Let's start with background. Republicans in congress and conservative media are furious over a scandal involving Operation Fast and Furious, a "gunwalking" program. What is a gunwalking program?
For a long time, the US has been fighting a "war" on drugs and drug cartels in Mexico. One idea for finding and convicting high-level drug cartel officials in Mexico, devised by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), was to allow, arrange, and monitor the "illegal" sale of US firearms to Mexican cartels, a kind of sting operation. Follow the guns to the criminals.
The reason Republicans and conservative media are so um...up in arms...about Fast and Furious is because they believe that gunwalking and Fast and Furious were surreptitiously planned by the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder as an underhanded way of imposing stricter gun controls on the US population in general. The reasoning behind this conspiracy theory goes like this: by intentionally selling firearms to Mexican cartels, drug-related gun violence in Mexico would intensify, so much so that the American people would be horrified and call upon the US government to impose stricter gun regulations.
I don't like wasting my time with such conspiracy theories, but since this one has taken off and become so mainstream, I feel the need to point out a few really obvious problems with this theory.
First, the ATF devised and began practicing the gunwalking scheme as far back as 2006. This is heavily documented, even by Fox News. 2006 was in the middle of the G.W. Bush administration. Obama did not assume the presidency until 2008. So when gunwalking schemes were devised and enacted for two years before Obama became president, why weren't Republicans pointing out the conspiracy then? Why isn't gunwalking a Bush administration conspiracy to curtail gun rights? Why all of a sudden is this an Obama conspiracy? The answer to these questions is perhaps best summarized by National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre, who has been presupposing that Obama secretly wants to abolish the Second Amendment and crack down on guns in America. Whether you think this should be done or not, it's clearly something that the Obama administration has not attempted to do in any way, shape, or form. For LaPierre, however, the fact that Obama has not cracked down on gun rights is evidence that he secretly wants to crack down on gun rights. On this point, LaPierre is either a shameless demagogue or a raving lunatic. You decide.
We can see, then, that the conspiracy theory about Obama deliberately continuing with Bush-era gunwalking operations in order to restrict gun rights is just another manifestation of an equally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory proffered by NRA president LaPierre. If the material truth does not show that the Obama administration has made any effort whatsoever to restrict gun rights, then those who "refused to be fooled" by the absence of Obama's rabid anti-gun politics can simply make up a story or stories about Obama secretly and surreptitiously espousing rabid anti-gun politics. This type of blather happens on the left and the right; but only on the right does it climb the ladder to congressional hearings and Supreme Court rulings.
The second most basic flaw of the Republican Fast and Furious conspiracy theory is even more simply stated. Horrific drug-related violence in Mexico and at the Mexico-US border has persisted for decades, and yet it hardly even makes news. Since when does the American public give a shit about drug-related violence in Mexico? The idea, in other words, that all of a sudden, after years of super-publicized school shootings like Columbine, college campus gun massacres like VA Tech, political assassination attempts like Gabby Giffords, and over 8000 gun-related murders in the US per year, Americans are going to turn around and demand an end to the Second Amendment and a tightening of gun control because of drug-related violence in Mexico, is absolutely ludicrous. It's so ludicrous that it doesn't even begin to register as a plausible motive for the Fast and Furious conspiracy.
Finally, the third most basic problem with the Republican Fast and Furious conspiracy theory is that it's also, blatantly, a bait-and-switch tactic. Truthfully, sting operations like gunwalking--including ATF Operation Fast and Furious, which, whether Obama and Holder knew much about it or not, has gone on under the Obama administration--can be extremely risky. These operations have not been successful, and may have cost US agents their lives because of high risk and improper oversight. Because of this there is a legitimate and ongoing investigation into Operation Fast and Furious and its Bush-era antecedents. Some of these investigations have been called for by Attorney General Holder himself. And these investigations do rise to the level of legitimate news. On the other hand, proponents of the Republican conspiracy theory and its news media advocates have latched onto these legitimate investigations like leeches, offering a parallel and totally unsubstantiated and entirely absurd conspiracy theory that prejudices coverage of the legitimate investigations and diverts attention from the real issues surrounding gunwalking operations. The conspiracy theory is, in other words, a bait-and-switch maneuver, designed to feed off of a legitimate news cycle, but replace the legitimate parts with conspiracy bullshit.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
When Business Types Try To Ru(i)n UVA: A Study of US-UK Extremes
This post is about the ousting of popular University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, who has been forced to resign by the UVA Board of Visitors (trustees) after just two years on the job for no reason other than that the Board is dissatisfied with her lack of, as they put it, 'strategic dynamism.'
Putting aside what would be a very satisfying rant about this kind of vacuous business jargon, the earnest utterance of which is as sure a sign as any of idiocy on the part of its speaker, what seems at this point like a calculated overthrow of a perfectly well functioning university president strikes at the core of one of the most important debates in higher education and, indeed, civil society itself. The Board's knock on Sullivan is that she isn't business-minded enough, and has refused to take the lemming-like plunge of following MIT, Harvard, and Stanford into the uncharted waters of online classes. As David Karpf has shown, it was actually a wise business move by President Sullivan to ignore the poor business sense of the board members, yet the fact that the board members were obviously dissatisfied with anyone but a puppet for a president at UVA is even more telling. This scandal--and yes, it is a scandal when you force out a sitting president of a flagship state university for no reason--speaks to the ongoing conflict between those who think universities are best run like businesses by businesspeople, and those who think businesspeople should stick to business and leave the educating to educators (to put it crudely).
Though it may not seem like it at first, this important question is also a question of higher education funding and revenue streams. In a simplified way, universities that operate primarily on public or state funding are primarily accountable to governments (and the voting public by extension); universities that operate primarily on private funding and tuition money are primarily accountable to major donors (and by extension trustee boards comprised of major donors); and any university hoping to shift its revenue source from one to the other can expect that new strings will be attached to the funding.
Though UVA is a state university, it nevertheless follows a US higher education funding model, primarily geared toward appeasing private donors, tuition-paying parents, and market/private sector forces. Virtually every US university, public or private, operates like this. If the state of Virginia decides to slash higher education spending, for example, UVA can respond by raising large amounts of funds and, more likely, by raising tuition. The US higher education market can easily absorb and support tuition increases, because tuition in the US is generally very high compared to other tuition markets in the world. The University of California system is perhaps a prime example of a stellar state-funded system that has since been de-funded by the state, so has been forced to make major cuts in resources and provisions while dramatically increasing tuition on its students. At US universities in the twenty-first century, percent annual tuition increases are regularly in the double-digits.
