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Friday, August 23, 2019

ANOTHER GOLDEN OLDIE


I got up this morning irritated at Susan Collins, not for anything she has just said but simply for being Susan Collins.  I think my bad temper was actually triggered by a TV appearance of David Ignatius, who has never seen a road he did not want to drive down the middle of.  Before going off to the start-of-the-year party of the UNC Philosophy Department later this afternoon, I decided to write a lengthy post laying out an idea I have had for some time about the political spectrum and the Myth of the Broad-Minded Moderate, as I label it in my musings.  But first, out of an excess of caution, I checked to see whether I had written about this before, and sure enough, there was a post on the topic from March 10, 2012.  That time I was irritated at the outpouring of praise for the retiring Olympia Snowe [what is it with me and women Senators from Maine?]

At first, I decided to scrap the idea, but then I thought, seven years is several lifetimes in the Blogosphere.  I think I will highlight what I wrote then, copy it, and post it again, inasmuch as it is still true.  So, with a warning to really long-time readers, here is what I said then:

The retirement announcement of the soon to be late and already unlamented Olympia Snowe has predictably unleashed yet another tsunami of punditry by the usual suspects about the regrettable rigidity of today's Congressional Democrats and Republicans.  This has been coupled with bathetic nostalgia for the good old days when giants of accommodation walked the halls of Congress, regularly reaching out across the aisles to craft compromises in the sacred middle of the political spectrum.  This, I believe, is what is referred to in those compressed fragments of communication called tweets as the CW of the MSM.  Those of us with pretentions to a somewhat better class of education prefer the phrase consensus gentium, believing, as we do, that it always sounds better in Latin.

Never mind the false and self-serving claim that the ideological rigidity of those on the right is mirrored by a like rigidity of the few remaining Members of Congress who can plausibly be described as "on the left."  Rachel Maddow has nicely skewered that fiction.  [I leave it to someone more agile at these things than I to provide the link in a comment.]  I should like to call into question the central thesis, namely that the vanishing breed of "moderates" like Snowe [and her colleague with the extraordinarily irritating voice, Susan Collins] are more open-minded, more flexible, more willing to engage in the quintessentially democratic act of compromise, than their more inflexible colleagues to the right or the left.

What follows is an hypothesis, not a thesis, because I do not have hard data to support it.  But I would be happy to put money on the proposition [not a Romneyesque ten thousand, to be sure, but certainly a fiver], because I am sure its central idea is correct.

Let us choose a single very large and complex issue of public policy -- health care reform, say, since we all remember the debates and maneuverings that led to the passage of the Affordable Care Act [also known, to Republicans, as Obamacare, and to some candidates for the Republican presidential nomination as Obamneycare].   In a leap of conceptual simplification worthy of a neo-classical economist, let us suppose that all the many possible positions, pro and con, on health care reform can be arrayed along a one-dimensional spectrum from left to right.  We may imagine that at the extreme left is true socialized medicine, with no insurance companies, no for-profit hospitals, and the central government paying the entire bill from the general tax fund.  Somewhat to the right of that terminus,  but still situated well to the left, is a single payer version of the current health care system.  The extreme right, we may suppose, is represented by the position of Dr. [and Congressman] Ron Paul, who says that uninsured trauma patients who show up in the Emergency Room of a for-profit hospital should be left to die -- rather like the old nineteenth century practice of letting a house burn if it did not sport a plaque showing that the owner was a subscriber to the private firefighting service.  [Those plaques, incidentally, are now valuable collector's items of Americana.]

Each member of the House or Senate, we shall now assume, can identify some point on that spectrum of positions that corresponds to his or her ideologically most preferred policy -- some complicated combination of coverages and exclusions, guarantees and options, in the maelstrom of the American health care system.  Now I am going to make a really serious conceptual simplification, genuinely worthy of a General Equilibrium theorist.  I am going to assume that each person, having located himself or herself at some point on the line, finds that each position to the left is less acceptable, the farther to the left it is from that point, and that each position to the right is also less acceptable, the farther to the right it is from that point.  [Those who have actually read my Tutorial on the use and abuse of formal models in political theory will recognize this simplification from the work of the Australian political scientist Duncan Black, but that, as they say, was in another land, and besides the wench is dead.]

OK.  Got that?  A line the points of which are different health care reform positions, arrayed from left to right, and Members of the House and Senate positioned along that line, looking with increasing disfavor to positions to their left or right according to how much farther right or left they are.  Let us suppose the line looks like this:

            ___________________________________________

Now, imagine some senator positioned somewhere along the line -- to the right, let us say.  Let us invent a name for him, a name so absurd and comical that no actual senator could ever actually bear it.  I know, how about Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, or Jeff Sessions, for short?  Let us suppose that Jeff Sessions is positioned, on the issue of health care reform, like this:

            __________________________________JF________

Jeff Sessions, we assume, prefers the package of health care reform proposals identified by the point on the line where we have located his initials, and if he had the power to enact a bill, that is exactly the bill he would choose.  But I am betting [this is where the hypothetical part of all of this comes into play] that he would be willing to compromise to at least some extent to get most of what he wants, striking a deal with Jim DeMint to his right or Jon Kyl slightly to his left [but still securely within the conservative segment of the line, of course.]   I may be wrong, of course.  Maybe Jeff Sessions is totally and immovably inflexible on the issue of health care reform.  But I would bet more than a fiver that that is not so.  Recall our assumption that the various positions are less and less acceptable to anyone located anywhere on the line the farther away they are, to the left or the right, from where he or she is located.  It follows from this assumption [never mind the proof, if it isn't obvious] that there is a compact space of possible positions around Jeff Sessions, all of which would be acceptable to him in a compromise, if he were able to get one.  Let us suppose this situation looks like this:

            ______________________________(___JF____)_____

Presumably, every single Senator and Representative can be modeled on the line in the same fashion.  Some will have very wide brackets around their initials, some very narrow brackets.  The width of the bracket, in this little model, is a visible representation of that politician's flexibility, or willingness to compromise.

