debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

16.9.05

Ideological Coherence

I normally can't stand Daily Kos, but I happened to be skimming it today and a post caught my eye. Kos links to an AP report that the federal government is trying to turn up evidence that would allow them to blame the failure of the levees in New Orleans on environmental groups' lawsuits obstructing the Army Corps of Engineers. (Emily Gertz has more about one such claim that has already been raised.)

Kos is dismissive of the likely impact of such a claim, rattling off a list of other excuses that the administration has given for its mishandling of the hurricane. I agree that blaming environmentalists is not going to make much difference in public opinion -- but for a quite different reason. In Kos's world, the President's approval ratings are plummeting. Katrina blew the lid off his pretensions to competence, and so any feeble attempt to shift blame will never hold up.

In my world, however, Katrina has changed nobody's mind. It merely added another arrow to all the pre-existing quivers. Blaming environmentalists won't persuade anyone because there isn't anyone to persuade. The argument will be eaten up by those who already exonerate the administration, and rejected out of hand by those (like myself and Kos) who already assume the worst about the President. The folks at Gallup seem to inhabit my world, finding in their latest poll that the partisan divide on Bush's handling of Katrina is nearly perfect, and that his overall popularity has bounced right back to pre-hurricane levels.

But blaming environmentalists is actually a clever strategy here, rather than a waste of PR money. And it's clever not because it's going to sway anyone on the fence about Bush's handling of the hurricane, but because it speaks to those who are already Bush partisans. People hold their views more strongly the more they feel that they "hang together," mutually supporting each other. Libertarians, for example, are able to maintain a viewpoint that runs orthogonal to the prevailing camps not because they just happen to agree with lassiez-faire economics and abortion each on their own merits, but because they have a meta-narrative that tells them that those positions go together (indeed, that they go together much better than the mix of positions held by either of the major parties). The explanations for any one event (such as Katrina) by ideologues serve not just to promote their side's take on the issue at hand, but also to tie it into all of the other positions that side holds. So blaming environmentalists for the levee breaches assures conservatives not only that Bush is not to blame, but also that that view goes well with the conservative dislike of environmentalism and (perhaps more importantly) the judiciary. When your beliefs seem to cohere like that, your confidence that you have correctly judged the merits of any one of them increases. The ideologies of the major American parties need a good bit of this shoring up of coherence, because they're not all that much different (or all that coherent). But they're strong enough that there would be a fair bit of cognitive dissonance involved in accepting this one pro-Bush argument without taking on the whole package.

(At the risk of being unnecessarily snarky, you have to wonder how Bush has enough loyalists left even just to fill his cabinet if his popularity has really taken the number of critical blows that Democratic partisans like Kos claim it has. Every week a new issue is the last straw that will finally turn the country against the President.)

Stentor Danielson, 15:57, ,

13.9.05

Bush Survives With Nary A Scratch

I think Jonathan Chait hits the nail on the head in explaining why President Bush will sail through the Katrina debacle unscathed:

So here we are, with the administration having badly bungled a war and a major national disaster, not to mention making a complete hash of the budget. Yet Bush and his aides don't seem very upset. And why should they be? There's nothing anybody can do to them now.

Chait goes on to explain how the structure of Congress, combined with the existence of a hard core of 35-40% of voters who would vote Republican even if Bush held a baby-eating orgy in the Rose Garden, means it's exceedingly unlikely that Congressional Republicans will feel the heat over Katrina either. I would add to that the fact that the election is over a year away. The more time passes, the more the really visceral images of dectruction and immediate-aftermath incompetence will fade. The Republican spin machine has finally gotten into gear*, so anyone who's currently staring down the tough choice of rejecting the GOP will be offered a comfortable narrative that will make peace between the tragedy of Katrina and their commitment to the Republican party.

Garance Franke-Ruta suggests that, while the ballot box might not have much strength against Bush, perhaps the media can create some accountability. Now, this might be true if the President believed that getting good reviews from the New York Times was intrinsically valuable -- but George W. Bush is not such a president. The only real power the press has is the power to influence people's decisions in the voting booth.

However, Chait seems surprised at the continuing loyalty of some ideologues:

What I think it means is that Kristol, like most conservatives, will remain loyal to Bush as long as he remains ideologically true, no matter how badly he governs.

To me, this is unsurprising, though not for the knee-jerk reason that conservatives are dumb and don't pay attention to reality. It's in the nature of an ideologue to see ideology as of primary importance. Post-Katrina hurricane relief is a relatively non-ideological task, but many other things the president does are not. Chait is implying that much of what a president does is similarly administrative, jobs where the goal is clear and the only question is the President's skill in carrying them out. An ideologue like Kristol, on the other hand, sees a big part of the President's job as consisting of setting those goals. Competence in carrying them out is only as good as the goals themselves. Think of it this way: had Bush executed the Katrina aftermath perfectly, making none of the mistakes for which he's been criticized, how many liberals would be willing to support him? Would saving a few thousand more people in New Orleans outweigh five years of corporate cronyism, the war in Iraq, two conservative Supreme Court justices, undermining environmental protection, a yawning budget deficit, and more? It's a tough question, and looking at it that way makes loyal ideologues seem reasonable after all.

*The leftward half of the punditocracy has been repeatedly led astray by the fact that the GOP often waits a few days before pushing its spin, prematurely crowing that the right's propaganda machine has finally bitten off more than it can chew and heralding the downfall (finally!) of Bush. The fact is that Karl Rove is good enough that he can forego the first-mover advantage to wait and get a sense of the landscape.

Stentor Danielson, 17:34, ,

12.9.05

Contradictory Hell

There seems to be a contradiction between two key doctrines of traditional Christianity: desert and depravity. The doctrine of desert states that, judged on their own actions, all sinners deserve to go to hell. Any sin, no matter how small, is appropriately punished by an eternity of suffering. The rationale for this rests on free will -- we make a choice to sin or not sin, and therefore deserve the consequences of each. On the other hand, the doctrine of depravity states that everyone is a sinner. It's in human nature to be unable to avoid sin. While we may be free at the scale of an individual decision, in the larger picture -- which is the basis on which we're judged -- we'll inevitably sin at least some of the time.

Taken together, these two doctrines run afoul of one of the most widely accepted principles in ethical philosophy: ought implies can. That is, we can't be obligated to do anything that is impossible for us to do. (Many people -- notably critics of utilitarianism -- interpret this principle even more liberally, holding that we can't be obligated to do anything that is really hard for us to do either.)

Pop Christianity resolves the problem in the post-Crucifixion world. According to pop Christianity, Jesus' death essentially revised the entry requirements for heaven. Rather than demanding total purity, God gives us a much more manageable task -- just believe in Jesus. However, I think most theologians would dispute pop Christianity's interpretation. According to a more intellectual Christianity, the pre-Jesus doctrine of desert still holds. Believing in Jesus is not an alternative path to earning salvation, but rather a method for begging God for mercy, to spare you from the punishment that you continue (in violation of "ought implies can") to deserve. While we can trust God to save everyone who believes, he's under no obligation to, and we'd have no right to complain if he decided to send us all to hell for our sins after all.

Stentor Danielson, 09:32, ,