On the other side of the spectrum would be the European model of free or almost free higher education. Education budgets effectively subsidize all or part of the costs of higher education, such that students pay significantly less than US students, if they pay anything at all. For the most part, all of the universities in a given country cost about the same, so there is no question of shelling out 25% more tuition money for a German or French equivalent of Harvard or Amherst instead of going to another state university, because there simply isn't a German or French equivalent of Harvard or Amherst. Tuition increases, at least without further subsidies for students, are generally not tolerated in the European model. In the UK, for example, the recent government push to increase tuition from around 3000 pounds per year to up to 9000 pounds per year (in a country in which higher education used to be free for students) has been met with severe backlash.
There are major problems with both of these extremes, and what's going on in the US at UVA and the UK with higher education in general are good examples of the pitfalls of such ideological approaches to university funding.
Let's put it this way: if I were to ask you whether you'd feel more comfortable placing the balance of control over higher education in the hands of a small group of extremely wealthy, private individuals, or in the hands of a small group of politicians, would you be satisfied with your choices? Are you confident that the immense task of educating people both for the workforce (and economic reasons) and for the civilization is one that can be adequately steered and dictated by the whims of either wealthy donors or demagoguing politicians?
As you might expect, I'm not satisfied with either of these options, which, after all, are not our only options.
In the UK, where the government is and has been applying devastating cuts and absurd 'outcomes' regulations to higher education funding, a sizable portion of UK voters are arguing for 'free' higher education. The problem with this argument should be obvious: if UK universities are hurting now because the government, their primary revenue stream, is comprised of people who want to de-fund universities, what would it be like if the government were the ONLY revenue stream for UK universities (i.e. 'free' higher education)? In other words, if the politicians control university funding, and, by virtue of that, control universities, deciding which subjects are worth studying, which research should be considered valuable, what criteria to impose upon peer review, what teaching practices are best, how many staff are needed and for how long, and so on, then empowering these same people even more by forcing universities to rely entirely on government funds is only likely to amplify the problem in the future. UK higher ed. activists react with violent disdain to the idea of a market for higher education, as though anything but 'free' higher education signifies crude 'market' dominance of the education sector, but neglect the fact that they're effectively lobbying to hand greater control of universities over to the people who they're protesting against for cutting university funding.
As exemplified by the UVA scandal, there exists in the US the same problem, just a different formulation. The lack of state involvement in higher education in Virginia (relative to the UK) means that their flagship STATE university can be run by a small group of people with their own, private interests. The UVA Board wants to get rid of Classics and German departments, both of which make a profit at UVA. They want to dictate higher education curricula even though, like the UK politicians doing the same in their country, they don't know the first thing about higher education. They can get away with it, despite the fact that the people who actually teach in, research in, and run the university--the faculty--don't think cutting Classics and German, turning UVA into an online distance learning institution, and ousting the president of the university are very good ideas. They can get away with it because, tuition aside, the US university really is run by donors with disproportionate influence and inversely disproportionate stakes in the actual practice of higher education. That such boards are accorded such power over even sitting university presidents and faculty is a disgrace.
What makes this disgrace possible is the fact that while UK universities starve at the government's table, US universities live like monarchs off of the bribes of rich donors and the tithes of paying students and their families, consuming luxury sports stadiums, plush accommodations and designer gyms, unlimited executive travel funds, corporate university bookstores and shopping centers, dining halls sponsored by Subway, Quiznos, and Taco Bell, then throwing the scraps to faculty and students, the very purpose and core components of a university, for the purpose of (gasp) education!
That the US tuition and student loan model is a bubble and in crisis is a bigger argument for another time; but when we talk about the encroachment of market forces in higher education, we usually forget about these other kinds of harmful market forces, the ones that tamper with higher education itself. If US universities took more seriously their educational mission, and took serious steps toward cutting out all the fat that trustee boards like UVA's feed off of and replenish, the foundation of their counterproductive and wholly ancillary existence at the moment, we could begin to untangle the actual costs of US higher education, as well as what is needed to maintain them. For now, we should resist being held hostage to high tuition and private donations that finance excess, which encumbers universities like a bloated fat suit, and put the wrong people in charge of universities.
Addendum:
In full disclosure, I advocate a higher ed. funding model somewhere between the US and the UK (let's call it the Atlantic Approach). The quick version is this: an optimal higher education is more expensive than it costs in the UK, and less expensive than it costs in the US. A market (in terms of a range of universities, research-oriented, public, private, liberal arts, vocational, etc.) is a good thing, because different people with different aspirations require different kinds of education. This would mean choice and competition in the tuition market as well, which would mean that individuals would be charged different tuitions, and universities would have different provisions and operating costs, dependent on the university. But universities must be run by educators (faculty boards), not administrators, donors, and trustees. Which means university expenditures should be controlled by people who are actually invested in higher education. Governments should provide tuition vouchers (grants, not loans) to students in need (not so good for high school education, which must necessarily be more standardized; good for university education, which is more of a choice), and extremely wealthy universities (Harvard, etc.) should endow full scholarships for admitted students whose fall under a certain income threshold (as places like Harvard already do to address access issues, quite successfully it would seem). In short, there is a role for the individual and a role for the state in funding higher education, and this should be by design. Because we need checks and balances, so that neither elite private interests nor elite government interests can contort and diminish the mission of higher education. As Keynes understood, markets are not an end, but means to ends that are of higher value and virtue than money. Education is one such thing, a thing that markets should be used to support and realize, but not to define.
Putting aside what would be a very satisfying rant about this kind of vacuous business jargon, the earnest utterance of which is as sure a sign as any of idiocy on the part of its speaker, what seems at this point like a calculated overthrow of a perfectly well functioning university president strikes at the core of one of the most important debates in higher education and, indeed, civil society itself. The Board's knock on Sullivan is that she isn't business-minded enough, and has refused to take the lemming-like plunge of following MIT, Harvard, and Stanford into the uncharted waters of online classes. As David Karpf has shown, it was actually a wise business move by President Sullivan to ignore the poor business sense of the board members, yet the fact that the board members were obviously dissatisfied with anyone but a puppet for a president at UVA is even more telling. This scandal--and yes, it is a scandal when you force out a sitting president of a flagship state university for no reason--speaks to the ongoing conflict between those who think universities are best run like businesses by businesspeople, and those who think businesspeople should stick to business and leave the educating to educators (to put it crudely).
Though it may not seem like it at first, this important question is also a question of higher education funding and revenue streams. In a simplified way, universities that operate primarily on public or state funding are primarily accountable to governments (and the voting public by extension); universities that operate primarily on private funding and tuition money are primarily accountable to major donors (and by extension trustee boards comprised of major donors); and any university hoping to shift its revenue source from one to the other can expect that new strings will be attached to the funding.
