The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (4 page)

But President Obama has lifted the rhetoric to new heights with all of his talk about “winning the future” (a phrase Newt Gingrich tried to corner some years earlier, so it must poll well). According to President Obama—and pop gurus like Thomas Friedman—the State must pick new industries and new products that will create the jobs of the twenty-first century. Like the ideological pilgrims who went to the Soviet Union and found “the future—and it works” (in Lincoln Steffens’s memorable
phrase), journalists like Friedman are feted in China and ride high-speed rail systems and come back saying we must adopt similar authoritarian or statist policies if we want to compete with China.

The vast majority of economists, on the left and the right, consider competitiveness—that is, economic competitiveness between nations—to be at least a deeply flawed if not completely worthless concept. Businesses compete, nations don’t. If China was the victim of a horrendous plague or ravaged by a destructive civil war, America might benefit in terms of geopolitical status, force projection, etc., but it would be dealt a massive economic blow as well, having lost income from a vital trading partner. Or as Paul Krugman put it in his famous 1994
Foreign Affairs
essay, “Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession” (these were the days when Krugman cared more about academic and intellectual rigor than journalistic bombast):

[T]he moral is clear: while competitive problems could arise in principle, as a practical, empirical matter the major nations of the world are not to any significant degree in economic competition with each other. Of course, there is always a rivalry for status and power—countries that grow faster will see their political rank rise. So it is always interesting to
compare
countries. But asserting that Japanese growth diminishes U.S. status is very different from saying that it reduces the U.S. standard of living—and it is the latter that the rhetoric of competitiveness asserts.
¹⁰

The appeal of competitiveness lies in its power as a buzzword, not as a serious concept. Business audiences like it, because they think in those terms and think governments should be run like businesses. More problematic, the public likes it because it is ultimately a base appeal to nationalism disguised as technocratic expertise. We can beat the Chinese by throwing money at certain industries! Implicit in this line of argumentation is the assumption that government officials are smarter than investors. It was this logic that empowered the Obama administration to throw billions into green energy white elephants like Solyndra.

There are policies that one could lump under the rubric of competitiveness that would actually help the United States of America become
more affluent vis-à-vis other nations, but such policies aren’t nearly as exciting for policy makers, because it is very difficult to take credit for their successes. A flatter, more progrowth tax policy, for example, would attract more investment and entrepreneurship. Spending on basic scientific research and education can be defended on grounds of competitiveness; so could more intelligent immigration policies. But such policies are defensible on more basic grounds: They’re good for our economy and for our productivity.

But that’s not the appeal of competitiveness. Industrial planners like competitiveness because they like industrial planning. They like spending money on dams and roads and windmills because there’s a photo op at the ribbon cutting. They like to believe they are smarter and wiser than the free market economy, and if only we could put them in charge, they could impose a more rational, planned economic system. That is why Thomas Friedman wishes we could be “China for a Day,” because in China planners are given command over the economy (why not “Nazis for a Day”?). Before there was Friedman and his man crush on Chinese communism there was the cabal of industrial planners—Kevin Phillips, James Fallows, Lester Thurow, et al.—of the 1980s and early 1990s, who were convinced that Japan’s MITI—the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (renamed in 2001)—was needed to replace our outdated system. Phillips wrote in his
Staying on Top: The Business Case for a National Industrial Strategy
: “[B]usinessmen… must set aside old concepts of laissez-faire.… It is time for the United States of America to begin plotting its economic future.”
¹¹
Before then, in the 1960s it was the Whiz Kids who held that modern economics was too complicated to leave to voters and consumers. They inherited the argument from the New Dealers, who pushed for an “economic dictatorship” in the words of Stuart Chase. They, in turn, were standing on the shoulders of the progressive technocrats, who took their cues from the Soviet Union (and Woodrow Wilson), who insisted, in the words of Walter Lippmann, that we must abandon the “drift” of nineteenth-century laissez capitalism and adopt the “mastery” of economic planners. You can keep going, but the story is the same: arrogant intellectuals trying to win czarlike power over the economy with fake arguments that sound reasonable.

So that is what this book is about. It is about the clichés that have a
tyrannical hold on our minds and the phrases that serve to advance ideological agendas that would expand and enhance the State’s mastery over our lives. By no means are all expansions of the State tyrannical, but for all intents and purposes, all advances of tyranny are statist. These are the themes and convictions that inform the coming chapters. They informed my decision to include some clichés while ignoring others. The first few chapters are an attempt to flesh out this fundamental point, by coming to the defense of ideology properly understood.

I do not claim that the conservative mind isn’t bound by clichés from time to time, or that my collection exhausts the subjects covered, never mind those not covered. But I would and do argue that conservatives are more honest about their indebtedness to ideology. We declare our principles and make our arguments more openly. My only humble hope is that what I write here helps people, conservatives and liberals alike, rethink the way they understand the world around them, and maybe enjoy themselves a bit in the process.

1

IDEOLOGY

O
n the way to his inauguration as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America, Barack Obama stopped in Baltimore to deliver a speech to tens of thousands of well-wishers.

“What is required,” declared the president-elect, “is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives—from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry—an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”
¹

Far more revealing than anything he said in his inaugural address, Obama’s comments in Baltimore capture not just the tone of his presidency—self-serving verbiage passing itself off as statesmanlike wisdom—but also reveal a great deal about the essence of American liberalism.

