I've talked about this before, but evidently not nearly enough. Two major points:
(1) Obama is a raging ideologue. He is not a pragmatist. "Pragmatism" is his ideological rhetoric, nothing more. It's progressives who are the real pragmatists today. Not all of them, and not all of the time, but it's pragmatism to note that the war on terrorism is a miserable failure, and we need to try something else. It's also pragmatism to note that (a) law & order responses to terrorism generally work a whole lot better than military responses and (b) soft power--including efforts at dialogue, understanding, humanitarian aid and the like--works a whole hell of a lot better than blowing people to bits. It's fact-hating ideology to oppose such measures.
Likewise, it's pragmatism to use cheap money (damn near free) to invest today in putting people back to work building the green tech and human infrastructure of tomorrow as a way to get out of the recession. It's fact-hating ideology to reject this as "discredited Keynesianism". And it's scientifically-based pragmatism to get atmospheric CO2 down below 350ppm as soon as possible. It's fact-hating ideology to reject this as "politically naive" or "extreme" or whatever, as if physics and chemistry give a damn about hominid politics.
Starting to see a pattern here, are we?
(2) But here's something more to help fill out the picture--a bit of an explanatory backdrop, if you will. From digby yesterday, "Triangulating In The New Millenium":
The base was in a very different place in 1992. Clinton ran as a New Democrat promising to end the "braindead politics of the past," much like Obama. The idea at the time was rather technical however, at least in part --- that you can use modern market based processes to achieve liberal goals. Now certainly there was a political desire to neutralize social issues, particularly about being soft on crime and changing the "incentives" in social welfare, which sort of defined DLCism of the 90s. But essentially Clinton was saying to liberals, "I'm with you on the goals, but we need to shed the old labels and try a different way of getting there." At least that's what I think liberals heard, whether or not it was true. Regardless, throughout the Clinton years, for the most part, there was a belief in his good intentions -- and he was actually pretty clever (more clever than Obama) in sending the liberal dogwhistle and telling the folks that he was on their side. (Taylor Branch's Clinton biography says that Clinton really was a liberal who was backed into the compromises and changing his priorities, just like Obama. But who really knows?)
Liberals were a defeated force in that decade and were willing to try this new thing to see if it might work. (We were all pragmatists then.) I know that I was open to seeing how the experiment would come out, and at the time, when the economy picked up and happy days were here again, we thought it might have worked. It's very hard to argue with prosperity. (And then there was the modern conservative movement hitting congress like a gale force, which was like nothing we'd ever seen before ...)
When Bush came in and blew a hole in the hard won balanced budget by giving tax cuts to millionaires, it was finally irrefutable to even the die-hards that it had all been a fools game and that the DLC experiment was a failure. It was clear that the Republicans had become ideologically bankrupt political terrorists and the Democrats had basically done their dirty work for them.
Barack Obama, however, has never agreed with that. Indeed, Sargent is right that he primarily sells himself as a conciliator and a bipartisan deal maker who is doing the best he can in a hostile situation. But then Clinton did too. In fact, all Democrats have thought that since the 1980s. The problem for Obama is that unlike Clinton, the experiment in "pragmatic, non-ideological" politics in the age of GOP nihilism has already been tried. And it failed. (They may have had a nice party for a while, but the hangover is one for the books.) He's living in the past and liberals are trying to drag him into the present.
"He's living in the past and liberals are trying to drag him into the present." The exact reverse of Obama's standard Versailles-approved shtick. Turns out that he's the one wedded to the failed policies of the past.
The point here is simple: Once upon a time it was at least plausible to argue that liberals were wedded to outmoded ideas and ways of viewing things (and in some ways, I'm sure they were--though much more in terms of strategy than anything else, I'd argue.) They needed to try new ideas. And so we did. And what did we get for our troubles? We lost the House after holding it for 40 years--and lost it for more than one term for the first time since 1932. We got a president impeached as the result of the 5-year witch-hunt. We got a presidential election stolen in plain sight by the Supreme Court, while Versailles applauded. We got a balanced budget which the GOP immediately plundered to plough enormous wealth into their their rich and super-rich base. In short, we got an epic political and policy failure. That's what digby is reminding us of.
So, after all that, one can no longer adopt the Clintonian policy position on the grounds of pragmatism. Although it had some limited successes, that position overall has proven itself to be a spectacular failure. Ergo, those who continue pushing it are doing so as a matter of ideology (or pure corruption, take your pick). Now, because of past history, they may adopt a rhetoric of "pragmatism" and even profess an ideology of "pragmatism" ("We're doing this to solve America's problems.") But the clear reality is that there's nothing whatsoever actually pragmatic about what they're doing. They're either shallow, clueless, unreflective ideologues, or else they're simply shills.
