All posts by John Casey

Blogger
Argument Analysis, E.J.Dionne, General discussion

Argue for it

3 Comments

Every now and then we point out why we tend to pick on conservatives (which we do). There are lots of reasons. The main reason is not that we’re liberal (which we are); it’s not that we think any particular liberal argument is advanced by pointing out the weaknesses in corresponding conservative arguments (they’re not–but then again the liberal arguments may not fail for the sophistical refutations brought forward by conservatives, that’s different); nor is it that we think that finding fault with conservative arguments and arguers in general advances the cause of liberalism in general.

Rather, the primary reason is that conservative pundits have a marked tendency to state their views in the form of arguments. That is to say, they’ll give a series of reasons for embracing some conclusion or another. Since we like arguments, we like reading them and thinking about them, we find this approach appealing (even if we find it often lacking).

On the liberal side (i.e., among major newspaper pundits–the blogosphere is another matter entirely), on the other hand, you don’t often see the kind of energetic arguing typical of George Will or Charles Krauthammer. This is not an indictment of liberal pundits either. There are lots of ways of stating one’s case. Stating in the form of a persuasive argument is just one. We wish they did it more. But that’s a different matter.

Take E.J.Dionne’s op-ed today as an example of the difference between liberal and conservative pundits. Dionne writes about Ted Strickland, Governor of Ohio. In discussing Strickland’s success (in an otherwise red state), Dionne points out that his positions resonate with the people:

>Strickland’s political skill only partly explains Ohio’s political transformation. A state that voted narrowly for President Bush in 2000 and 2004 not only elected Strickland as governor in 2006 but also sent Sherrod Brown, an economic populist with a far-more liberal public profile, to the U.S. Senate.

>The conversion rate among Ohio voters in just two years was staggering. According to exit polling, 30 percent of Ohioans who voted for Bush in 2004 voted for Strickland in 2006; 20 percent of Bush’s 2004 voters supported Brown.

>Why the big change? Scandals involving former governor Robert Taft and former representative Bob Ney made even loyal Republicans squeamish. Strickland won a fifth of self-identified Republicans and a quarter of conservatives, while holding on to more than 90 percent of liberals and Democrats, and roughly 70 percent of moderates and independents. If national Democrats reached such numbers in 2008, they’d win the presidency decisively.

>The new economy has hit Ohio hard. Industrial cities such as Youngstown and Cleveland have suffered under the lash of globalization. Brown’s tough stand against free trade appealed in a place where the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs makes the promise of a flat, highly competitive world fall very flat indeed.

>What might Democratic presidential candidates learn from Ohio? As a matter of style, Strickland suggests they must understand that “people are desperately wanting to believe that political leaders understand them and that they are trying to deal with their day-to-day lives.” Memo to overly cautious candidates: Strickland also thinks that “the display of genuine emotion is important.”

>Substantively, Strickland says the economy matters most, although he has been a strong opponent of the Iraq war from the beginning. “The foreclosure problem is huge,” Strickland says. “The people are desperate for jobs.” He sees health care and education as central — they were the key issues in his recent budget. These questions “ought to give Democrats a leg up,” but only if they can “talk about these things in a way that gets people to believe you will do something about them.”

>There’s the rub for Democrats in 2008. Voters want government to work but aren’t sure that it can. They want government to solve problems but worry that it won’t. This creates a strategic paradox: Democrats need to discredit Bush’s government without discrediting government altogether.

All of this may be a fine explanation of Strickland’s success. But it has the air of a trade journal publication for political strategists. Why should it interest a typical voter to read an article in the newspaper about what the typical voter wants? From the point of view of political analysis, on the other hand, Strickland’s story is interesting. But you couldn’t put anything Dionne says here against the conservative pundit who will argue that the voters are wrong.

Sure they voted that way. But why should they vote that way? Whatever his many vices, and they are many, that’s the kind of question George Will would be asking.

Ignoratio Elenchi, Op-Eds and other opinions

Ad republicam

3 Comments

This has to be one of the funniest responses to the chickenhawk charge:

>The caller, besides his anger, raises a point that’s brought up, out against the supporters of the war a lot and that’s the argument that if you really supported the war, you’d be fighting it. And, unfortunately, that goes against the Constitution, which gives every American the right to speak their mind, regardless of their biography or regardless of what they do, so it’s an unconstitutional argument. It’s a demeaning argument to the troops in the field because it assumes that they’re somehow victims, and that they’re not there of their own free will. We have a voluntary Army and the people serving are there of their own free will.

