This, more than anything else, is what caused me to start this blog. It is also the subject I return to or circle around frequently. The conflict between these two approaches to finding truth is at least 400 years old and likely far older. For the purpose of this post, however, I am going to mostly focus on the last 50 or so years. And I am going to approach it through the prism of politics.
I have just started reading "Why the Right went Wrong" by E. J. Dionne Jr. Since he lays out his thesis in the introduction, I can describe his main thesis and conclusion fairly even though I am a long way from the end of the book. The book was published in January of 2016. So a lot of the events of the current Presidential campaign season had not played out yet. And there is still a good way to go to get us all the way to the election. But the Trump phenomenon had exploded on to the scene in time to be mentioned in the book.
And the book takes a track that I would characterize as parallel to my thesis but it is not exactly the same as mine. He makes two main points. The first one is that the ideas the Republican Party is now wresting with as it tries to decide what it thinks of the Trump phenomenon are not new. He traces them back to the '64 Goldwater campaign and before. His second main idea is that Republicans have for a long time been making promises to their base without delivering on them. This disconnect between promise and execution is Dionne's explanation for the current Trump insurgency.
I generally agree with both ideas. But I want to take a slightly different approach to the second one. As Dionne sees it Republicans have been telling their base that they will do A, B, C, etc. and then they don't. Dionne (at least in the part of the book I have finished so far) provides details on why each specific promise ends up being broken (or at least indefinitely deferred). It might be for some tactical reason (doing so would alienate voting group X and we can't afford to do that now) but I think the problem has more fundamental root cause.
I think the Republican agenda has been built on faith and flies in the face of reason. It is this unwillingness to be constrained by reason, the possible, that has led to this consistent failure. But Republican failures are only a component of what I want to talk about. I believe that at the societal level faith and reason continually vie for ascendancy. And I think faith has been ascendant for several decades but that reason is now making a comeback. I want to use politics as the backbone of my argument but I don't want to restrict myself just to politics. Politics is a particularly appropriate choice at the moment because politics, and more specifically partisan politics, has now been forced into nearly every facet of our lives by one side of the other in the partisan divide. It so happens that the time period Dionne covers is a close match for the period I want to primarily focus on too. So let's have at it.
And I want to start a little further back, with World War I. To an extent previously unimaginable WW I was a technological battle. One of the key components was the machine gun. It, in the guise of the Gatling Gun, had been invented in the Civil War, roughly fifty years previously. But going into WW I its importance was vastly underestimated by the Generals on all sides. A machine gun "nest", a machine gun and its operator dug into a position of cover, was nearly impervious to attack by infantry troops across open land. If overlapping fields of fire, a geometry based setup where multiple nests could cover each part of the field of attack, were set up then the position turned out to be neigh on impregnable. And this resulted in the trench warfare stalemate the held for most of the war. Generals ran up horrific numbers of casualties before they learned this fundamental lesson.
So the machine gun was technology, important technology, but old technology. WW I also saw a substantial amount of new technology introduced as the War ground on. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this was the airplane. At the start of the War it was a toy with no obvious military use. But rapid development produced a very capable machine by the time the War ended. It was most effective as a photo-reconnaissance vehicle. But to be effective in this role it had to have offensive and defensive capability. This was done by adding machine guns whose fire was synchronized with the rotation of the propeller. The machine guns were initially installed for use against other airplanes. But they could also be used to strafe infantry on the ground. A bombing capability was also developed but airplanes of the period were not big enough to carry enough bombs to have much effect on the outcome of the War.
The submarine, another prewar technology, also evolved rapidly from a toy to a deadly weapon as the War ground on. Another technological development was poison gas. Under the right circumstances it could be very effective against an unprepared enemy. But the circumstances were often unfavorable and the enemy quickly learned to be prepared. Finally, the technological advance that decisively broke the trench war stalemate was the tank. It represented a weapon that could defeat a set of machine gun nests with overlapping fields of fire. So that's how things ended. How did they begin?