During Netroots Nation, we are running Golden Oldies plus a few surprises. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on July 26.
A Daniel De Groot Golden Oldie
From Mon Nov 24, 2008. Original HERE.
There has been here, and elsewhere, a low-level (ahem) ideological debate about the relative importance of ideology versus pragmatism. To some, the election of Obama is seen as a victory for getting things done as opposed to what I suppose in this formulation is the old Washington game of tilting at ideological windmills. It's a theme I have seen frequently here in the comments, through the discussion on the merits of Obama's cabinet and other nominations so far. I want to address the underlying fiction which claims there is some practical ideal route of policy that can eschew ideology itself. Greenwald addressed this today, more specifically on pragmatism as foreign policy:
If one discards the need for ideology in favor of "pragmatism" and "competence" -- as so many people seem so eager to do -- then it's difficult to see how one could form any opinions about questions of this sort beyond a crude risk-benefit analysis (i.e., "pragmatism"). Are there military and economic benefits to be derived for the U.S. from invading Pakistan? Bombing Iran? Lending unquestioning support to Israel? Escalating our occupation of Afghanistan? Remaining indefinitely in Iraq and exploiting their resources? Propping up dictators of all types? Deposing Hugo Chavez? Torturing suspected terrorists for information, or detaining them without process? If so, then those who are heralding "pragmatism" as the supreme value -- or at least something that should trump "ideology" -- would have no real basis to oppose those actions. It is only ideological beliefs that permit opposition to those polices even if they are "beneficial" to our "national self-interest."
How do you make a "pragmatic" compromise with failure? Pragmatism, after all, is concerned with what works. And failure, by definition, is what doesn't work. You can no more make a pragmatic compromise with failure than you can tell an honest lie. Yet, the idea of a pragmatic compromise with failure is the very essence of the Obama presidency--except when compromise blends imperceptibly into full-scale mimicry.
Bush's war on terrorism was an utter failure, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, Afghans and others for no good reason, just like Osama bin Laden said that America always wanted to-and thereby recruiting more potential terrorists than bin Laden ever dreamed of. Obama's compromise was to kill fewer Iraqis and more Afghans, plus assorted other dark skinned people from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia. Bush's response to global warming was to ignore it and give oil companies everything they want. Obama's compromise was to pay attention to global warming and still give oil companies everything they want. Bush's attitude towards civil liberties was to trample them underfoot gleefully. Obama's compromise is to cut back on the glee, pretending to be serious, even troubled. Bush's response to the Wall Street meltdown was tons of free cash given away by the former head of Goldman Sachs. Obama's response to the Wall Street meltdown was tons of free cash given away by the former head of the New York Fed. Bush's approach to education was to install a fellow Texan with a much-hyped, but ultimately failed educational record running Houston's school system as Secretary of Education, and instituting a narrow, test-driven plan deceptively labeled "No Child Left Behind." Obama's approach to education is to install a fellow Chicagoan (a basketball buddy, in fact), with a much-hyped, but ultimately failed educational record running Chicago's school system as Secretary of Education, and instituting a narrow, test-driven plan deceptively labeled "Race To The Top."
It's no accident that conservative policies fail. They're meant to fail....
In Part 1 I began discussing the contents of "Pragmatism versus economics ideology: China versus Russia", the lead article in the latest Real World Economic Review (#52) written by David Ellerman. That diary had two sections devoted to discussing parts of the paper, "Articulating The Pragmatist/Social Engineering Distinction" and "The Failure of Development", and one section devoted to reflection, "Applying The Pragmatist/Social Engineering Distinction To Our Own Current Political Situation."
In this part, I will follow a similar pattern, first looking at the rest of the paper, and then discussing implications for us in the progressive movement. There are two sections devoted to discussing the paper, "Further Developing The Pragmatist/Social Engineering Distinction: Two Frameworks" and "Decentralized Social Learning", followed by "Reflections".