Whatever the merits of the chickenhawk argument–and as long as tours in Iraq get extended it certainly has some–the way to respond to it is not to hide behind the Constitution. The Constitution, Matthew Continetti ought to know, governs the legal rights of American citizens, not the kinds of arguments that can be made in a public forum.

Michael Gerson, Unqualified Authority

Let them eat yellow cake

Sometimes one can only laugh. Yesterday, for instance, Michael Gerson–former speech writer to George W.Bush–turns his attention to Iraq. Keep in mind that Gerson’s man, in Gerson’s words, was fantastically wrong about Iraq. But he was wrong about Iraq in the company of another man–Tony Blair, the now former British PM. This is why the following is so dumbfounding:

>One of the most infuriating problems in Iraq seems to generate precious little fury.

>In a kind of malicious chemistry experiment, hostile powers are adding accelerants to Iraq’s frothing chaos. Iran smuggles in the advanced explosive devices that kill and maim American soldiers. Syria allows the transit of suicide bombers who kill Iraqis at markets and mosques, feeding sectarian rage.

>This is not a complete explanation for the difficulties in Iraq. Poor governance and political paralysis would exist whether Iran and Syria meddled or not.

Not to mention sectarian rage. But no mind:

>But without these outside influences, Tony Blair told me recently, the situation in Iraq would be “very nearly manageable.”

Tony Blair! Those who listened to Tony Blair (and Bush, and many, many others) the first time found themselves in a bloody mess. You’d think that Gerson, architect and first person witness of the nonsense that put us there, might perhaps be sensitive to question of diminished credibility. Just a whisper perhaps.

But then again, maybe not.

Ad hominem tu quoque, Jonah Goldberg

Woodrow Wilson did it too

1 Comment

This is from Jonah Goldberg one long exercise in the tu quoque (among much else):

>At a candidate forum for trial lawyers in Chicago on Sunday, Hillary Rodham Clinton proclaimed that the Bush administration is “the most radical presidency we have ever had.”

>This is, quite simply, absurd. But such boob-bait for the Bush bashers is common today in Democratic circles, just as similar right-wing rhetoric about Bill Clinton was par for the course a decade ago. The culture war, it seems, has distorted how we view politics more than we realize. Trust in government is at historic lows, but faith in one’s own “team” remains remarkably durable. (President Bush’s job-approval rating among Republicans is 80 percent, according to the polling company Rasmussen Reports.)

Then he goes on to criticize Woodrow Wilson.

Nobody is defending Woodrow Wilson. And whether Bill Clinton pardoned convicted felons has nothing to do with whether Scooter Libby deserved a pardon.

Bush, David Brooks

Non-existent principles

3 Comments

This from Brooks’ column yesterday. Inspired by this.

>[H]is self-confidence survives because it flows from two sources. The first is his unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea. Bush is convinced that history is moving in the direction of democracy, or as he said Friday: “It’s more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn’t exist.”

I missed the part in the Bible about history moving in the direction of democracy. That idea–democracy–was someone else’s. I’m also uncertain whether the dispute about Bush’s belligerent and counterproductive policies primarily concerns whether or not certain principles “exist.” Whatever the source of such foundational principles of value (divine beneficence, common agreement, or whatever), there will always remain the question of how to apply them. Claiming that they’re divine, in other words, tells us nothing about how to apply them.

Argument Analysis, Bad Explanations, David Brooks

Or Tolstoy is right

2 Comments

David Brooks writes:

>Many will doubt this, but Bush is a smart and compelling presence in person, and only the whispering voice of Leo Tolstoy holds one back.

>Tolstoy had a very different theory of history. Tolstoy believed great leaders are puffed-up popinjays. They think their public decisions shape history, but really it is the everyday experiences of millions of people which organically and chaotically shape the destiny of nations — from the bottom up.

>According to this view, societies are infinitely complex. They can’t be understood or directed by a group of politicians in the White House or the Green Zone. Societies move and breathe on their own, through the jostling of mentalities and habits. Politics is a thin crust on the surface of culture. Political leaders can only play a tiny role in transforming a people, especially when the integral fabric of society has dissolved.

>If Bush’s theory of history is correct, the right security plan can lead to safety, the right political compromises to stability. But if Tolstoy is right, then the future of Iraq is beyond the reach of global summits, political benchmarks and the understanding of any chief executive.