Though UVA is a state university, it nevertheless follows a US higher education funding model, primarily geared toward appeasing private donors, tuition-paying parents, and market/private sector forces. Virtually every US university, public or private, operates like this. If the state of Virginia decides to slash higher education spending, for example, UVA can respond by raising large amounts of funds and, more likely, by raising tuition. The US higher education market can easily absorb and support tuition increases, because tuition in the US is generally very high compared to other tuition markets in the world. The University of California system is perhaps a prime example of a stellar state-funded system that has since been de-funded by the state, so has been forced to make major cuts in resources and provisions while dramatically increasing tuition on its students. At US universities in the twenty-first century, percent annual tuition increases are regularly in the double-digits.
On the other side of the spectrum would be the European model of free or almost free higher education. Education budgets effectively subsidize all or part of the costs of higher education, such that students pay significantly less than US students, if they pay anything at all. For the most part, all of the universities in a given country cost about the same, so there is no question of shelling out 25% more tuition money for a German or French equivalent of Harvard or Amherst instead of going to another state university, because there simply isn't a German or French equivalent of Harvard or Amherst. Tuition increases, at least without further subsidies for students, are generally not tolerated in the European model. In the UK, for example, the recent government push to increase tuition from around 3000 pounds per year to up to 9000 pounds per year (in a country in which higher education used to be free for students) has been met with severe backlash.
There are major problems with both of these extremes, and what's going on in the US at UVA and the UK with higher education in general are good examples of the pitfalls of such ideological approaches to university funding.
Let's put it this way: if I were to ask you whether you'd feel more comfortable placing the balance of control over higher education in the hands of a small group of extremely wealthy, private individuals, or in the hands of a small group of politicians, would you be satisfied with your choices? Are you confident that the immense task of educating people both for the workforce (and economic reasons) and for the civilization is one that can be adequately steered and dictated by the whims of either wealthy donors or demagoguing politicians?
As you might expect, I'm not satisfied with either of these options, which, after all, are not our only options.
In the UK, where the government is and has been applying devastating cuts and absurd 'outcomes' regulations to higher education funding, a sizable portion of UK voters are arguing for 'free' higher education. The problem with this argument should be obvious: if UK universities are hurting now because the government, their primary revenue stream, is comprised of people who want to de-fund universities, what would it be like if the government were the ONLY revenue stream for UK universities (i.e. 'free' higher education)? In other words, if the politicians control university funding, and, by virtue of that, control universities, deciding which subjects are worth studying, which research should be considered valuable, what criteria to impose upon peer review, what teaching practices are best, how many staff are needed and for how long, and so on, then empowering these same people even more by forcing universities to rely entirely on government funds is only likely to amplify the problem in the future. UK higher ed. activists react with violent disdain to the idea of a market for higher education, as though anything but 'free' higher education signifies crude 'market' dominance of the education sector, but neglect the fact that they're effectively lobbying to hand greater control of universities over to the people who they're protesting against for cutting university funding.
As exemplified by the UVA scandal, there exists in the US the same problem, just a different formulation. The lack of state involvement in higher education in Virginia (relative to the UK) means that their flagship STATE university can be run by a small group of people with their own, private interests. The UVA Board wants to get rid of Classics and German departments, both of which make a profit at UVA. They want to dictate higher education curricula even though, like the UK politicians doing the same in their country, they don't know the first thing about higher education. They can get away with it, despite the fact that the people who actually teach in, research in, and run the university--the faculty--don't think cutting Classics and German, turning UVA into an online distance learning institution, and ousting the president of the university are very good ideas. They can get away with it because, tuition aside, the US university really is run by donors with disproportionate influence and inversely disproportionate stakes in the actual practice of higher education. That such boards are accorded such power over even sitting university presidents and faculty is a disgrace.
What makes this disgrace possible is the fact that while UK universities starve at the government's table, US universities live like monarchs off of the bribes of rich donors and the tithes of paying students and their families, consuming luxury sports stadiums, plush accommodations and designer gyms, unlimited executive travel funds, corporate university bookstores and shopping centers, dining halls sponsored by Subway, Quiznos, and Taco Bell, then throwing the scraps to faculty and students, the very purpose and core components of a university, for the purpose of (gasp) education!
That the US tuition and student loan model is a bubble and in crisis is a bigger argument for another time; but when we talk about the encroachment of market forces in higher education, we usually forget about these other kinds of harmful market forces, the ones that tamper with higher education itself. If US universities took more seriously their educational mission, and took serious steps toward cutting out all the fat that trustee boards like UVA's feed off of and replenish, the foundation of their counterproductive and wholly ancillary existence at the moment, we could begin to untangle the actual costs of US higher education, as well as what is needed to maintain them. For now, we should resist being held hostage to high tuition and private donations that finance excess, which encumbers universities like a bloated fat suit, and put the wrong people in charge of universities.
Addendum:
In full disclosure, I advocate a higher ed. funding model somewhere between the US and the UK (let's call it the Atlantic Approach). The quick version is this: an optimal higher education is more expensive than it costs in the UK, and less expensive than it costs in the US. A market (in terms of a range of universities, research-oriented, public, private, liberal arts, vocational, etc.) is a good thing, because different people with different aspirations require different kinds of education. This would mean choice and competition in the tuition market as well, which would mean that individuals would be charged different tuitions, and universities would have different provisions and operating costs, dependent on the university. But universities must be run by educators (faculty boards), not administrators, donors, and trustees. Which means university expenditures should be controlled by people who are actually invested in higher education. Governments should provide tuition vouchers (grants, not loans) to students in need (not so good for high school education, which must necessarily be more standardized; good for university education, which is more of a choice), and extremely wealthy universities (Harvard, etc.) should endow full scholarships for admitted students whose fall under a certain income threshold (as places like Harvard already do to address access issues, quite successfully it would seem). In short, there is a role for the individual and a role for the state in funding higher education, and this should be by design. Because we need checks and balances, so that neither elite private interests nor elite government interests can contort and diminish the mission of higher education. As Keynes understood, markets are not an end, but means to ends that are of higher value and virtue than money. Education is one such thing, a thing that markets should be used to support and realize, but not to define.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Science Cannot Stand Alone
One of the most frequent (and perhaps most obnoxious) gripes from people like me (left-leaning and highly educated) is that the average person simply doesn't pay enough attention or lend enough credence to scientific discovery, or at least to information that has been rigorously derived. This is the New Atheism in a nutshell, for example: too many people cling in comfort to beliefs and superstitious, casting aside the contrary evidence that's staring them right in the face.
