Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.
It’s the nature of complex phenomena to have multiple causes and origins. It’s simplistic to say that a war, revolution or economic collapse can be explained by a single factor. It’s the job of analysts to sift among potential sources, assign weights to particular ones and thus try to understand the nature of such phenomena.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
However, in real time, we don’t have the luxury of waiting until a consensus or even a dominant view has developed. In fact, we often don’t have time to do anything except rely on gut instincts derived from experience, theory, conjecture, ideology and a wide variety of other influences.
For those who lack the time, knowledge or education to think deeply about events as they happen, political parties and movements provide predigested ideas, perspectives and remedies.
Unfortunately, people are sometimes led astray by those they trust for insights, information and solutions to problems. This may result from corruption or mendacity, rigidity of thought, simple error or ignorance. And it’s human nature for people and organizations to be reluctant to acknowledge mistakes and to have an almost unlimited capacity to rationalize and force facts and theories to conform to their self-interest.
In the case of the Great Recession or mini-depression that we have been experiencing for almost four years, the best economists in the country are still divided on its cause and cure. It’s not an exaggeration to say that they are deeply polarized, with virtually no overlap among the competing camps in terms of analysis or remedies.
At the risk of oversimplification, one side sees government as the cause of all that has gone wrong in the economy and therefore believes that scaling back government intervention is necessary to improve the situation. That means reducing taxes, deregulation and spending cuts.
The other side thinks that the complex causes for the crisis are not necessarily related to the required response, which can be determined by examining the facts of the situation — high unemployment, nonexistent inflation and extraordinarily low interest rates, among other things.
This camp believes that the problems created by the crisis can be addressed by monetary and fiscal policy — much the way a doctor may save an ill patient by aggressively treating his symptoms even without knowing the precise cause of the ailment.
In broad terms, these dueling perspectives happen to conform to the basic philosophies of the two major parties. Republicans are predisposed to blame government for every problem regardless of the circumstances, and Democrats tend to view government as necessary to deal with economic and social problems.
One reason people join political parties is to save themselves the time and work of researching and thinking about issues. They are too busy with their jobs, their families and all the other things that occupy the time and attention of average people.
And even in the Internet age, it is hard to find the information and analysis necessary to make informed decisions about public policy. It’s vastly easier to just accept one party’s perspective and assume it is correct.
What parties and movements do when an issue comes along that requires them to take a position or presents opportunities to advance their agenda is to sort the possible causes and prospective cures put forward into those that are sympathetic to their program and philosophy and those that are not. Those that are sympathetic are deemed to be correct; those in conflict are deemed incorrect.
Obviously, there are serious problems with this approach, which members of both parties follow. Mistakes are easily made and incorrect positions established that may make matters worse rather than better. These positions may be held so dogmatically that their supporters feel that coercion is justified in forcing people to accept their point of view or that violence is an appropriate response to resist policies whose validity they question.
Thankfully, elections and democracy offer peaceful methods for resolving political conflict. And historically a sufficiently large number of Americans have been willing to withhold judgment until the facts are determined with some degree of certainty, and to be persuaded by logic and evidence, rather than immediately aligning themselves with a particular ideological or partisan political approach.
But without correct information and good leadership, it may not be possible for the rational, reality-based community to exercise influence, and control will necessarily default to one of the extremes.
Right now, it is clear that the right side of the political spectrum is dominant. Virtually all policy debate these days is based on the premise that the conservative position is at least valid. For example, we have heard for months from Republicans that government regulation is a major, if not the primary, factor holding back economic expansion and employment growth.
Just last week, the House majority leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, posted a memo to House Republicans detailing specific regulations whose repeal would create jobs.
Mr. Cantor offered no analysis or evidence that abolishing these regulations would do anything to raise real growth of the gross domestic product or to reduce unemployment. The Republicans to whom the memo was addressed don’t need any evidence, because they are predisposed to believe that government regulation always holds back economic growth and job creation. That’s why they became Republicans in the first place.
So overwhelming is the Republican view that on Friday President Obama withdrew an Environmental Protection Agency regulation, widely supported by scientists as essential to air quality, because its economic burden is deemed to be unaffordable at this time.
Of course, we can’t be sure whether the regulation would have reduced jobs or if its withdrawal will lead to illnesses by people who would have otherwise remained in good health. All we know is that in the cost-benefit calculation, Mr. Obama considered the costs to be decisive.
His supporters will argue that Mr. Obama made the right call based on the facts of the case, but no doubt political factors also weighed on his decision. And those factors have been heavily shaped by the reality that much of the public has been swayed by the oft-repeated Republican charge that government is the enemy of progress.
In a courtroom, justice requires that both sides be equally well represented. If one doesn’t do its job properly, the jury cannot be blamed for a wrong result. If Democrats are going to accept Republican premises, they shouldn’t be surprised if a majority of people eventually conclude that Republicans ought to be in charge of government policy.