They began with faith. In the excellent Barbara Tuchman book about the run up to and the first six weeks of the War, "The Guns of August", she delves into the attitudes and beliefs of the various players as the War began. I want to single out the French. The French believed they could emerge triumphant because of "Élan". French soldiers were just morally and every other way superior to their opponents (presumed to be the Germans). This idea did not survive contact with the enemy. Élan did not take out German machine gun nests. WW I crushed entire empires before it was over. And godless technology was the key to victory.
World War II played out along similar lines. Technology in the form of advanced submarines, radar, sonar, code breaking, newer and better tanks, ships, and airplanes, and ultimately the Atomic Bomb won the day. Faith was no match for any of this technology. In the postwar period faith was seen as no defense against long range bombers carrying nuclear weapons or ICBMs or any of the other high tech weapons of the day. In a straight up match between faith and reason the expected victor was never in doubt, at least when it came to things military. That is, until Vietnam came along.
Most people have now either forgotten or never knew that the principal architect of the US strategy in Vietnam was Robert S. McNamara. He was considered a technocrat's technocrat. He went from the auto industry to the Defense Department. His idea was to bring modern "scientific management" to military problems and that's what he did with Vietnam. And it was a spectacular failure. All the vaunted technological capability of the US military was rendered impotent by conditions on the ground. This put a big dent in the idea that science and technology can do anything. It opened the door on the idea that there might be another way.
And this other way was first embraced not by Republicans and conservatives but by hippie liberals. They started talking about eastern religions and meditation and flower power and alternative medicine and crystals and "turn on, tune in, drop out". In the period running from the late '60s through the late '70s these ideas saturated our media and culture. And then they all burned out. But this turn away from rationality and technology was resurrected by the Right a short time later in much modified form as religious conservatism. And now a short digression . . .
The '60 election pitted two candidates against each other, neither of whom was a member of a mainstream protestant religious denomination. Kennedy was a Catholic and the fight between Catholics and Protestants had by then stretched back centuries. Nixon belonged to a fringe religion. He was a Quaker. This need to choose between two candidates, neither of whom was a mainstream protestant, turned out to be the beginning of the end of the lock that had long been held on US politics by the traditional protestant religious denominations. Now mainstream protestant religious denominations have no impact at all on our political discourse. Romney, the Republican standard bearer in 2012 was a Mormon, a religion long considered even more fringe than the Quakers. His religious affiliation had little or no impact on how the election turned out.
The reason for this is that Religious Right is dominated by people who belong not to one of the traditional protestant denominations but to a splinter of a splinter denomination. Most mega-churches and many successful smaller congregations are nominally affiliated with a denomination. But most of their members couldn't tell you which denomination nor how that denomination differs from a dozen other ones. In 1960 voters knew Kennedy was a Catholic and Nixon was a Quaker. But I doubt one in a hundred contemporary voters could name the denomination of any of the five main candidates still in the race.
Returning to the main narrative, the left was the first to turn away from a reason based approach and embrace faith as an alternative. But the right made the same change a decode or so later. And a fine exemplar of this, as he is for so many things, is Ronald Reagan. The Reagan Administration embraced and championed the Religious Right. But I want to come at all this from a different direction. Reagan was a maser at being associated with two opposite positions simultaneously. He would advance one position in his rhetoric and the opposite one in his actions. I will confine myself to two examples.
He claimed to be a fiscal conservative and promised repeatedly to balance the budget. But in actuality he did the opposite. He ran a budget deficit every single year he was in office. And his smallest deficit was larger than the largest deficit of his predecessor. The result was that the national debt tripled under Reagan. No other President has produced a larger percentage increase in the national debt. No one. The problem was simple math. He put through massive tax cuts. He also put through massive increases in Defense spending. He left large programs like Social Security and Medicare alone. There was literally not enough money left in the rest of the budget to bring it into balance.