Further Developing The Pragmatist/Social Engineering Distinction
Ellerman next develops the pragmatist approach--in contrast with the social engineering approach--in terms of two different conceptual frameworks. First, that of computer science search algorithms, and second that of population genetics. Regarding the first of these, Ellerman begins:
Parallel Experimentation as Pragmatic Social Learning
The Duality Between Series-Oriented and Parallel-Oriented Strategies
There is a duality--series-parallel duality--that runs throughout mathematics, engineering, and human affairs. Many problems can be conceptualized as searching over a tree (starting at the root). At each point, we have two options: to continue searching to greater depth along a branch of the tree, or to broaden the search to include one or more other branches of the tree. For instance, Albert Hirschman explored this duality in his treatment of exit-voice dynamics [Hirschman 1970]. If you are dissatisfied with your position on a branch of a search tree, then you have the basic choice to exit the branch to try other branches (e.g., buy products from another company) or to stay loyal to the branch and exercise voice to try to improve your position along the branch.
Suppose one is facing a search tree in trying to find a solution to a problem. If one is quite sure that the solution lies along the branch that one is on, then a strategy of series experimentation is appropriate. Test the current proposed solution and then move along that branch, as it were, by improving that proposal. But if there is genuine uncertainty as to which branch may contain "the" solution or even "a" solution, then a strategy of parallel experimentation would be more appropriate. Try several options, prototype quickly to test the options, and communicate between the experiments since improvements in one option might also benefit other options. Eventually a clear winner might emerge so that resources could then be concentrated on that option.
[Note]: I began this diary six weeks ago, Finished it, in fact (except for a few minor updating details)... but didn't know it. That part I hadn't finished will appear in a follow-up diary tommorow. Both parts have been repurposed somewhat to meld with intervening developments.
The latest Real World Economic Review (#52) has just been published [in early March], and the lead article by David Ellerman is sophisticated look at the relative failure of ideology vs pragmatism in economic development. Titled "Pragmatism versus economics ideology: China versus Russia", Ellerman's focus is actually much broader. It's just that China and Russia provide us with as close to a controlled experiment as we're ever likely to get in the field of economic development at the large-economy scale.
But the evidence is so stark--China has grown so rapidly, while Russia has not just seen its economy shrink, but is in the midst of drastic population decline as well--that what makes this paper so significant is not the data, which he barely mentions (or needs to), but the penetrating analysis of what's behind it: not just the specific failed policies of "shock therapy" as prescribed by Jeffrey Sachs, but the physics-derived model of social science fused with social engineering that assumes a "one best solution" that is already known--at least in basic outlines. (This is also, need I say, a useful expansion of the field of vision embodied in Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.)
Ellerman contrasts this approach with the pragmatist vision, particularly as embodied in Dewey, which differs systematically at every level, from its basic conception of what science is to what knowledge is, how it is generated and dispersed, and how it relates to the individual and social creation of value, be it moral, spiritual or material.
Among other things, Ellerman invokes the model of a binary search tree, and the different strategies called for if one has a strong belief (justified or not) that what one is looking for can be found in a certain narrow range, versus how one should act in a condition of genuine uncertainty, and he also invokes the model of population genetics, which serves to elucidate the role of diverse sub-populations in enhancing adaptability to realize maximal fitness.
[Note]: The following is written from a perspective emphasizing developmental potentials which have been at least somewhat realized. I freely acknowledge-and have elsewhere argued-that the history of liberalism is a lot more complicated and problematic than this account alone would suggest. The repeated tardiness of liberals to champion racial justice would be an obvious case in point, precisely the sort of point that as a radical I have made on various different occasions. However, that example is much less a failing of ideology than a failing to live up to the ideology. Clearly, liberalism by itself has repeatedly failed to address the broader needs of justice. However, radicals have often been most effective by challenging liberalism simply to live up to its promises, and it's in that spirit that the following is written.
In his diary, "One liberalism through the ages", Dan makes a very strong case for seeing liberalism as centrally concerned with promoting and defending autonomy. This makes considerable sense to me as a way of distinguishing liberalism from libertarianism, and as exposing some of the flaws involved in libertarian attempts to pass themselves off as "classical liberals" with a legitimate claim to the liberal tradition.
In addition to his arguments, I would point to Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan's subject/object schema of cognitive development, in which the self is understood in terms of a subject/object relationship, with the subject structures of one level becoming objects at the next higher level. In this schema, the Level 3 "traditional" self is defined by its social surround, the roles and relationships of the society around it, taking as objects the named kinds of things that the society defines as having a stable existence, not just physical objects, but also individual attributes and dispositions, which makes a great deal of sense, since cultures the world around are defined in part by how they divide up the world analytically, and put it back together synthetically into a functioning whole.
