Jonathan Chait explains why arguing with Bush conservatives seems pointless

Way back in 2001, when Bush was still lobbying on behalf of his first tax cut plan, the president was all over the map in explaining why the cuts would be worthwhile. On different occasions, Bush insisted tax cuts for millionaires are a good idea when the economy is bad, when the economy is good, when the surplus is high, when the deficit is high, when the public needs to spend more, when the public needs to save more, and when energy costs are too high.

One quickly got the impression that the tax cuts were not about achieving a desired policy goal — the tax cuts were the policy goal.

As it turns out, this was more instructive than most of us realized at the time. Indeed, it points to a fundamental difference in the way the left and right approach public policy. For the left, it’s about producing a desired policy goal. For the right, the goal of an action is far less relevant than the action itself. As Jonathan Chait explains in a true must-read, conservatives value ideology, not results.

We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

The contrast between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, then, ultimately lies not only in different values or preferences but in different epistemologies. Liberalism is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy — more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition — than conservatism.

Now, liberalism’s pragmatic superiority wouldn’t matter to a true ideological conservative any more than news about the medical benefits of pork (to pick an imaginary example) would cause a strictly observant Jew to begin eating ham sandwiches. But, if you have no particular a priori preference about the size of government and care only about tangible outcomes, then liberalism’s aversion to dogma makes it superior as a practical governing philosophy.

For anyone who’s ever grown frustrated trying to debate a conservative who doesn’t seem to care about being wrong, Chait’s analysis is incredibly helpful.

Take privatization, for example. The right will argue that privatizing a government service — say, Social Service to take a random example — will produce a variety of policy goals (broader wealth, increased savings, fewer government expenditures, lower taxes, etc.) When faced with empirical evidence that privatization wouldn’t generate those goals, the right will offer a different policy rationale. If it’s debunked as well, it doesn’t really matter, because the right wants privatization anyway. Their ideology dictates that privatization is, prima facie, superior. Whether it achieves an additional policy goal doesn’t matter, because privatization is the policy goal.

This preference for removing power from Washington is simply something that either you accept or you don’t. It’s neither right nor wrong in an absolute sense. It does, however, make empirical reasoning pointless. Viewed pragmatically, Social Security raises questions about which economics has a lot to say: balancing the tradeoffs between retiree incomes and costs to workers, allocating risk, and so on. Liberal thinking, unlike conservative thinking, actually hinges on the outcome of those questions.

This doesn’t mean that conservatives don’t believe their own empirical arguments. Nor does it mean that ideologically driven thinking can’t lead to empirically sound outcomes. In many cases–conservative opposition to tariffs, price controls, and farm subsidies–it does. But empirical reasoning simply does not drive their thinking. What appears to be conservative economic reasoning is actually a kind of backward reasoning. It begins with the conclusion and marches back through the premises.

This is particularly enlightening when dealing with the Bush White House. The quote has been used repeatedly for a variety of purposes, but John DiIulio, the former Bush White House domestic policy adviser, was offering a critically important analysis in 2002 when he said, “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm.”

In the context of Chait’s thesis, DiIulio’s analysis, gleaned by working alongside Bush in 2001, makes all of this administration’s decisions come together in a coherent fashion. This is a White House for which policy is largely irrelevant because an ideological “wish list” tells them everything they need to know.

[Paul] O’Neill, the former Bush Treasury secretary, mourns that administration’s hostility to expertise and fact-driven debate. “You don’t have to know anything or search for anything,” he says of the ideologues in the administration. “You already know the answer to everything. It’s not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.”

For four years, we’ve been having the wrong debate, engaged in an argument in which both sides were talking past one another. The White House would explain what it wanted; we’d explain why their ideas wouldn’t work. This was our first mistake: we expected “reality-based” evidence to matter. How incredibly foolish. We’ve been relying on facts when dealing with rivals for whom ideology is everything.