And yes, thanks to hot-button issues like religion and climate change, this kind of charge is typically made by the left against the right. So much so that when people on the left find cause to question scientific findings, it all of a sudden becomes a 'liberal war on science.'
In truth, this is one of the things that most aggravates me about my compatriots on the political left. Too often we treat science too lightly. We take it for granted in a most insidious way. We chortle at so-called religious nuts and climate denialists; and then the second someone like tenured UT Austin sociologist Mark Regnerus publishes findings from a massive data set that suggests that gay parents are less good for children than straight parents--in other words, that suggest something that we liberals don't like to hear--we pounce on the study like zealots.
Yes, I am convinced that, politics aside, Regnerus' study is flawed. Just as I am convinced that LSE evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa's infamous study on the objective unattractiveness of black women was also flawed. Just as I am convinced that former Harvard president and accomplished economist Larry Summers' offensive calculations about women in the sciences were also flawed. Need I go on?
It's one thing to claim that a scientifically derived finding that you don't like was nevertheless derived in a faulty way; but this still begs the question: had you liked or been perfectly neutral about the finding, would you (and everyone else who heard about it through the controversy-obsessed press) have looked deeper into the study before accepting its conclusion?
Sure, there's 'good' science and 'bad' science (depending on where you're sitting), rigorous science and less rigorous science; but ultimately the scientific method can and does yield conflicting, ambiguous, unpleasant, and difficult-to-interpret results. And this is the case not just for the social sciences. Climate change and group selection, to name a couple examples, have been sources of considerable contestation and politicization for a long time now.
Personally, I have no problem with any of this, not only because I understand quite a lot about the day-to-day work of 'doing science,' but also because I understand that science is a methodology, not an authority.
This brings us back to our liberals. We love science so much, and love sticking science in the eyes of 'common people' and right-wing extremists so much, that we've chosen to ignore what science really is and how science really works. More often than not, when I hear 'science' invoked in conversation, it's invoked with childlike inflection, as if science is somebody's daddy: 'Nuh UHH, you're wrong, SCIENCE says!'
See, by invoking science like a celestial daddy, we don't have to make logical or rigorous arguments about the things we value, the rights we hold dear, or the priorities we should set for ourselves and our nations. We just point at the authority and say 'DADDY SAID,' at which point someone else comes along, pointing to a different scientific authority, and, well, 'MY DADDY says YOUR DADDY IS WRONG!'
A funny thing happens when we forget that justifying our positions and values is a bigger project than simply pointing to a set of objective truths (to say nothing of what happens when someone else questions the objectivity part).
Hence, however many climate scientists proclaim with scientific certainty that we're all drilling our way to hell in an an Exxon-propelled handbasket (huh?), governments and societies will still have to make difficult policy decisions about whether to spend X on carbon reduction or on fighting Malaria, hunger, poverty, and so on. Just as if Richard Dawkins disproved the existence of God tomorrow, we'd be no closer (arguably we'd be even farther away) to solving the problem of inter- and intra-religious fighting and factionalism. No fact alone--and I mean this sincerely--will ever strip away the centuries of accumulated significance that certain beliefs and customs have forged. This isn't always a case of willful ignorance, as many liberals assume; it's a force as real as gravity.
When science tells us something we don't like--as it always has done and always will do--that's OK. That's one of the reasons that make the scientific method so useful and so important. The moment we start taking science as the only legitimate form of knowledge, and the ultimate authority, however, we set for ourselves a nasty trap. Whether we like it or not, if science is the ultimate authority, and unquestioned as such, we have to listen to it when it goes against our better judgment. And none of us really wants that.
Do we want a society that doesn't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation? I, for one, do. And I don't need a scientific study to tell me why I should or should not want and value this. I don't need a scientific authority to tell me that gay people make good parents in order to justify my position in support of the rights of gay people to marry and to raise children; which means this position of mine also cannot be assailed merely by a scientific study that finds something that seems contrary to my position. Far from clinging to a belief which is not 'evidence-based,' my position is derived from a long and rigorous tradition of careful and reasoned thought on the subjects of natural and human rights, political philosophy, and jurisprudence. I don't need to be a zealot nor a denialist nor anti-science to hold my position; I simply recognize that there are legitimate and in some ways superior forms of knowledge that fall outside the scope of scientific knowledge.
In this way I am free to appreciate science for what it is, given its limitations, and for the very useful knowledge it produces. I don't have to submit to the authority of science when science is operating outside of its own jurisdiction.
Sadly, there are people who practice scientism--who believe that science has ultimate and unlimited jurisdiction. We should remember that, on the contrary, science cannot stand alone.
And yes, thanks to hot-button issues like religion and climate change, this kind of charge is typically made by the left against the right. So much so that when people on the left find cause to question scientific findings, it all of a sudden becomes a 'liberal war on science.'
In truth, this is one of the things that most aggravates me about my compatriots on the political left. Too often we treat science too lightly. We take it for granted in a most insidious way. We chortle at so-called religious nuts and climate denialists; and then the second someone like tenured UT Austin sociologist Mark Regnerus publishes findings from a massive data set that suggests that gay parents are less good for children than straight parents--in other words, that suggest something that we liberals don't like to hear--we pounce on the study like zealots.
Yes, I am convinced that, politics aside, Regnerus' study is flawed. Just as I am convinced that LSE evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa's infamous study on the objective unattractiveness of black women was also flawed. Just as I am convinced that former Harvard president and accomplished economist Larry Summers' offensive calculations about women in the sciences were also flawed. Need I go on?
It's one thing to claim that a scientifically derived finding that you don't like was nevertheless derived in a faulty way; but this still begs the question: had you liked or been perfectly neutral about the finding, would you (and everyone else who heard about it through the controversy-obsessed press) have looked deeper into the study before accepting its conclusion?
Sure, there's 'good' science and 'bad' science (depending on where you're sitting), rigorous science and less rigorous science; but ultimately the scientific method can and does yield conflicting, ambiguous, unpleasant, and difficult-to-interpret results. And this is the case not just for the social sciences. Climate change and group selection, to name a couple examples, have been sources of considerable contestation and politicization for a long time now.
Personally, I have no problem with any of this, not only because I understand quite a lot about the day-to-day work of 'doing science,' but also because I understand that science is a methodology, not an authority.
This brings us back to our liberals. We love science so much, and love sticking science in the eyes of 'common people' and right-wing extremists so much, that we've chosen to ignore what science really is and how science really works. More often than not, when I hear 'science' invoked in conversation, it's invoked with childlike inflection, as if science is somebody's daddy: 'Nuh UHH, you're wrong, SCIENCE says!'