Again, not so much a false dichotomy as false dichotomizing: considering only two very different possibilities as exhaustive without the further claim that one is evidently false or ridiculous.

Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea

1 Comment

A few weeks ago the Chicago Tribune ran a story entitled, “What is a Hate Crime?” The story was so bad the public editor condemned it and expressed bafflement that such an experienced reporter could have written it. Aside from the fact that the story didn’t bother to address the legal meaning of the term hate crime, it was premised on the complaints of a Charlie Daniels (yes, that one), a couple of right wing bloggers (known for hyping the false), and various white supremacist groups. They complained that a horrific abduction and murder in the Nashville, Tennessee area should qualify as a hate crime because it was committed by people of a different race from the victim. The story furthered their complaint, pointing out statistics on crimes where the victim is of a different race than the perpetrator.

Ignoring the objections of the public editor, today the Tribune posts an unsigned editorial about the upcoming vote on hate crimes legislation. They write:

>The Tribune carried an interesting story recently about a particularly heinous double murder in Knoxville, Tenn. The two young victims, who were kidnapped, raped and killed, were white. The three men and a woman who stand charged with the crime are black.

>The story posed some difficult questions about how this country deals with crimes that have a racial overtone — when someone of one race kills someone of another race. And it asked the question: What is a hate crime?

>The definitions in federal law and various state laws differ, but generally a hate crime is considered to be any crime that is motivated by bias based on race, religion or other factors. Hate crime laws permit tougher punishment based on the motivation and broader social impact of the offense.

>So did the Knoxville case qualify? “There is absolutely no proof of a hate crime,” said John Gill, a special counsel to the Knox County prosecutor. “It was a terrible crime, a horrendous crime, but race was not a motive.”

>Yet Mary Newsom, the mother of one of the victims, told a Tribune reporter: “If this wasn’t a hate crime, then I don’t know how you would define a hate crime.”

However horrible the criminal act, its horror does not make it a hate crime–pointing that out, as the Tribune ought to know from reading their own public editor (or their mail for that matter) is irrelevant. In addition to this, the editorial makes the two common objections to hate crime legislation–both of them silly in my estimation.

The first, hate crimes legislation is unnecessary:

>But why expand the use of a federal hate crime law?

>Not only are crimes of violence already punishable under state laws, most states also have their own hate crimes statutes. The vast majority of street crime has always been handled by state and local authorities, and nothing suggests they are abdicating that responsibility. It’s telling that only a tiny percentage of existing hate crimes leads to federal indictments.

>The Senate version is called “The Matthew Shepard Act,” after a gay man beaten to death in 1998 in Wyoming. But that case fails to prove the need for an expanded law. His two assailants were not charged with a hate crime, since the state had no such law. They were, however, convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The rarity of the crime has nothing to do with whether or not it should be illegal. Aside from this, the Matthew Shepard case is not exemplary. Not all hate crimes are murders, so sentencing in those cases might not be adequate (in that they wouldn’t involve maximum penalties).

The second objection rests on a sophomoric skepticism about judging mental state:

>Hate crime laws may be justified when the crime has a broad societal impact. A brick through the window of the first black family on a block is more than a prank. But hate crime laws raise concerns when they punish criminals differently not because of what they do, but because of what they think. In the view of Northwestern University law professor Martin Redish, it’s the equivalent of tacking on extra punishment if a crime is meant to promote the cause of communism. Beat a man because he looks rich, or because he’s got a Republican bumper sticker on his car, and there’s no hate crime. Beat him because you think he’s Jewish, or Cuban, or (under this bill) gay, and there is.

This is a bit of a twist on the old argument. But it’s worth pointing out that people get punished for what they think all of the time. It’s almost as if the “guilty mental state,” the mens rea, were the cornerstone of criminal law. So pointing out that you’re punishing someone for what they think doesn’t amount to much. Besides, juries are asked to make all sorts of judgments about knowledge, intent, volition, character, honesty, depravity and much much more (especially when it comes to sentencing).

The twist in this argument, however, consists in its muddying the waters about which groups qualify for protection from hatred–the rich aren’t included, but neither are Civil War reenactors, NASCAR fans, or Trekkies. Perhaps they could petition the government for inclusion.