Level 4, in turn, takes as objects the traditional self and the social surround it is embedded in, it operates on a principal of autonomy, "self-authorship", which does not necessarily reject the objects of the society it lives in, but does view them critically, as capable of modification, alteration, and reinvention, as well as regarding it as quite possible to invent wholly new objects. The Level 4 self-Kegan calls it the "modern self"--is autonomous in a way that simply isn't possible for the Level 3 self, because it can step back and question the social assumptions that the Level 3 self is embedded within.
Historically, the emergence of the Level 4 self as a relatively more common phenomena corresponds with the emergence of liberalism in the development of modern Europe. It gets its first big boost in the Italian Renaissance, based in city-states that flourished on trade, which brought them in contact with a wide range of cultures, and thus creating a condition conducive to developing the capacity to reflect back on their own culture, observing it-at least partially-with eyes that had learned to observe and come to understand something of the culture of others. It gets a second big boost with the Protestant Reformation, with it's central focus on the individual Christian conscience, and the subsequent Protestant/Catholic wars, which ultimately could only be resolved by adopting a practice of religious tolerance, which further enabled people to critically reflect on religious beliefs that had once been like the ocean in which all swam together. And it got it's third big boost with the Enlightenment, which was a veritable celebration of the power of human reason to reflect upon the world, and make it anew.
We at Open Left are taking the New Year's weekend off. Golden Oldies will run in their place. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on January 4th--Chris Bowers
A Daniel De Groot Golden Oldie
From Mon Nov 24, 2008. Original HERE.
There has been here, and elsewhere, a low-level (ahem) ideological debate about the relative importance of ideology versus pragmatism. To some, the election of Obama is seen as a victory for getting things done as opposed to what I suppose in this formulation is the old Washington game of tilting at ideological windmills. It's a theme I have seen frequently here in the comments, through the discussion on the merits of Obama's cabinet and other nominations so far. I want to address the underlying fiction which claims there is some practical ideal route of policy that can eschew ideology itself. Greenwald addressed this today, more specifically on pragmatism as foreign policy:
If one discards the need for ideology in favor of "pragmatism" and "competence" -- as so many people seem so eager to do -- then it's difficult to see how one could form any opinions about questions of this sort beyond a crude risk-benefit analysis (i.e., "pragmatism"). Are there military and economic benefits to be derived for the U.S. from invading Pakistan? Bombing Iran? Lending unquestioning support to Israel? Escalating our occupation of Afghanistan? Remaining indefinitely in Iraq and exploiting their resources? Propping up dictators of all types? Deposing Hugo Chavez? Torturing suspected terrorists for information, or detaining them without process? If so, then those who are heralding "pragmatism" as the supreme value -- or at least something that should trump "ideology" -- would have no real basis to oppose those actions. It is only ideological beliefs that permit opposition to those polices even if they are "beneficial" to our "national self-interest."
Being into the whole history thing enough to have written a book on it, I tend to take a long view on the big policy battles we fight today. As I wrote the other day, no piece of legislation ever gets to perfection, and on plenty of them you can have a perfectly legitimate debate even over the most well-intentioned bill over whether it does more harm than good. In addition to the actual policy particulars, lawmakers have to weigh (if they care about political survival) a wide range of other factors, including the political implications both nationally and in their home districts, the symbolism of what they are doing, how the interest groups and donors that matter the most to them are impacted, and how the media nationally and back home are treating the issue. Trying to factor in all these things is intense, and it is understandable that politicians sometimes have trouble making up their minds.
For reasonably progressive-minded advocates and lawmakers on a huge issue like health care, after you factor in all of the above, at the end of the day you also have to ask yourself two very big questions. The first is whether the passage of this legislation sets the stage on other issues for better or worse things to come. The second is whether the legislation, even with all of its flaws and compromises, creates a platform to build on in the future.
In my earlier post, "No, Obama, Conservatives Are NOT Just Liberals With A Different Set Of Ideas", I concluded by arguing that there are two levels of confusion to Obama's quest for cross-ideological progress. The first I described thus:
(1) Obama expects the general possibility of good-faith rational negotiations, producing consensus between liberals and conservatives "of good will." He mistakes the reality of specific cooperative achievements-of the sort that even flaming liberals like Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone managed to achieve-for a viable paradigm applicable across the boards.
He fails to recognize that such specific achievements only appear as potentially paradigmatic on the liberal/procedural side of the ledger, and only there among those, such as himself, who are blind to the topography of the conservative value space. In reality, such cross-ideological agreements are not possible in general, but are only specifically possible because they do not intrude into the realm of core normative principles on the conservative side.