See, by invoking science like a celestial daddy, we don't have to make logical or rigorous arguments about the things we value, the rights we hold dear, or the priorities we should set for ourselves and our nations. We just point at the authority and say 'DADDY SAID,' at which point someone else comes along, pointing to a different scientific authority, and, well, 'MY DADDY says YOUR DADDY IS WRONG!'
A funny thing happens when we forget that justifying our positions and values is a bigger project than simply pointing to a set of objective truths (to say nothing of what happens when someone else questions the objectivity part).
Hence, however many climate scientists proclaim with scientific certainty that we're all drilling our way to hell in an an Exxon-propelled handbasket (huh?), governments and societies will still have to make difficult policy decisions about whether to spend X on carbon reduction or on fighting Malaria, hunger, poverty, and so on. Just as if Richard Dawkins disproved the existence of God tomorrow, we'd be no closer (arguably we'd be even farther away) to solving the problem of inter- and intra-religious fighting and factionalism. No fact alone--and I mean this sincerely--will ever strip away the centuries of accumulated significance that certain beliefs and customs have forged. This isn't always a case of willful ignorance, as many liberals assume; it's a force as real as gravity.
When science tells us something we don't like--as it always has done and always will do--that's OK. That's one of the reasons that make the scientific method so useful and so important. The moment we start taking science as the only legitimate form of knowledge, and the ultimate authority, however, we set for ourselves a nasty trap. Whether we like it or not, if science is the ultimate authority, and unquestioned as such, we have to listen to it when it goes against our better judgment. And none of us really wants that.
Do we want a society that doesn't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation? I, for one, do. And I don't need a scientific study to tell me why I should or should not want and value this. I don't need a scientific authority to tell me that gay people make good parents in order to justify my position in support of the rights of gay people to marry and to raise children; which means this position of mine also cannot be assailed merely by a scientific study that finds something that seems contrary to my position. Far from clinging to a belief which is not 'evidence-based,' my position is derived from a long and rigorous tradition of careful and reasoned thought on the subjects of natural and human rights, political philosophy, and jurisprudence. I don't need to be a zealot nor a denialist nor anti-science to hold my position; I simply recognize that there are legitimate and in some ways superior forms of knowledge that fall outside the scope of scientific knowledge.
In this way I am free to appreciate science for what it is, given its limitations, and for the very useful knowledge it produces. I don't have to submit to the authority of science when science is operating outside of its own jurisdiction.
Sadly, there are people who practice scientism--who believe that science has ultimate and unlimited jurisdiction. We should remember that, on the contrary, science cannot stand alone.
Friday, June 8, 2012
The Great Postmodernism Scare
Everyone thinks they're an expert on postmodernism by invoking the common dictum that postmodernism is indefinable. The 'anything goes' nature of pop-postmodernism makes it a regular theme of ironic discussion. 'That's so postmodern' is rarely, if ever, voiced with earnesty.
At some point the fruits of the academic study of postmodernism, whatever their merits, escaped from university departments and Morningside Heights book circles and permeated popular culture. Before too long, the likes of David Horowitz were proclaiming the end of civilization as we know it, because this insidious thing called postmodernism would convince everyone, wrongly, that all knowledge is relative, there is no moral distinction between right and wrong, and all value is contingent. Though postmodernism played perhaps its most prominent role in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, it survives today as a boogeyman of both the anti-academic right and the anti-humanities 'new scientism.'
Curiously the claims made about postmodernism by these very distinct groups are actually very similar. For anti-academic conservatives, the fear is that postmodernism is a tool of left-wing indoctrination, which enables radical, left-wing professors to undermine the stable, 'traditional' values that students learn in the home before being released into university. For proponents of scientism, there's a similar fear that a kind of right-wing postmodernism will destabilize scientific knowledge such that people can equate the scientific validity of, for example, creationism with that of evolution. In both cases, but from very different political motives, postmodernism is the vile stuff that will eat away at the concept of truth until truth, in any meaningful sense, becomes a thing of the past, and chaos reigns.
Well, for everyone who fears the triumph of postmodernism over human reason and all meaningful and practicable categories of truth, I have news for you: truth has been beaten severely and left for dead, but postmodernism didn't do it.
Consider Mitt Romney. In this political ad against President Obama, the Romney campaign shows footage of Obama speaking in 2008, saying 'if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.' This ad is made to make Obama look silly for trying to sweep the major issue--the economy--under the rug, as though candidate Obama thought in 2008 that the economy was no big deal, not worth talking about.
Of course, the full quote from Obama was actually: 'Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.' The Romney ad took a quote from Obama in which Obama was actually quoting McCain, and chopped off the part of the quote in which Obama attributes it to McCain. The objective, then, was to make it look like Obama, and not McCain, was the one who thought talking about the economy was a losing strategy. Even more despicable, the Romney ad attempts disingenuously to criticize Obama for espousing an idea that it knows was not Obama's idea, but an idea of Obama's Republican opponent that Obama himself was criticizing in that speech.
If that Romney campaign lie is too convoluted to sink in, consider Romney's most recent lies. In this case Romney simply made up his claim that the government investments in failed Solyndra resulted in money being given to Obama friends, family, and campaign contributors. And most recently, Romney mischaracterized an argument in Noam Scheiber's book, claiming that the Obama administration passed health reform knowing that it would slow down economic growth, a blatant lie for which Scheiber himself felt compelled to stand up and tell the world that Romney was just making stuff up.
My purpose in including here these recent examples of total disregard for truth--even total disregard for truth as a category of knowledge--is to show you that this most insidious form of lying and misrepresentation is most certainly not the spawn of left-wing, postmodernist literature professors. I doubt Mitt Romney was ever an acolyte of Derrida or Paul de Man. I doubt his political campaign keeps copies of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus on its headquarters' bookshelves.
As I see it, it turns out, despite decades of hand-wringing about the perilous effects of postmodernism, both within and beyond the academy, postmodernism has done little more, in effect, than direct our critical attention from time to time to the very assumptions that an unquestioning relationship to truth can result in. In this way postmodernism, ironically, may actually be part of the antidote to rampant disregard for truth, or to truth as simply that which is asserted with theatricality and authority.
What, then, is responsible for the abuse of truth that our politicians and pundits practice on a daily basis? In short, I think it's a combination of two things (for another discussion, both). One, information theory, which is responsible for de-coupling information and meaning, treating information as a mathematical abstraction with no necessary ties to meaning. Two, the rise of technocracy, which has resulted in the naive and uncritical treatment of the quantitative findings of technical experts as truth by and of the fact that they're quantitatively derived by technical experts. In other words, you can always find an economist, a pollster, a climate scientist, etc. who can use scientific and quantitative methods to justify an opposing viewpoint.