***Vacation for a week starting tomorrow. Enjoy the archives.

David Brooks, False Dichotomy, Straw Man

Segregation forever

For almost three years now we’ve noted David Brooks’s tendency to divide the world into two’s. Frequently this division is the first step on the way to a false dichotomy:

>do you want to surrender to terrorists or fight them like a man with the military, you choose;

sometimes, however, it’s just a random an arbitrary division:

>there are two kinds of people, some like cheddar, others Velvetta.

It’s false, but not the kind that’s fallacious.

Now we know why Brooks does this:

>For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors lived in small bands. Surviving meant being able to distinguish between us — the people who will protect you — and them — the people who will kill you. Even today, people have a powerful drive to distinguish between us and them.

>As dozens of social-science experiments have made clear, if you separate people into different groups — no matter how arbitrary the basis of the distinction — they will quickly begin discriminating against others they deem unlike themselves. People say they want to live in diverse integrated communities, but what they really want to do is live in homogenous ones, filled with people like themselves.

>If that’s the case, maybe integration is not in the cards. Maybe the world will be as it’s always been, a collection of insular compartments whose fractious tendencies are only kept in check by constant maintenance.

Human nature. But there’s hope:

>Maybe the health of a society is not measured by how integrated each institution within it is, but by how freely people can move between institutions. In a sick society, people are bound by one totalistic identity. In a healthy society, a person can live in a black neighborhood, send her kids to Catholic school, go to work in a lawyer’s office and meet every Wednesday with a feminist book club. Multiply your homogenous communities and be fulfilled.

>This isn’t the integrated world many of us hoped for. But maybe it’s the only one available.

Now the only way this analysis works is if Brooks understands the question of integration on the blender model: everyone in every way all of the time is blended through and through. Every one is the same. Everything is in everything.

I can’t think of anyone who ever seriously thought that was the goal of integration. Integration, in the relevant sense nowadays (what with the Supreme Court and all), means equal access to the goods of society (housing, public schools, etc. ) regardless of for example race, gender or sexual orientation.

Moving freely between institutions and communities (say, without legal or social blockades) is precisely what integration is. And that’s hardly the same as George Wallace’s “Segregation now. . . .segregation forever.”

Ad Hominem Abusive, George Will, Straw Man

Faddish social theories

4 Comments

I don’t know what the argument was for the Seattle Public School system’s diversity policy recently considered by the Supreme Court, but after reading George Will today, I know even less:

>Seattle’s “race-conscious” policies were devised by the sort of people who proclaimed on the school district’s Web site that “having a future time orientation” (planning ahead), “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” and “defining one form of English as standard” constitute “cultural racism” and “institutional racism” and arise from “unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality.” Stephen Breyer, in a dissent joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens, said the court should be deferential to such people when they shuffle pupils on the basis of race.

>Why race? Although progressive people would never stoop to racial stereotyping, they evidently believe that any black or other minority child, however young or from whatever social background, makes a predictable and distinctive — you might say stereotypical — contribution to “diversity.”

>Breyer said that last week’s decision abandons “the promise of Brown.” Actually, that promise — a colorblind society — has been traduced by the “diversity” exception to the equal protection clause. That exception allows white majorities to feel noble while treating blacks and certain other minorities as seasoning — a sort of human oregano — to be sprinkled across a student body to make the majority’s educational experience more flavorful.

>This repulsive practice merits Clarence Thomas’s warning in his opinion concurring with last week’s ruling: Beware of elites eager to constitutionalize “faddish social theories.” Often, they are only theories. As Roberts said, Seattle and Louisville offered “no evidence” that the diversity they have achieved (by what he has called the “sordid business” of “divvying us up by race”) is necessary to achieve the “asserted” educational benefits.

>Evidence is beside the point. The point for race-mongering diversity tinkerers is their professional and ideological stake in preventing America from achieving “a colorblind mentality.”

Their policy might even be less justifiable than this makes it seem. But that’s precisely why I want to know what it is. In the fever of his perpetual advocacy (and perhaps his recent rediscovery of the virtues of segregation [here–then here]), Will never lets on that there was ever a legal case for it. And here he has managed even to make the Supremes sound like him–picking quotes about racism out of context (and to heightened negative effect). Here, for instance, is the fuller context of that quotation:

>Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

That’s better. Having a discussion about that quotation, however, would take time and would involve seriously considering the claims it makes. And that’s boring. It’s easier to call them “faddish social theories” and be done with it.