On Friday, I intended to use some posts from the past to illuminate the political events of the week, but found myself writing about more private problems, about the human condition and my own incapacity in understanding it. Today, I return to more familiar terrain, thinking about the changing American political landscape.
Viewing the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on Thursday, I was reminded why the 2012 election is so important. What the Republicans propose on the economy, on American identity and principles is strikingly different from President Obama’s promise and performance. Day to day, it has seemed that Obama is losing his focus. But I am convinced that he is accomplishing a lot and that the alternative is stark. In April, I presented my guide for judging his Presidency. I think it still applies.
Trying to figure out the stakes in an election requires understanding the issues, and judgment of Obama’s leadership and the Republican alternatives, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it requires an understanding of imagination. Governor Paul LePage of Maine gave clear expression of the right-wing imagination when he ordered the removal of murals celebrating labor at the Maine department of labor – not fair and balanced. These murals are not even particularly provocative. Images of the banned murals were presented in a post by Vince Carducci.
Cultural works that don’t depict a specific worldview offend the Tea Party imagination. And work that can’t be supported through the market, following Tea Party wisdom, is without real value. The cultural and market fundamentalism present a major civilizational challenge.
While this challenge must be met rationally, politics isn’t and shouldn’t be only about reason. Feelings, along with imagination, also are of telling import, as James Jasper explored in a post last Spring.
I feel strongly about the Tea Party, as the Tea Partiers feel strongly about their commitments. I know this is important. How the emotions will affect political choice will play a big role in the coming elections. How is it that public personalities that I find so repulsive are actually attractive to my fellow citizens? I can more easily accept my policy differences with Tim Pawlenty than I can listen to Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry. I hope the majority of my compatriots feel the same way, but I worry about this arena of feelings. It is one thing to recognize that feelings matter. Its quite another for them to run wild, as in the xenophobic birther movement.
Mine is not always a reasonable response, I admit, and I try to fight against this. I have been looking for conservative thinkers and public figures to respect, without much success. I have sought out conservative contributors to our discussions and hope for more success in this regard. I think that there is an underlying serious debate about the public good occurring in American politics, but I am perplexed how ideological certainty and willful ignorance of facts seems to be the price of admission into Republican presidential politics. Not one of the Republican presidential hopefuls would agree to reduce the deficit if it included minimal tax cuts. This indicates that they are either ignoring hard budgetary realities or that their ideological project is to radically reduce the role of the state, far beyond the expectations of the general public.
The Republicans have included the extreme right into their mainstream ranks. As a committed partisan, I believe that this will lead to Obama’s reelection and a more Democratic Congress. I also hope that as a result a more reasonable opposition emerges. As an analyst of politics and the human comedy, I fear that my partisan self may be mistaken. Fictoids have power. True belief can be convincing. Calm deliberate leadership can look weak, and the economy is stagnating, thanks to global forces, but also to American politics gone wild. Reason, imagination and feelings may be destructively interacting.
You raise excellent points. I think that the situation on tax increases and cost reductions is more complex. On the cost reduction side, I’m not sure that anyone is advocating real cost reductions. Most of the cost reduction proposals on all sides, over a longer period, only modify the rate of projected cost increases. Our political process further complicates cost reduction considerations. Unless there is a constitutional amendment, each new Congress is free to do whatever it wants to do relative to negotiated cost reductions. That’s one reason why they rarely occur. On the tax revenue side, there are huge differences between increases and decreases in total revenues that occur with economic expansion and contraction; and increases and decreases due to changing marginal tax rates or changes in tax preferences (policy based tax expenditures/deductions and unplanned loopholes). At one point or another, virtually all of the tax expenditures were put in place to encourage one type of behavior or another; many of the original intents are still reasonable. If discontinued, there may be indirect adverse impacts on revenue generation. My guess is that the entire tax code needs to be revised; however, this is a very difficult task because any major revision will have material anticipated and unanticipated impacts. The first step to solving this problem is my opinion would be to deep six the campaign rhetoric; develop a consensus about what we want the tax code to do; and then develop options. The tension between government mandated directives and programs versus market-based initiatives must be addressed. We have had, and will continue to have both for as long as I can see, but a shift in emphasis has major consequences. Different theoretical approaches (each claiming to be valid) will yield different results. In a sense, we are being asked to walk or run down alternative paths. Splitting the difference does not get us to either destination, and may only complicate potential solutions. We have delayed dealing with major issues for far too long, and now they are forcing use to address them: the sooner the better.
At the risk of offending many, the following quotes from Bertrand Russell seem to fit the current political landscape:
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.”
“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.”
As someone who shares your concerns about the state of our political landscape, I quote from an article that appeared in The New York Times today:“If taxes cannot be raised under any circumstances, then we have veered from economic policy to religious catechism,” Peter Wehner, a former deputy to Karl Rove in Mr. Bush’s White House, wrote for Commentary. He continued, “There is something amiss when the political pressure in a party, any party, is so intense that it prevents a serious intellectual conversation from even taking place.” (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/obama-shifts-gears-from-coaxing-g-o-p-to-swaying-the-public/)
But we must admit that the “catechism” is also coming from the liberal left. Here I have in mind Drew Westen’s critique of Obama a week ago in The New York Times, which equally invoked emotions as a call to arms in our political discourse. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/what-happened-to-obamas-passion.html
All of this reminds me of the ‘Big Brother is good–Big Brother is bad’ dichotomy you pointed out in Beyond Glasnost. I hope your new book updates some of these ideas as applied to our current apolitical culture.