Let us look at, in reverse order, the four things from which the president says we must declare our independence. First there is bigotry. Fair enough. No reasonable person disputes that it would be nice if we could put bigotry behind us. And yet, it’s worth noting that traditional bigotry was at its lowest point in American history, as evidenced not least by the fact that it had just elected the first black president, and by a significant margin.

Then there is prejudice. This is a word we all have been taught to despise as a lesser form of bigotry, if not a lazy synonym for it. But let us assume Obama means prejudice as a stepbrother of bigotry rather than as an identical twin. For if there’s no difference between the words, his speechwriter should be flogged for wasting Obama’s breath with pointless redundancy. Surely what the president-elect meant here—if he meant anything at all—is uninformed opinion, irrational bias,
prejudgment
. I have no doubt that the president and I could argue at great length about what constitutes prejudice in the particulars. And, more to the point, it’s a good guess that the prejudice he has in mind is defined almost entirely as a shortcoming of his political opponents. But yes, fine, let us be done with prejudice, too.

And what about small thinking? This is a tougher one than it appears. Web searching and dictionary thumbing don’t get you too far. But I gather that small thinking is pettiness, selfishness, seeking trifling advantages and niggling victories over your fellow man. It is another way of saying small-minded, which means unimaginative, capricious, and petty.

So far, other than the fact that it is boring, gassy rhetoric, I don’t really have a problem. If Obama wants to call for a declaration of independence from prejudice, bigotry, and small thinking, who am I to complain? And if, in his second term (should he get one), he opts to launch a new war of liberation against stinginess, grumpiness, and mopery, that’s fine by me, too.

But it should be said again that the man’s opinion of America on the eve of his presidency is awfully low. Are these the traits that best describe America in 2008 (or now, for that matter)? Or even best describe its chief shortcomings? Small-minded thinking, prejudiced, and bigoted? How odd that a black man with the name Barack Hussein Obama is elected
president and then turns on the country that elected him with a wagging finger and an exhortation to abandon precisely the qualities the American people lacked sufficiently in order to elect him in the first place. Perhaps if he received 100 percent of the vote he would have felt less compelled to chastise Americans for their remaining shortcomings. Of course, the actual people attending the massive rally didn’t mind such scolding because they knew it was aimed at
other Americans
, the ones who didn’t vote for him.

But wait, there were four traits the American people needed to free themselves from. The last one (which was really the first one, since we are dealing with his small parade of horribles in reverse order) was
ideology
.

And it is here where the president-elect truly showed his hand. For Obama, ideology is part of the same motley tribe as bigotry, prejudice, and small thinking. Ideological thinking is surely not a trait he associates with himself. Indeed, it is something he hopes to lead his fellow Americans away from, to help them transcend this regrettable vestige of our “easy instincts.”

But there’s a problem: While small thinking, prejudice, and bigotry are indeed fruits of our easy instincts, ideology—as Obama means it—is not. To be sure, there are evil, cruel, or simply wrongheaded ideologies that are little more than elaborate rationalizations of tribal instincts (and as I have argued in another book, they go by names such as fascism, communism, jihadism, and socialism). But such ideologies do not define
ideology
per se. If Nazis are ideologues, so are peace activists. If lovers of the free market are driven by ideological imperatives, so are those who wish to spread the wealth around.

What Works

There is a presumption, however, that liberals are not ideological. No, it’s more than a presumption, it is a flat-out assertion. You would be hard-pressed to find a prominent liberal intellectual, politician, or journalist who hasn’t baldly stated at one point or another that liberals only care about “what works.” They contrast this with their political opponents, always on the right, who are all ideologues— “extremists,” “dogmatists,” and the like.

President Obama, for instance, is deeply, profoundly, habitually committed to the notion that he’s a pragmatist boldly standing athwart ideology. He’s interested in results, not mere labels. “My interest is finding something that works,” he told
60 Minutes
at the beginning of his administration. “And whether it’s coming from FDR or it’s coming from Ronald Reagan, if the idea is right for the times then we’re gonna [
sic
] apply it. And things that don’t work, we’re gonna get rid of.” One finds in
The Audacity of
Hope
numerous assaults on the evils of ideology—indeed “any tyrannical consistency”—that drives people away from the humility of pragmatism. And, of course, here he is in his inaugural address:

This is Obama’s standard refrain, and his biggest defenders routinely repeat it back, almost as if they think it’s actually true. During the intense debt-ceiling negotiations in July and August 2011, Obama would claim incessantly that Republicans were “constantly being locked into ideologically rigid positions,” while he was a compromiser and a pragmatist. This dichotomy of ideology versus pragmatism in which he casts himself as the disciple of cool reason and common sense and his opponents as blinkered ideologues is a fiction. It is part lie he tells us and part lie he tells himself.

Remember Barack Obama’s famous explanation for why voters in western Pennsylvania wouldn’t support him in the Democratic primary? These “bitter” Americans “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
³
That is how Barack Obama sees ideology (indeed, that is what he thinks of
Hillary Clinton’
s supporters). It is those bitter savages with their white-knuckled grips on their boomsticks and their sky god whom Barack Obama seeks to emancipate through a “new declaration of independence.”