With so many experts and so much data and information, it's easy for those with the adequate resources at hand to tell lies and get away with it, and sometimes even to have seen enough charts to believe the lies they're telling. The more we fear the idea of instability that postmodernism represents, the more we empower technocracy to become the new postmodernism.
At some point the fruits of the academic study of postmodernism, whatever their merits, escaped from university departments and Morningside Heights book circles and permeated popular culture. Before too long, the likes of David Horowitz were proclaiming the end of civilization as we know it, because this insidious thing called postmodernism would convince everyone, wrongly, that all knowledge is relative, there is no moral distinction between right and wrong, and all value is contingent. Though postmodernism played perhaps its most prominent role in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, it survives today as a boogeyman of both the anti-academic right and the anti-humanities 'new scientism.'
Curiously the claims made about postmodernism by these very distinct groups are actually very similar. For anti-academic conservatives, the fear is that postmodernism is a tool of left-wing indoctrination, which enables radical, left-wing professors to undermine the stable, 'traditional' values that students learn in the home before being released into university. For proponents of scientism, there's a similar fear that a kind of right-wing postmodernism will destabilize scientific knowledge such that people can equate the scientific validity of, for example, creationism with that of evolution. In both cases, but from very different political motives, postmodernism is the vile stuff that will eat away at the concept of truth until truth, in any meaningful sense, becomes a thing of the past, and chaos reigns.
Well, for everyone who fears the triumph of postmodernism over human reason and all meaningful and practicable categories of truth, I have news for you: truth has been beaten severely and left for dead, but postmodernism didn't do it.
Consider Mitt Romney. In this political ad against President Obama, the Romney campaign shows footage of Obama speaking in 2008, saying 'if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.' This ad is made to make Obama look silly for trying to sweep the major issue--the economy--under the rug, as though candidate Obama thought in 2008 that the economy was no big deal, not worth talking about.
Of course, the full quote from Obama was actually: 'Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.' The Romney ad took a quote from Obama in which Obama was actually quoting McCain, and chopped off the part of the quote in which Obama attributes it to McCain. The objective, then, was to make it look like Obama, and not McCain, was the one who thought talking about the economy was a losing strategy. Even more despicable, the Romney ad attempts disingenuously to criticize Obama for espousing an idea that it knows was not Obama's idea, but an idea of Obama's Republican opponent that Obama himself was criticizing in that speech.
If that Romney campaign lie is too convoluted to sink in, consider Romney's most recent lies. In this case Romney simply made up his claim that the government investments in failed Solyndra resulted in money being given to Obama friends, family, and campaign contributors. And most recently, Romney mischaracterized an argument in Noam Scheiber's book, claiming that the Obama administration passed health reform knowing that it would slow down economic growth, a blatant lie for which Scheiber himself felt compelled to stand up and tell the world that Romney was just making stuff up.
My purpose in including here these recent examples of total disregard for truth--even total disregard for truth as a category of knowledge--is to show you that this most insidious form of lying and misrepresentation is most certainly not the spawn of left-wing, postmodernist literature professors. I doubt Mitt Romney was ever an acolyte of Derrida or Paul de Man. I doubt his political campaign keeps copies of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus on its headquarters' bookshelves.
As I see it, it turns out, despite decades of hand-wringing about the perilous effects of postmodernism, both within and beyond the academy, postmodernism has done little more, in effect, than direct our critical attention from time to time to the very assumptions that an unquestioning relationship to truth can result in. In this way postmodernism, ironically, may actually be part of the antidote to rampant disregard for truth, or to truth as simply that which is asserted with theatricality and authority.
What, then, is responsible for the abuse of truth that our politicians and pundits practice on a daily basis? In short, I think it's a combination of two things (for another discussion, both). One, information theory, which is responsible for de-coupling information and meaning, treating information as a mathematical abstraction with no necessary ties to meaning. Two, the rise of technocracy, which has resulted in the naive and uncritical treatment of the quantitative findings of technical experts as truth by and of the fact that they're quantitatively derived by technical experts. In other words, you can always find an economist, a pollster, a climate scientist, etc. who can use scientific and quantitative methods to justify an opposing viewpoint.
With so many experts and so much data and information, it's easy for those with the adequate resources at hand to tell lies and get away with it, and sometimes even to have seen enough charts to believe the lies they're telling. The more we fear the idea of instability that postmodernism represents, the more we empower technocracy to become the new postmodernism.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
When Mathematicians Study Literature
One of the difficult things about teaching literature is undoubtedly 'unteaching' people all the dumb things they've probably learned about literature. Arguably, before you can have a really productive analytical discussion about literature (which, I promise, can be a lot of fun), you have to understand literature as a kind of data.
No, I'm not saying you have to understand literature in a positivistic light. You have to understand that, even if meaning isn't always upfront and readily apparent (anymore than it would be for an actual data set), a work of literature is something concrete and coherent from which we can all learn something. And the process by which we can learn something from literature--literary criticism--is aimed ultimately at learning something about the human experience, and not necessarily about telling us what counts as art and what doesn't, what styles are similar and what aren't, or whether something is historically 'true' or not. Answering these kinds of questions have always been part of literary criticism, to be sure; but they are means toward the end of learning something about how humans experience the world. We would be foolish to get caught up in such questions as though they were the only ends in themselves.
Nevertheless, we often do get too caught up in these types of questions. For the right people, they're interesting; they're fun; and they're almost always endlessly debatable. The problem is, they're only the surface of what we can learn from literature. So when trying to teach literature as a kind of data--as a record of the human mind in action that can tell us something valuable about the human experience, beyond the literary page--it can be difficult to steer people away from common and understandable fixations on the so-called 'literary' questions of style, artistic merit, etc., as though answering these (fascinating) questions is all literary study has to offer.
When it comes to laypeople who are primarily interested in quantitative study, like these Dartmouth mathematicians, conveying an understanding of how best to approach the study of literature and how to draw logical and supported conclusions about literature is sometimes especially difficult. This is the case because it's especially difficult to look at literature as a kind of data when your job involves looking at actual data in a very specific way. Noting that 'literature is a form of expression that...provides a historical record of the evolution of culture,' the authors of the Dartmouth study seem poised to analyze literature in interesting and productive ways, but then go on to fixate on style.
