Kent Brockman: Senator Dole, why should people vote for you?
Kang: It does not matter which way you vote! Either way your planet is doomed! Doomed! Doomed!
Kent Brockman: Well, a refreshing bit of candor from Senator Bob Dole!
I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of public reason in this great republic of ours. In part because it plays pretty significantly into what I’m trying to do academically. The more cynical I get about the capacity for our public politics to incorporate reasoned debate and argument on things like health care, the more pessimistic I get about my broader goals of trying to recuperate the core of some type of political liberalism.
Yeah, yeah, theories of justice are great in principle, but what do you do about a political landscape that appears to be wholly uninterested in the faculties of reason? Is that proof that we just need to do better, or is it proof of a fundamental paradox built into this type of system?
No Reason – Against All Authority
I don’t have any firm answers. But it’s hard to avoid thinking about it. A couple recent posts in particular got me wondering about where we stand as a nation right now on this sort of thing.
First, there’s Ezra Klein a few weeks back, pointing out something deeply troubling:
There is a famous poll from 1994 that shows the American people had a clearer idea of Clinton’s health-care reform bill at the beginning of the process than at the end. This is a serious problem: Polls are a good barometer of the mood of the public, but if the public is systematically misled, it’s hard to say what the poll is measuring. A few months ago, health-care reform was quite popular. Today, it’s unpopular. Is that because the public knows more about the bill? Or less?
He talks about this in the context of polling, suggesting that Democratic legislators ought not rely too much on them to guide their actions. And I think that’s an excellent point. There are just structural elements of this process (a deeply ingrained status quo bias being the most powerful) which mean that the side proposing change is going to do worse and worse in the polls the closer it comes to actually passing something.
People love ‘change’ when it’s abstract, but the more particular it gets, the scarier it becomes. This is to be expected. The job of legislators is not to freak out too much about public opinion in the short-term. If you drill down to just a single moment, you’ll get a far less useful understanding of the situation than if you recognize the rolling and fundamentally temporal nature of social attitudes.
There’s every chance that ‘health care reform’ will be polling under 50% when this thing finally comes to the floor. What Democratic legislators need to understand is that a few years down the road people will have become accustomed to their new levels of health coverage and things will be well on their way to turning the 2009 health care bill into another third rail.
In short, it’s not a coincidence that the Republicans are demonizing the current health care bill by trying to claim it’ll hurt Medicare (the last significant expansion of public health care). Whether it makes sense matters a lot less than whether it appeals to a sense of unease about change.
So there’s all that to draw from the breakdown in public opinion. And you can spin it optimistically as I’ve tried to do.
But still: there’s something deeply and profoundly disconcerting about living in a world where years of public debate about something produces an electorate that is less well-informed about the issue. I mean, yikes.
Which leads to another thing: Ed Kilgore pondering the issue of Joe Wilson and other right wing extremists, particularly whether or not their mere presence tends to shift the public debate rightward. He is skeptical, and is even more concerned about the idea that the appropriate progressive response is to lionize our own brand of ‘extremists’ whose job it will be to re-balance things:
The solution, this sort of analysis invariably suggests, is to counter right-wing “framing” of arguments with left-wing framing, pulling the debate back to something resembling the actual “center.” If this approach sounds a bit too cute and cynical, that’s because it assigns roles to various players in politics based on their tactical positioning rather than the validity of what they actually believe.
[…]
But perhaps there’s something to be said after all for truth-telling and reasonableness, not in the pursuit of compromises with the crazy people of the Right, but because a majority of people in this country will ultimately recognize and reject craziness, just as they’ve generally done in the past. Progressives shouldn’t have to cultivate their own cadre of “extremists,” or feign extremism in their own “positioning,” in order to show they are actually trying to solve the country’s many problems. Sometimes it’s best to say what you actually think, with emotional empathy and passion to be sure, but with a little more faith in democracy.
Obviously, I find this idea very appealing. A big part of what I liked about the Obama campaign was its promise of post-partisanship as a codeword for precisely this kind of attitude: the belief that the public is capable of sorting out the lunacy and the nutjobs and recognizing the value of real solutions to actual problems.
You don’t have to be a purist follower of J.S. Mill to find something of value in this approach. It’s very easy in this day and age to become overly concerned about the Ann Coulters and Glenn Becks and so forth. And it’s EXTREMELY easy to buy into the sensationalized take on things like the town halls of August that got broadcast over and over.
But the reality is that these people are on the far extremes.
Which is emphatically not to deny that they matter at all. Or to pretend that things like framing, the issue of what becomes acceptable forms of criticism and what gets relegated to unfair or ‘personal’ attacks, and all those sort of things are irrelevant.
But, perhaps, it’s possible to worry about those sorts of things as merely elements of constructing a more robust and viable stage of public consideration. Maybe we can see the willful efforts to evade debate as obstructions rather than fatal flaws in the struture of democratic reason.
The real issue in my mind is not about shutting down Glenn Beck; it’s about making it clear to those with their hands on the levers of power that this kind of thing should not serve as a fundamental barrier to the enactment of reasonable solutions.
The tea-baggers are a constituency. And we shouldn’t deny them entirely. But they are only one constituency, and not a tremendously large one. That they can shout loudly and bring in a bunch of headlines has very little to do with what makes for electorally sound policymaking for the long term.
I don’t want to go all Field of Dreams on you, but…if you build a good health care bill, the votes will come. People may not claim to care all that much about the super-wonky stuff, but they DO care about results. The wacko-fringes aren’t persuadable, but the folks in the middle care a lot more about good old fashioned policy than you’d expect given the way political coverage works these days.
At least, I still hold out hope for that.
How this health care stuff plays out over the next few months (and then over the next few years as it starts to get implemented) may tell us a lot about the empirical question of whether public reason can really take us anywhere.