Now, my hypothetical thesis is this:  the people located near the break between the Democratic [left] side and the Republican [right] side of the line, people like Olympia Snowe, do not in general have brackets around their initials that are noticeably wider than the brackets around the initials of people located near the left end or the right end of the line.  But because they are more often in play when one side or the other is attempting to assemble a winning coalition, they acquire the undeserved reputation for being reasonable, willing to compromise, non-ideological, or public-spirited.

I watched the very public wooing of Olympia Snowe during the health care debate, and it was my distinct impression that she had an extremely narrow bracket around her initials [so to speak].  She just happened to be located at the fault line between the two parties.  My informal guess is that the most flexible members of the Senate were actually the most liberal Democrats, who were willing to make enormous compromises to get something, anything, done.

There is of course not the slightest possibility that anyone in the MSM will take note of this, or will adjust the CW by so much as a micrometer.  That would require intelligence and the willingness to consider a new idea.


6 comments:

s. wallerstein said...

In light of what you say above, readers might be interested in Tariq Ali's concept of the
Extreme Center.
https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Centre-Warning-Tariq-Ali/dp/1784782629

jgkess@cfl.rr.com said...

Democrats, now, are what Republicans were in the 60's and 70's (at least on economics). Hell, even on social policy it was Nixon in 1972 who floated a proposal to nationalize our health-care system. It's bizarre that critics of modern Democrats claim that the party has moved too far to the Left. On this point, Joe Scarborough (of "Morning Joe"), that Reagan-loving fool, is especially nuts.

David Palmeter said...

I think you’re right in noting that members of Congress don’t stray all that much from their starting positions, but those positions vary greatly. Someone like Collins is closer to the center (if she weren’t, she’d have hard time getting elected in Maine) than someone like Sessions. Similarly, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Mancin have very different starting points.

The Good Old Days of compromise were really days when the two parties were anything but homogeneous. The Democratic party encompassed a Northern pro-labor bloc as well as a Southern segregationist bloc. Hubert Humphrey and James Eastland were fellow Democrats. The Republican Party encompassed pro-corporation bloc and more liberal, “Party of Lincoln” bloc. Jacob Javits and Barry Goldwater were fellow Republicans.

It was never neat and tidy, but this was the broad picture. It began to unravel about 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Goldwater’s nomination, with Nixon’s Southern strategy a few years later increasing the pace of separation. The Party of Lincoln became the Party of Jefferson Davis when the segregationists switched parties, and the Republican Right, the heirs of Goldwater, began their purge of the liberal Republicans.

The Democrats were the losers in this process. In the 24 years between Nixon’s election in 1968 to Clinton’s in 1992, the Democrats held the White House for all of four years, with Carter. And as the process rolled on, the Democrats, after controlling the House since 1954, lost it in 1994 to Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America. The Republicans have had control of the House most of the time since.

I wonder how Big Business is viewing the scene these days. They have to love the tax cuts and deregulation, but they must worry about the threat of Trump telling them what and what not to do. Today he ordered US corporations to get out of China. (“I hereby order...). His ignorance is beyond belief. He doesn’t seem to know that he has no more authority to order Apple to leave China or GM not to close a plant in Ohio than I do.

He appears to be coming totally unhinged. And he has control of nuclear weapons. The time has come for Article 25.

Danny said...

'This, I believe, is what is referred to in those compressed fragments of communication called tweets as the CW of the MSM.'

I'll take your word for it that anything is referred to in tweets as 'the CW of the MSM'.

'Those of us with pretentions to a somewhat better class of education prefer the phrase consensus gentium, believing, as we do, that it always sounds better in Latin.'

Ah, the consensus sapientium prefer the phrase consensus gentium, believing that quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur.

But what is this about the 'soon to be late and already unlamented Olympia Snowe', who might have been 65 years old at the time, and is not dead yet? Nevermind. This whole exercise turns out to be to make a point about the notion of a centrist ideology. The point counts, I take it, as 'a new idea'. As in, 'That would require intelligence and the willingness to consider a new idea.'

There seem to be two ideas at play here, one of them more of a political methodology, and the other, more defines the 'what'. It strikes me, that we can have far-right moderates, far-left moderates, radical centrists, or moderate centrists. So if you are impartial, and even handed, you might even have have this radical proposititon that people do not have to die for their opinions.

I defend centrists especially now in this day and age. I guess we can all agree, though, that a centrist is only moderate until it is time not to be.

P.S. I didn't follow how Rachael Maddow comes into this. Did anybody get that?

Anonymous said...

The retirement announcement of the soon to be late and already unlamented Olympia Snowe has predictably unleashed yet another tsunami of punditry by the usual suspects about the regrettable rigidity of today's Congressional Democrats and Republicans.

Just that sentence justified re-blogging the essay.

Tom Cathcart said...

As a long-time former Mainer (32 years), I agree with everything you say about Susan Collins except for one thing, your disparagement of the annoying voice. She reportedly has the same vocal cord disease as Diane Rehm.