Accordingly, the Dartmouth study uses quantitative methods to draw some really absurd and illogical conclusions about literature, doing sophisticated and skillful work that's underpinned by a number of amateurish and unfounded assumptions about literature. In this respect it's a little bit sad, really. The study is an example of the way that this entire genre of quantitative literary study, while valuable, also regularly sidesteps or misses altogether the most important and interesting questions about literature. Why would one assume, for example, that because writing style tends to be similar among authors who are contemporaries, such authors aren't influenced as much, or more, by previous authors? Is style the only way in which authorial influence can be manifested? How does authorial influence manifest in non-stylistic ways? Consider, for example, the contemporary South African writer J.M. Coetzee's award-winning novel, Foe. I doubt any human or computer would find Foe a strong stylistic match with Daniel Defoe's classic eighteenth-century novel Robinson Crusoe, though Foe is based entirely on Robinson Crusoe. A reading of style in these two novels (by human or computer) would undoubtedly find that Foe is more like other twentieth-century novels than it is like Robinson Crusoe; so such a reading could find, implausibly, that writers like Coetzee aren't influenced by 'classic' novels like Robinson Crusoe.
True, this study also tells us some incredibly interesting things about patterns in literature; and people like me are undoubtedly glad that the study was conducted. In fact, I think there's a very welcome place in the wider field of literary study for quantitative analyses of literature (see Franco Moretti's Stanford Literary Lab). The problem, however, is that quantitative determinations have a funny way of insinuating themselves as the most important and the most reliable. In the case of literature, however, knowing the basics of literary history and criticism may still lead us to the most interesting and fruitful questions, and their answers. This might come as a surprise for readers in our 'technological age,' but it shouldn't. After all, given how long people have been studying literature, and how long people have been applying quantitative analyses to their objects of study, if the latter were a breakthrough way of doing the former, wouldn't it be old news by now?
No, I'm not saying you have to understand literature in a positivistic light. You have to understand that, even if meaning isn't always upfront and readily apparent (anymore than it would be for an actual data set), a work of literature is something concrete and coherent from which we can all learn something. And the process by which we can learn something from literature--literary criticism--is aimed ultimately at learning something about the human experience, and not necessarily about telling us what counts as art and what doesn't, what styles are similar and what aren't, or whether something is historically 'true' or not. Answering these kinds of questions have always been part of literary criticism, to be sure; but they are means toward the end of learning something about how humans experience the world. We would be foolish to get caught up in such questions as though they were the only ends in themselves.
Nevertheless, we often do get too caught up in these types of questions. For the right people, they're interesting; they're fun; and they're almost always endlessly debatable. The problem is, they're only the surface of what we can learn from literature. So when trying to teach literature as a kind of data--as a record of the human mind in action that can tell us something valuable about the human experience, beyond the literary page--it can be difficult to steer people away from common and understandable fixations on the so-called 'literary' questions of style, artistic merit, etc., as though answering these (fascinating) questions is all literary study has to offer.
When it comes to laypeople who are primarily interested in quantitative study, like these Dartmouth mathematicians, conveying an understanding of how best to approach the study of literature and how to draw logical and supported conclusions about literature is sometimes especially difficult. This is the case because it's especially difficult to look at literature as a kind of data when your job involves looking at actual data in a very specific way. Noting that 'literature is a form of expression that...provides a historical record of the evolution of culture,' the authors of the Dartmouth study seem poised to analyze literature in interesting and productive ways, but then go on to fixate on style.
Accordingly, the Dartmouth study uses quantitative methods to draw some really absurd and illogical conclusions about literature, doing sophisticated and skillful work that's underpinned by a number of amateurish and unfounded assumptions about literature. In this respect it's a little bit sad, really. The study is an example of the way that this entire genre of quantitative literary study, while valuable, also regularly sidesteps or misses altogether the most important and interesting questions about literature. Why would one assume, for example, that because writing style tends to be similar among authors who are contemporaries, such authors aren't influenced as much, or more, by previous authors? Is style the only way in which authorial influence can be manifested? How does authorial influence manifest in non-stylistic ways? Consider, for example, the contemporary South African writer J.M. Coetzee's award-winning novel, Foe. I doubt any human or computer would find Foe a strong stylistic match with Daniel Defoe's classic eighteenth-century novel Robinson Crusoe, though Foe is based entirely on Robinson Crusoe. A reading of style in these two novels (by human or computer) would undoubtedly find that Foe is more like other twentieth-century novels than it is like Robinson Crusoe; so such a reading could find, implausibly, that writers like Coetzee aren't influenced by 'classic' novels like Robinson Crusoe.
True, this study also tells us some incredibly interesting things about patterns in literature; and people like me are undoubtedly glad that the study was conducted. In fact, I think there's a very welcome place in the wider field of literary study for quantitative analyses of literature (see Franco Moretti's Stanford Literary Lab). The problem, however, is that quantitative determinations have a funny way of insinuating themselves as the most important and the most reliable. In the case of literature, however, knowing the basics of literary history and criticism may still lead us to the most interesting and fruitful questions, and their answers. This might come as a surprise for readers in our 'technological age,' but it shouldn't. After all, given how long people have been studying literature, and how long people have been applying quantitative analyses to their objects of study, if the latter were a breakthrough way of doing the former, wouldn't it be old news by now?
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Notes On The Scott Walker Recall Election (Before Results Are In)
In case you don't know, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a conservative Republican, is undergoing a recall election today. This means that, one year into Gov. Walker's term, the people of Wisconsin are dissatisfied enough to have gathered enough signatures to call a vote on whether Gov. Walker will remain the governor of Wisconsin. Specifically, Wisconsinites needed to amass 540,208 signatures in order to bring forth the recall vote (25% of the total votes cast in the gubernatorial election that Walker initially won); they were able to gather 1 million.
You can read around for takes on why Walker has become the first Wisconsin governor to come up for a recall vote, but the primary factor is the controversial Wisconsin Act 10, which Walker wrote and led the Republican-controlled State Legislature to pass. The bill makes deep cuts to the state government, and in/famously demolishes collective bargaining rights (union representation) in the state.
Given this background, and the fact that it's a Presidential election year, you may have already heard pundits on the left and right billing today's recall election in Wisconsin as a kind of referendum with national implications. If Walker survives the election (which, given the fact that conservative groups both within and completely outside of Wisconsin have outspent Democrats roughly 25:1 on propaganda, is likely), conservatives and Republicans will spin the 'victory' as just that: a victory that lends credence to conservative policies in Wisconsin, and a positive referendum on conservative policies and 'anger with big government' nationwide. They will use this as ammunition in the Presidential election in November, claiming that when the people of Wisconsin defeated a recall bid for the governor's seat, they affirmed conservative ideas and fiscal austerity.