One of the signature events that helped Reagan win the White House was the Iran hostage crisis. Reagan was adamant that he would not trade guns for hostages, He was most adamant that he would not do it with Iran. But he did. The details don't mater but it is a fact that what later became known as Iran/Contra involved selling sophisticated military equipment to Iran as part of a larger scheme. So he did what he said he would absolutely not do. He was eventually forced to reluctantly and equivocally admit what he had done.
But it didn't matter. Reagan was wildly popular. This was initially a mystery to me. So I asked one of his supporters about various issues. On one issue he said "I really like what Reagan says about this issue". It was not important to this supporter that Reagan did the opposite. So then I asked about something else. He responded "I really like what Reagan does about this issue". It was not important to this supporter that Reagan said the opposite. At that point it was no longer a mystery why he was so popular. And what's important here is that this is faith based thinking. You have faith that in spite of the fact that some one says or does the wrong thing, things will work out because he does or says the right thing. Holding to a position in spite of ample evidence that it is wrong is the hallmark of faith based thinking.
Lee Atwater, a famous Republican operative of this period was the first to figure this out. If you convince people to have faith in you then you can literally do whatever you want. Various GOP operatives have taken this insight to heart and used it very effectively. A more recent example of this is Dick Armey. The Tea Party arose because of a grass roots anger about key economic issues.
Supposedly TEA stood for Taxed Enough Already. So you would expect that Tea Party members would be focused like a laser on making sure that their taxes were reduced. But Armey successfully gained their trust and redirected their energy away from middle class tax cuts and toward issues that were near and dear to the wealthy people that backed Armey. So all of a sudden the Tea Party agenda was focused on tax cuts for the rich, a reduction in regulations, deficit reductions, and other issues that were, at best, of peripheral interest to Tea Partiers.
It worked. A lot of "right thinking" people were elected and a lot of officials who weren't were thrown out of office. But the amount of middle class tax reduction that resulted was modest at best. The wealthy backers of the Tea Party got a lot of what they were interested in, however. I'm sure as I work my way through Dionne's book he will lay out many other examples of "bait and switch" tactics by the right. My point is you can't keep pulling this off if you don't keep convincing your constituents that you will eventually deliver. Eventually they will desert you. It is a tribute to the skill of these Republican operatives that they have been able to pull this trick off so often for so long.
And that brings us to today. A simple explanation for the Trump phenomenon is that the Republican base is no longer willing to go along with the Republican establishment. Dionne's thesis is that this is because they have finally caught on to the trick. And with respect to the Republican establishment he is manifestly correct. We are far enough along in the process so that all the establishment backed Republican candidates have been forced out of the race. There is one person who could fulfill that role that is still in, namely John Kasich. But he has not been able to gain any traction. The establishment has never lined up behind him in the way they did for Bush and then Rubio. And the base has consistently relegated him to a distant third. He won his own state of Ohio. And, he has just picked up a few delegates in the New York primary. But the few delegates he is picking up in New York are the first delegates he has picked up since Ohio. And there have been a lot of contests between the two.
So to that extent I am onboard with the Dionne thesis. But what do we make of Donald Trump? The only way to account for his success is to fall back on faith. Fact checkers have debunked pretty much every claim he has made. Supporters don't care. "He's my kind of candidate", they say. What does that mean in practical terms? There is a word: altruism. It means doing something that helps someone else even if that disadvantages you personally. A nick name for an elected official is "public servant". The idea is that you serve the public perhaps to your own detriment. Elected officials are expected to behave altruistically. So is there anything that suggests the Trump has a streak of altruism in him? No!
Trump's has been in the public eye for a long time. So there is an extensive and detailed record of his activities readily available to anyone who wants to take the time to examine it. And it is a consistent one of him behaving not in an altruistic manner but rather in a greedy one. Take his four bankruptcies. Business deals sometimes go bad. If you have done as many deals as Trump it is not surprising that several of them have gone bad. But when this happens there are two basic approaches you can take. You can share the pain or you can get as far out from under as the law allows. Trump consistently has selected the latter approach. Has he donated generously either of his time or of his money to public causes? No! He has certainly been involved in many high profile charitable activities. But these are easily identified as publicity stunts that cost him little but benefit him greatly by increasing the value of his brand.