By the way, I wanted to end my comments above by saying that the current situation scares me. But in doing so, I too would be giving in to the politics of fear which governs the discourse in this country.
Regina
Exactly right, Al (at least in my opinion). The next post on Deliberately Considered will explore more fully the challenge of reasonable doubt and conviction.
I can’t help but wonder where Habermas’ “rational criticial debate” is located in American politics. Certainly, we can find it at Deliberately Considered, and of course other media, but to deal with huge problems such as the budget deficit and job creation it needs to be widespread. Perhaps we would find it in the bi-partisan “Super Congress,” that is, if those debates don’t occur behind closed doors.
Yet should we not expect it too much of it from a large democracy such as the United States? Is “rational critical debate’ not widely ingrained in American culture? Certainly religion is. Much more so I believe. That is why we should perhaps not be surprised if we have, to quote from the NYT again, “veered” into “religious catechism” rather than rational critical debate.
However, I wonder how many Tea Party households, or corporations for that matter, run their own economies based on emotional zeal and fictoids, rather than facts and pragmatism. It’s the latter they mean to have for the national government, but it’s the former that is ruling the day. Do the seemingly remote abstractions of macro problems create an opening in the public mind for the falsehoods we now lament to creep in? This is a problem that Dewey and Lippmann addressed, but unfortunately the problem is still with us. However, could it be that the “Super Congress” is a step in the direction of taking decision making, in matters regarding the budget at least, beyond the reach of public opinion? Is this the best way of dealing with major issues that can’t seem to be rectified?
I don’t think that the problem relates as much to facts and pragmatism as it does to vision and values. Every effective change effort that I have ever witnessed has consensus built around a clear vision and values. We have neither today. Leadership is responsible to helping define these and work with an organization to shape them and gain consensus on them Actions absent these are frequently ineffective and misdirected. Once these are in place, then effective problem solving techniques can be applied which are rational and are based on factual analysis. All sorts of analytical tools are available to solve problems. Many successful businesses and organizations do this as standard operating procedures. I actually find that it is odd that the newly tasked Congressional committee is heading off to solve a problem without having built a consensus around a vision and values; therefore I suspect it may end in gridlock. They only have a goal and their existing ideological perspectives. Time and effort up front speeds things along later and provides better outcomes, which are more easily accepted. The lack of developing a shared or consensus vision and values indicates to me a failure of leadership. Political parties (all political parties) are reluctant to shed preconceptions and deal with the issues in an objective manner (identifying and pursuing the best solutions which help achieve the consensus visions and values in the most effective and efficient manner). I’m absolutely sure that all parties along the political spectrum believe in what they are doing and have facts to back their own approaches; and equally are convinced that conclusions that don’t agree with their analyses are based on erroneous beliefs and factual misconceptions. As Weber suggests, politics and science as a vocation are incompatible. To solve our existing problems, the Congressional committee needs to redefine their roles, become a little less political and apply a little more management science in my opinion.
Yes, it is true that vision is very important, but in order for a vision to be implemented you need to somehow get through the smoke and mirrors, i.e. fictoids, that act as obstacles; and if you do manage to implement something, if it is not congruent with the world outside one’s head, that is, on a more or less accurate picture of reality, it would likely fail. I don’t see how you can get around that. Perhaps pragmatics is less a factor, because, after all, whether something can be deemed pragmatic depends on whether or not it works. But, I think since values are often so highly subjective, and in a mass democracy there are such a plurality of values, it can be very difficult to build a consensus around these. Even with core values such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, what these things actually mean are often highly contested.
Vision and values may indeed be the key factors in running an organization, but could you run a mass democracy the same way? (For one thing, there does not seem to be the same sense of task interdependence.) But it does seem now as if no one in particular is steering the ship. So I would agree that lack of leadership is also a problem, but in the current political climate, the United States seems ungovernable and I think fictoid induced mass delusion and ideological rigidity has a lot to do with this. Too many would rather have the psychological comfort of their beliefs than tend to facts that might undermine these.
Hi Scott,
You write: “Too many would rather have the psychological comfort of their beliefs than tend to facts that might undermine these.”
This is exactly what the late Leon Festinger showed in his classic work on dissonance, “When Prophecy Fails”. It is a work I revisit often.
Regina
In my view, vision and values are content neutral concepts which are equally important for both cohesion as well as change. The absence of consensus concerning vision and values leads to various forms of conflict, which may either be constructive or destructive. These moments in time tend to be unstable which creates an opportunities for change. The catalyst for change is usually a compelling reason (in our current circumstances, chronically high unemployment and underemployment and unsustainable deficits). Developing a new consensus vision and values isn’t easy, but when it emerges; it helps legitimize a definition of situation. This opens the way for effective problem solving at both the macro and micro levels in my opinion.
On a macro level, we have seen these things develop periodically such as: the formation of the United States as a Constitutional Republic; the U. S. Civil War; women’s emancipation; the civil rights movement; the resolution of the Cold War; etc. There are numerous examples of this process working on the personal, interpersonal and institutional level. I’ve been a part of these transformations in non-profit organizations and in businesses. Sometimes a transformational leader or leadership can help lead these changes. There are other mechanisms such as the politics of small things to borrow Jeff’s concept. In the absence of a guiding vision and values, the solutions that develop tend to be lacking and rarely resolve fundamental issues.