After all, Republicans have done this before. In 2010, when state senator Scott Brown won an upset US senate election in Massachusetts and took over the late Ted Kennedy's seat, it was both a serious symbolic blow for Democrats, and a practical complication. Brown became the 41st Republican senator (out of 100), which meant the 60-vote supermajority required to defeat filibusters was now lost for the Democrats (the Republicans have shamelessly abused the filibuster, effectively requiring 60 votes, and not 51, to pass a bill in the senate). Republicans took this victory in Massachusetts as a national-scale referendum on Obama's policies, proclaiming that Brown's upset was the turning point for the American people in their dissatisfaction with Obama's attempts at healthcare reform. Republicans attempted to convince the nation that because Brown won in Massachusetts, Obama would lose on healthcare reform. Of course Obama went on to pass healthcare reform, and conservative legislative overreach on gay rights, abortion, and women's rights have since undermined the credibility that conservatives and Republicans gained in the 2010 mid-term elections.
Today, pending results of the Scott Walker recall election in Wisconsin, it's important to keep things in perspective, and not get carried away with spin and tenuous conclusions like we did after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts. For those of us on the left, a Scott Walker recall would really have little to do with Obama's national priorities going into the November Presidential election: touting his economic accomplishments. While cutting government jobs, as Walker has done in Wisconsin, does of course increase unemployment, Obama's primary ideological foil on the economy is not Scott Walker at the state level, but Paul Ryan at the national level. Macroeconomics is about more than just busting unions and firing teachers and police officers. If I were Obama on the economy stump, I'd focus on explaining to the American people the difference between the size and scope of government debate and the getting us out of a depression debate. The two are not the same thing; and it's possible to spend government money in a stagnant economy while favoring deficit reductions and strict monitoring of government spending once the economy comes around. This is where Obama's economic argument lives; not in Wisconsin. Further, Obama can and should attack conservatives on backward social policies on abortion, contraception, marriage equality, and women's issues. What happens in Wisconsin does not change the measurable fact, looking at the number of bills put forth by conservatives, that conservative priorities are scaling back rights and privileges of gays and women, rather than improving the economy.
If Walker wins the recall election, it's likewise important to keep things in perspective. A 'victory' in your own gubernatorial recall election, for which at least 1 million of your own constituents signed a petition to bring against you, is no victory at all. If Walker wins, it's not a triumph of his and other Republican policies and ideas; it's an indication that these policies and ideas, while wildly unpopular and destructive, are simply not quite unpopular and destructive enough for Walker, already the first governor in the history of his state to have his own people call a vote on whether he gets to keep his job, to lose his job. In other words, regardless of what happens today, Scott Walker is still a negative--a 1-million-signature-petition negative. Winning the recall by what is likely to be a slim margin might make him a little less negative, but it most certainly won't be enough to make him a positive, for anyone who's actually paying attention.
So there you go. Bring all the popcorn you want, but what we're looking at in Wisconsin, while crucial for Wisconsinites, is no national referendum. It's merely a vote on just how bad Scott Walker is at his job.
You can read around for takes on why Walker has become the first Wisconsin governor to come up for a recall vote, but the primary factor is the controversial Wisconsin Act 10, which Walker wrote and led the Republican-controlled State Legislature to pass. The bill makes deep cuts to the state government, and in/famously demolishes collective bargaining rights (union representation) in the state.
Given this background, and the fact that it's a Presidential election year, you may have already heard pundits on the left and right billing today's recall election in Wisconsin as a kind of referendum with national implications. If Walker survives the election (which, given the fact that conservative groups both within and completely outside of Wisconsin have outspent Democrats roughly 25:1 on propaganda, is likely), conservatives and Republicans will spin the 'victory' as just that: a victory that lends credence to conservative policies in Wisconsin, and a positive referendum on conservative policies and 'anger with big government' nationwide. They will use this as ammunition in the Presidential election in November, claiming that when the people of Wisconsin defeated a recall bid for the governor's seat, they affirmed conservative ideas and fiscal austerity.
After all, Republicans have done this before. In 2010, when state senator Scott Brown won an upset US senate election in Massachusetts and took over the late Ted Kennedy's seat, it was both a serious symbolic blow for Democrats, and a practical complication. Brown became the 41st Republican senator (out of 100), which meant the 60-vote supermajority required to defeat filibusters was now lost for the Democrats (the Republicans have shamelessly abused the filibuster, effectively requiring 60 votes, and not 51, to pass a bill in the senate). Republicans took this victory in Massachusetts as a national-scale referendum on Obama's policies, proclaiming that Brown's upset was the turning point for the American people in their dissatisfaction with Obama's attempts at healthcare reform. Republicans attempted to convince the nation that because Brown won in Massachusetts, Obama would lose on healthcare reform. Of course Obama went on to pass healthcare reform, and conservative legislative overreach on gay rights, abortion, and women's rights have since undermined the credibility that conservatives and Republicans gained in the 2010 mid-term elections.
Today, pending results of the Scott Walker recall election in Wisconsin, it's important to keep things in perspective, and not get carried away with spin and tenuous conclusions like we did after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts. For those of us on the left, a Scott Walker recall would really have little to do with Obama's national priorities going into the November Presidential election: touting his economic accomplishments. While cutting government jobs, as Walker has done in Wisconsin, does of course increase unemployment, Obama's primary ideological foil on the economy is not Scott Walker at the state level, but Paul Ryan at the national level. Macroeconomics is about more than just busting unions and firing teachers and police officers. If I were Obama on the economy stump, I'd focus on explaining to the American people the difference between the size and scope of government debate and the getting us out of a depression debate. The two are not the same thing; and it's possible to spend government money in a stagnant economy while favoring deficit reductions and strict monitoring of government spending once the economy comes around. This is where Obama's economic argument lives; not in Wisconsin. Further, Obama can and should attack conservatives on backward social policies on abortion, contraception, marriage equality, and women's issues. What happens in Wisconsin does not change the measurable fact, looking at the number of bills put forth by conservatives, that conservative priorities are scaling back rights and privileges of gays and women, rather than improving the economy.
If Walker wins the recall election, it's likewise important to keep things in perspective. A 'victory' in your own gubernatorial recall election, for which at least 1 million of your own constituents signed a petition to bring against you, is no victory at all. If Walker wins, it's not a triumph of his and other Republican policies and ideas; it's an indication that these policies and ideas, while wildly unpopular and destructive, are simply not quite unpopular and destructive enough for Walker, already the first governor in the history of his state to have his own people call a vote on whether he gets to keep his job, to lose his job. In other words, regardless of what happens today, Scott Walker is still a negative--a 1-million-signature-petition negative. Winning the recall by what is likely to be a slim margin might make him a little less negative, but it most certainly won't be enough to make him a positive, for anyone who's actually paying attention.
So there you go. Bring all the popcorn you want, but what we're looking at in Wisconsin, while crucial for Wisconsinites, is no national referendum. It's merely a vote on just how bad Scott Walker is at his job.
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