And then there are the many businesses he has put his name on that sell directly to the public. Here I am thinking of Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump branded clothes, etc. Are these high quality products backed by a "the customer comes first" attitude? The opposite is the case. Voters literally have no reason to trust and every reason to distrust Trump when he says he will act on their behalf. But they have faith so they trust him not because of the facts but in spite of the facts. The Republican base still has faith. It has just transferred its faith from the old set of establishment operators to a new and better huckster.
But Trump is doing badly in national polls. And so is the Republican brand in general. And I attribute this in part to a turning away from faith and toward reason on the part of the public as a whole. It wasn't just the Vietnam war that turned people away from reason. The '60s era represented the beginning of the end of a number of long established trends. People had been asked to invest in education. And for a long time they had and they were happy with the result. The boom that ran for more than 20 years after WW II was attributed in part to the G.I. bill that put higher education within the reach of millions. But by the late '60s a lot of people saw college students riling things up with their civil rights and anti-war and women's rights agitation. And over time not just any college degree was a ticket to success. It had to be the right degree from the right school. So many started asking what was the point?
The '60s also represented the beginning of the end of a long love affair with infrastructure. A classic example was the Interstate Highway System. But by the '70s highway projects were becoming prohibitively expensive and traffic remained bad and pollution was awful so what was the point? In general, in spite of our wonderful reason based technological superiority we didn't seem to be getting ahead. Crime was increasing. Drugs were everywhere. Cancer was stubbornly resisting a cure. Reason just didn't seem to be working very well any more.
And so as a society we turned away from reason based technology as the place to find cures to our ills and shifted back to faith. Good hard working people of faith would pray their way to success. And "it" was all the fault of godless technology anyhow.
There were enough sins that could be credibly laid at technology's doorstep to lend this narrative some credibility. Technology brought us the specter of global nuclear annihilation, for instance. And for a long time faith seemed to be doing no worse and perhaps better than reason based technology. But part of this was due to the fact that over time we had built generous safety margins into our technological infrastructure. Our highways are now falling apart. But they were built well and it took a long time for them for the deterioration to become obvious to the casual observer. The same is true for our sewer systems, our water systems, out electrical grid, etc.
Meanwhile we have been fed a steady stream of "government is the problem", "we can cut taxes just by eliminating waste and fraud", "all regulations are bad", "it is the fault of [insert name of powerless group here]". But in the same way that "all technology is good" got threadbare by the late '60s, it is these newer slogans that are now looking threadbare.
Dionne sees the problem the right has as the conservative establishment failing to deliver on their promises. I see a parallel contributing factor in the idea that the faith based approach that was so successful for so long may have finally run its course. This is not a situation where only one of the two ideas can be right. Both ideas compliment and reinforce each other. The right is now losing credibility in the same way the left lost credibility in the late '60s and early '70s.
Dionne points out that some promises could not be met for tactical reasons. Cutting Social Security and Medicare, something the establishment right has been interested in doing for decades, will immediately alienate a large segment of the Republican base who depend on the programs. The right has been able to square the circle by telling the donor class that wants the cuts that they are working on them while at the same time telling their base that they don't really mean it. For this to work each group has to believe that it is the other group that is getting conned. But if you can pull this trick off, as Reagan did, then you make two constituencies that want conflicting things simultaneously happy. And that wins you elections.
