things (1) that the ends justify the means and (2) that there is no other way to win this argument because his audience is too stupid to listen to well-formed arguments that appeal to the intellect.
Before I go on, to the extent that Olbermann does the same thing, his tactics are also cynical and if it fits your personal ideology to replace “Olbermann” with “Limbaugh” then by all means go ahead. I won’t be speaking about particulars so you shouldn’t have any problems.
Number 2 clearly makes these tactics cynical, etymologically-speaking. Limbaugh believes … something … and he feels that he is righteous in attempting to persuade others to side with him. But he also believes they are too stupid to reach the same conclusions he did through the same machinations that he reached them, which presumably involved facts of some kind. So he must trick them into it. This notion that people are too stupid to use their intellect is cynical by definition regardless whether its true or not.
I am not trying to assert that “cynical” equals “bad.” I have several cynical notions, in part because people like Rush Limbaugh are not isolated cases. If, for example, I believe that Rush Limbaugh does what Rush Limbaugh does because it makes him money, I believe the worst of Rush Limbaugh and of his followers too, since the only way a venal person can make money through the Limbaugh method is tap into the venalism inherent in man.
But what if we believe the best of Limbaugh? What if we believed that he really believes that there is an intellectually honest conservatism that would make a better world were it enacted in policy unadulterated by Democratic politicians? And what if we also believed that (unfortunately) he is right and the hoi polloi are too stupid to choose good government on their own? In other words, what if we believed that Limbaugh is trying to create a better world and to do so he makes the most of human stupidity—using it against itself to make that better world?
Must we also believe that only Limbaugh knows the method by which this better world can be created? Must we also believe that Limbaugh developed this theory completely on his own without the aid of a single book, teacher, friend, mentor or episode of The Wire? Must we also believe that there’s not a single, solitary person in the whole nation that might be persuaded by hearing Limbaugh articulate his theory and how he arrived at it in a well-argued format free of specious or illogical reasoning?
I guess what I really want to say here is that I can offer something like forgiveness for this obstinate, hateful and ignorant hackery, this ends-justifies-the-means style of battle if I had some clear picture what those ends were supposed to be. It seems to me that people like Limbaugh refuse to offer these kinds of arguments because they just don’t exist and that’s the problem I see. Real conservative thinkers like Conor Friedersdorf and (lord help me) Ross Douthat don’t sound like Limbaugh and don’t hold his positions because they actually think through the big questions of the day.
Rush Limbaugh essentially turns himself into the straw man he is always using, right? Any liberal that stands up and says “conservative thinking is bad because I heard on the Limbaugh show last night that blah blah blah; and, that isn’t accurate because X, Y, and Z” is attacking a belief that no one really holds. His level of hackery makes him a parody of conservatism in exactly the same way that the word “Liberals,” when uttered by Limbaugh, is always followed by some parody of actual liberal thinking. “Now, this is really simple folks; the Liberals in this country would have you believe that Obama is a Christ-like figure that walks on water but…”
No big point really and I would do myself some harm if I tried to force one. Just thinking out loud.
Libertarians and the Con Man
Filed Under Author, Porchy | 4 Comments
He lies.
He’s very convincing.
He has the right to take your money if you’re stupid enough to trust another human. <shrug> Actions have consequences.
Hope you like government cheese. Oh, I forgot, there isn’t any.
Goodbye.
Society be damned.
What can I say?
America’s Meritocracy Hard at Work, as it always is.
Filed Under Porchy, USA | Leave a Comment
No doubt the 13 year old son of Bloomberg LLP was the highest qualified applicant to intern in Mayor Bloomberg’s office.
Are Governor’s Better Presidents
Filed Under Barack Obama, Domestic Politics, Politics, Porchy | Comments Off
Is he the Ryan Leaf of presidents?
One of the big debates in 2008 was whether Obama had “enough” experience. At the time, a lot of the people who were criticizing Obama for his lack of experience were touting Mitt Romney as their guy based primarily on his single term as governor of Massachusetts and his experience as a CEO of an investment firm.
I said at the time that I thought “experience” was a hard measure. What exactly qualifies you to be president of the United States? The job is unique in quality or scale in every conceivable category. Think of it this way, if we were to put various world leaders in a head-to-head comparison in an attempt to find out if, for example, FDR was a better leader of the US than Tony Blair was of England, how would you do it? In addition to problems of comparing the head of the US state and US government to just the head of the UK government, you also have to make huge concession for the size of the land mass, economy, military, population, and relative ethnic homogeneity–just to name a few of the most striking differences.
Now that may seem extreme, but imagine what happens if try to do the same thing but limiting our comparison to just presidents of the United States.
In 1890 America’s population was roughly the size of what Britain is today. Our economy was the same size as Britain’s (measured in GDP) around 1980. So, if we can’t really compare Blair to FDR, how can we compare Adams to Clinton?
Or, for that matter to be more reasonable about it, how do compare Harry Truman to George W. Bush? I’m not a huge fan of Bush but let’s be honest, America in 1947 was a big, complicated mess but America in 2002 was an even bigger, more complicated mess if all we consider are the size of the economy and our population. Certainly we have to toss a few bonus points Bush’s way by virtue of having had a harder job.
Two presidents, but only one man.
But my bigger problem is this: when you ask a question like, what experience makes for a better president? what you want to do is gather a set of data and start to generalize. But we’ve only had 43 presidents (we shouldn’t count Grover Cleveland twice). Some of them were legislators, some were soldiers, some were governors. As senators or governors, some were from big states where they represented lots of people and large economies. Some were from very small states where they did not.
Basically I’m saying that we just don’t have a large enough data set to come up with any definitive answer on this score.
Brad DeLong thinks only governors should be in the running for president. In response, Jonathan Bernstein eyeballs the Siena survey (pdf) and thinks that legislators, not governors, have a slight edge. John Balz, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago in a paper in the most recent Perspectives on Politics (pdf) tries to quantify data from seven surveys (including Siena) and concludes that mayors and legislators are slightly disadvantaged.
However, and I think this is key, Balz essentially concludes that, regardless of position held or length of service, prior experience makes almost no difference at all. This is essentially what Bernstein notes as well.
To shed just a little light on the difficulty of using past experience as a gauge for predicting future performance look no further than “the quarterback problem.” In a nutshell, despite the subjective measures of professional football scouts and the objective measurements of the Wonderlic Test, nobody has a clue how to predict which college quarterbacks will make good NFL quarterbacks.
Keep in mind, this is a system that gives us hundreds of data points every year going back decades. Also keep in mind this is a situation where the general skill set is essentially the same. Although the level of competition is higher and the strategies are different, the fundamental skills of being a quarterback remain unchanged. And yet…we still can’t do it.
If we can’t figure out which past quarterbacks will make good future quarterbacks how can we possibly determine which professional path will give us the best future president?
Any Good American
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“Any good American isn’t racist.”
It’s that simple. I didn’t say it. She said it. Take it up with her. So..y’know…straighten up and fly right.
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