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.