But then their are the issues where reason tells up it is literally impossible to do something. A balanced budget, or the closely related desire to reduce the deficit, are examples of this. You can balance the budget by keeping taxes low if you also deliver few services. Or you can deliver a lot of services but pay for them with high taxes. This latter approach is the one Democrats generally pursue. Republicans pretend they pursue the former. But it is only pretend. They are perfectly willing to cut taxes. But they are also unwilling to cut government spending sufficiently to make up the difference. They are consistently on record as supporting high military spending. Paying interest on the national debt (currently quite a bargain due to low interest rates) is also non-negotiable. If nothing else, Wall Street holds the paper and expects to be paid on time.
That leaves only one big chunk of the budget, the social safety net programs. These include Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But, as noted above, the Republican base depends heavily on these programs whether they know it or not. ("Please keep the government out of my Medicare" tells us far too much about these people.) If you don't cut them the entire rest of the federal budget amounts to dibs and dabs. Foreign Aid, a perennial bugaboo, is effectively a rounding error in the federal budget. And as you go down the list to say the Highway Trust Fund, or Farm Price Supports, or NASA, or the National Institutes of Health, you find powerful Republican constituencies who benefit greatly from them and are not at all interested in seeing their meal ticket cut back.
So what we end up with is tax cuts that balloon the deficit because they are not matched by comparable spending cuts. Reagan was not the only Republican who has run up huge deficits. Both Bushes did it too. It is an inevitable consequence of the Republican mismatch between what they promise and what reason says is possible.
The current election campaign has seen faith based arguments viewed with much more skepticism than in the past. A contributing factor has surprised me has turned up to be the "just say no" campaign Republicans in the House and Senate have been waging against the Obama Administration from its first day. They have succeeded in diminishing Obama's list of accomplishments. But he has managed to pull some off anyhow. On the other hand Republicans have nothing positive to show for their efforts.
They have not been able to implement any of their own agenda. They have not been able to roll back Obamacare. They have been forced to do various deals on the budget and deficits. They have lost major ground on social issues like gay rights. They may chalk up a minor win on Immigration. But it would come from the Supreme Court and not from the legislature. After nearly eight years of struggle Obama is viewed as the winner on points. Importantly, this view is widely held by the Republican base.
For a long time voters would look at Democratic candidates and say "what's the point?" They just didn't believe a Democrat could deliver. Republicans were the champions who would do whatever it took to advance their agenda. Voters would look at a Democrat and a Republican and say "I might as well vote for the Republican. His policies will prevail in the end either way." But that analysis is being turned on its head by the results of the battle between Obama and congressional Republicans. It is now the Republicans that are seen as being unable to deliver anything except gridlock.
There was a story in the local paper recently. The headline was "We all lie, scientists say, but politicians even more so" (see http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/we-all-lie-scientists-say-but-politicians-even-more-so-2/). In my opinion this is a "dog bites man" story. But, obvious as the point seems to me, it was nice to see it actually make it into print. All politicians lie. They lie because we the voters demand it. We like exciting people who promise us the moon even though at some level we know it ain't so. A lot of "straight shooter" types have run for office. On average they lose. We can't seem to vote for the dull guy or gal who actually tells us like it is. "Like it is" inevitably involves disappointment and bad news. We like and vote for the happy talk snake oil salesman instead.
Back in the day Republicans, by and large were the dull people. They were business oriented and valued a well run operation. They might be a little reactionary on social issues but they kept the trains running on time. Democrats tended to be the less practical dreamers. The two parties complimented each other. They both over promised and under delivered but there was some connection between the promises and reality. Then Reagan came along and the tether between Republicans and reality started stretching. This has left Democrats by default as the party closer to reality.
Democrats frequently stretch the truth. They even sometimes say something that is completely false. They need a competing party to bring them down to earth occasionally. But the current Republican party is incapable of doing that. They seem to have lost all conception of where reality lies. They are so good at creating a magical world that their supporters have come to believe over time that it is real. They have completely lost their ability to recognize when Democrats say something sensible and reasonable. At the same time they have lost their ability to tell when a Republicans say something nonsensical and unreasonable. This is not good but I see some signs that things are improving. I have faith.
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