If this were Obama's only confusion, then enough repetitions of the total rejection he's already experienced would eventually lead him to some sort of rethinking-such as, for example, refocusing on reaching out to conservative voters, rather than political leaders who either answer to, or directly come from the movement conservative core, who are far more ideologically rigid. What keeps Obama from making such a sensible adjustment is, at least in part, a second level of confusion, which I described thus:
(2) Having failed to make these crucial distinctions, Obama consequently sets himself up for a second level of confusions. This level consists of abandoning the liberal/procedural framework for achieving cross-ideological consensus, and accepting instead elements-from micro- to macro- of the conservative characterization of potential consensus (such as letting torturers off the hook as simple fairness.) This effort is doomed to failure, as I will describe in a followup post.
This is that post. It will also draw on the intervening post on conservative/authoritarian psychology.
At DKos, teacherken has a rather frightening new diary (h/t dkmich), "Schools - are we headed for national tests and standards?", in which he lays out various bits of evidence, recent statements of President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan, and concludes that the answer is "yes". He then asks, what exactly will these standards aim at producing--a happy hive of worker bees?
He raises a whole host of important questions, to which I want to add one that Gerald Bracey has repeatedly pointed to, as I've noted before: the professed purpose of workforce development and increased US competitiveness is totally bogus. The US is already #1 in competitiveness, while other countries where students outscore ours--such as Japan--have worse economic problems than we do. Furthermore, we already produce a workforce that is underemployed for its skill level.
I am all in favor improved education, but (a) we need a broader concept of what education is for--as teacherken argues, and (b) we need to improve our entire economic system so that it makes full use of the workforce we already have, and has jobs for the workers of the future we are intent on educating today. These two points imply a very different approach to education and our economic future than Obama appears to have in mind--and, most troubling of all, there appears to be virtually no public discussion of these very important issues.
Quotes from teacherken and further discussion on the flip.
In part one, I presented the background for this diary, a partial framework for understanding the battle of elite conservative and neo-liberal "reformers" to take over education. With that background in mind, let us consider four columns written anmd published at Huffington Post by Gerald Bracey, America's leading mythbuster on the education front, whose been on that job since 1991.
Bracey's first column looked back at the severely limited public debate preceding the choice, which had virtually shut out the possible nomination of Linda Darling-Hammond, an actual life-long educator who appeared to have the insider track as head of Obama's transition team on education. The next takes aim at the myth of educational crisis. The last two look at the utter cluelessness of Obama and his eventual choice, his basketball buddy Arne Duncan.
In my diaries yesterday, "Hello! President Pragmatism! Over Here!" and "Obama's Anti-Pragmatic Ideology vs. Universal Health Care", I focused attention on how Obama's neoliberal ideology clashed with professions of "pragmatism" by favoring market-based "solutions" that don't actual solve the problems they face-problems involving public goods, such as health care (even though there certainly are components of health care that qualify as private goods). I argued that movement conservatives opposed to the welfare state were out of step with their base, which (as General Social Survey data shows-see table on the flip) favors maintaining it. The solution was simple: don't dismantle the welfare state, but instead repurpose it to support economic patrons of movement conservatism, vast non-competitive oligopolies or monopolies rationalized to their base under fraudulent "free market" rhetoric. Thus, I wrote:
They didn't stop public spending on these important public goods, but they did start privatizing that spending in every way they could conceive of. And every step of the way that they did this, they created more and more of a private infrastructure that benefited from the arrangement--a vast array of insider special interests, who were very, very much like the British East India Company, the archetypal Crown Corporation against which the American colonials revolted, and against which Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations.
This happened first with the military industrial complex, but has become increasingly widespread across different sectors, of which the "health care industry" is a prime example, which the neoliberals are now aiming to vastly endow in turn, following the movement conservative pattern, without really grasping the implications-at least in some cases. Rather than benefiting the alleged beneficiaries-the American people-the neoliberals will actually benefit the health care special interests, as is transparently obvious, given who is included in the discussions. In this endeavor, the reformers were all but entirely excluded from the process.
Things are quite different, however, in the field of education, where the special interests are not nearly so well established at the primary and secondary levels. For that reason, looking at education can provide a useful contrast, which I am going to do in Part 2 of this diary, drawing on several recent columns by leading education myth-buster Gerald Bracey, published at Huffington Post. But first, in the remainder of this diary, there is groundwork to be laid, so that the full ramifications of Bracey's criticisms can be understood.
