Managed Ignorance

Aaron in reply to Jason Kuznicki says:

@Jason Kuznicki, Here’s the thing — we’re talking about how these movements interact with the general, not-well-informed public. It’s fine to say, “Well, Daniel Larison is a conservative and he’s against the wars” — or Frum, or Friedersdorf, or Douthat or whichever intellectual conservative who has absolutely zero impact on the movement, but these views are, at best, marginal in the conservative movement, or completely derided. The popular conservative movement is anti-government and anti-tax. They are not anti-deficit, and they aren’t anti-Medicare (although they are anti-Medicaid). You mention that government grew during conservative governance, as it did under liberal governance. But what kind of growth? Under conservatives, we see a growth of the military, of the debt, and of assistance to (white) seniors. We see reductions in services to the poor, to children and minorities. I agree wholeheartedly that there is a terminal intellectual dissonance at the heart of modern conservatism. When people like Andrew Sullivan and David Frum go off on airy variations on the theme “what is real conservatism,” they’re meditating on the best of what it could be, not what it is and where it’s going. Sullivan can go on and on about his “conservatism of doubt” all he wants, but the fact remains that the self-identified conservatives in power

You say, “Republicans can’t be called the party of smaller government at all. Lower taxes, yes, but not smaller government, and this in the long term is irresponsible, even if no one is paying attention.” Of course they can’t be – it’s self evident that their interest in smaller government is nonsense. But that’s not what people believe. If we’re talking about how Republicans manipulate people through managed ignorance (which is a great phrase, by the way) the image that they have presented to the public (small government, lower taxes) is part and parcel of that.

You also say: “I think liberals, too, could easily profit from ignorance, they just don’t seem to do it so readily.” I don’t believe that liberals are morally superior to conservatives, so there must be a reason why liberals are less likely to use ignorance as a political weapon. I would posit that it’s because progressivism actual values fact-based governance. If liberal-aligned politicians felt that an ignorant public was useful for their reelection, they would use that. But it doesn’t make sense by virtue of the fact that they are liberal-aligned in the first place.

The famous libertarian $100 bill on the sidewalk is a good example of the dichotomy. Liberals take it to heart: the poor are still poor, the market hasn’t managed to correct this, so government should do something. If the market was going to solve the problem of endemic, generational poverty, it would have. So, Johnson creates the Great Society and tries to address it. Reagan comes in and says, “Well, there are still poor people, let’s have some tax cuts and less government.” It doesn’t matter whether or not the programs were working, or whether they could have been improved – and it certainly doesn’t matter that Reagan increased taxes and the government, because when people – our managedly ignorant masses – think of Reagan, they think of less taxes and less government. “Government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.”

Finally, you say that liberals want to government to grow, and I would agree with you that, by and large, that’s true. But they don’t want it to grow as a matter of principle – they want it to grow because, by growing, it can help people. If shrinking it would help people, than I believe that’s what they would advocate – look at the welfare reform and budget deals of the ‘90s. Can you cite an example of a major Democratic politician, on the national level, saying something as ignorant and as wrong as McConnell and Boehner’s support of imaginary Laffer Curve economics of the last month or so? That was then repeated endlessly and as widely accepted on the left as the right’s anti-tax dogma?Report