It's not necessary to nudge the Obama administration leftward until it arrives at socialism. When it comes to the public provision of public goods, Eisenhower Republicanism would be just fine.
In my intro to that diary, I said:
This weekend I want to take a sharper, more clearly-defined look at the limits of Obama's progressivism, which this diary begins. Not surprisingly, the dividing line is not pragmatism, but good old-fashioned ideology: "neo"-liberalism vs. the real thing. A key distinction of the real thing is public provision of public goods.
Examples of those limits are everywhere, but none is better than the virtual exclusion of single-payer health care from discussion in the health-care debate. Private insurance companies take roughly one third off the top for their bureaucracy, their advertising, their lobbying and their profits, and they don't contribute anything to providing health care. In fact, they are a clear impediment, as millions of people know from their personal experience on a daily basis. They are, at this point, purely parasitical on our diseased political culture. Yet, getting rid of them is politically unthinkable in Obama's mind, in the world he accepts as given. On Democracy Now! on Friday, this was the topic of discussion with Harpers senior editor Luke Mitchell, author of the article "Sick in the head: Why America won't get the health-care system it needs."
This is a follow-up to "Dems About To Collapse On Contraceptives In Stimulus Plan???". According to Elana Schor at TPMDC, "Family Planning Aid is Gone For Good From the Stimulus". True or not, we need to fully realize just how bad this is, so we understand the parameters that Obama is operating within. Hopefully they can and will be changed, but we cannot be effective in changing them if we don't understand them--particularly if we will fully mis-understand them. First off, Robert in Monterrey, aka "Eugene" had an excellent recommended diary at DKos yesterday, "This Is Not Acceptable", hitting three main points at the crux of the matter:
Why does this battle matter? First, contraception is economic stimulus. Family planning is necessary for American families of all incomes to enjoy financial stability and the ability to plan expenses. If you have an "oops baby" then your finances may suffer severely and unwantedly.
Second, this is a conservative effort to destroy the Obama Administration in the womb. If Obama caves, as now appears likely, then Republicans will have won a truly major victory. They never had a chance to stop the stimulus, but now they will have shown they can dictate some of its terms. They were active in pushing their bullshit talking points to the media - flawed as they were. If Obama is going to cater to their whims, we know from the Bush era how this story ends - Republicans will make more crazy demands, and Democrats will give in to them.
Third, this is part of the conservative effort to attack not just abortion rights, but contraception and the right to privacy. What they have done, and what Obama is about to enable, is something rather stunning - they have made contraception controversial. Sure, some of us might have felt a bit sheepish the first time we bought condoms or picked up the pill at the pharmacy, but we got over it, because it's not controversial or shameful but normal.
Not to the conservatives. They never wanted to stop at rolling back Roe v. Wade - they want to roll back anything smacking of sexual freedom. Griswold v. Connecticut is their true goal, the 1967 case that outlawed bans on contraception and established the right to privacy. If they are going to have a chance at rolling that back, they have to make contraception controversial. And if we are to stop them, we must not yield an inch to them - we must stand up and say "no, you lost, and we are keeping contraception funding."
There are millions of perfectly competent, perfectly decent individual conservatives. You can find them almost everywhere, in every neighborhood, in every city and town across America. But when you shift your gaze from their individual lives to the philosophy they share, and its historical record, the conclusion is inescapable: It's a complete disaster, utterly incapable of producing sound, sustainable policies. Worse yet, the political leadership it produces is incompetent at anything, except for making excuses for itself, and shifting blame onto others--not exactly the sort of behavior that squares with the famed conservative mantra of "personal responsibility."
First, consider the macro record, which goes way beyond "heckuva job, Brownie!" Conservatives have dominated the federal government on two separate occasions over the past 100 years. The first was 1921-1933, the second was 2001-2009. (Although the GOP did not control Congress throughout all of 2001-2009, its post-2006 ability to filibuster in the Senate, combined with an Executive Branch that conceived of itself as accountable to no one effectively marginalized any Democratic influence.) Both these periods ended in financial crises of unprecedented proportions, for which conservatives disavowed any responsibility whatsoever.
Indeed, conservatives today are still trying to deny any credit whatsoever to FDR's remarkable record of saving the nation the last time conservatives screwed up this badly. And their two-fold purpose in doing that is to (a) continue absolving themselves of any blame and to (b) block us from dealing with the crisis they've produced this time around.
Individually, I doubt that one conservative in ten would act this irresponsibly. But as a group, it's virtually impossible for them to act any other way.
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