Brain Fertilizer

Part I.

Part 2.

And here we can see the great flaw in Chait’s wishful thinking about liberal realism. Clinton agreed to welfare reform — over the objections of most liberals, including his own wife — because the Republicans forced him to and he’d have lost the 1996 election if he didn’t. That was the beginning and the ending of Bill Clinton’s fact-finding. The New York Times's editorial page — a better representative of elite liberalism’s worldview than The New Republic, alas — called welfare reform “atrocious” and an outrage. “This is not reform, it is punishment” they declared.

Last summer, the Times reported that welfare reform was one of the “acclaimed successes of the past decade” and its renewal is a “no-brainer.” Chait would no doubt salute the newspaper for its empiricism. But how would we have known they were empiricists in 1996? Real empiricists express skepticism toward their own predictions, not moral outrage and — often — charges of racism at those who doubt them.

Indeed, that’s the story writ small of liberalism’s alleged acceptance of “new realities.” It’s not that liberals have maturely adapted to new data, it’s that they’ve been proven wrong so often — either empirically or at the polls — that they’ve had to change, and each time they do it, it’s not with the empiricist’s joy of learning new things, it’s with grumbling through gnashed teeth and amidst much caterwauling about liberal “sellouts” and political opportunism. For more than three decades, liberals swore there was no evidence that there was anything wrong with welfare reform until even the public knew they were lying.

Lastly there’s Chait’s solipsism. His version of reality cannot explain liberals who disagree with him. Are liberals who oppose free trade simply morons who can’t do the math? Was Hillary Clinton less of a liberal because she opposed welfare reform? What about Marian Wright Edelman? Are the Europeans who’ve refused to recognize that the economic rot of their welfare states really conservatives because they can’t face facts? Are liberals in America who envy Europe’s economic model incapable of recognizing its flaws? How does Chait explain anybody to his left — either ideologically or simply in the next office over from him — who disagrees with him? If liberals always go where the facts take them — you in the back, stop laughing — how is it that liberals ever disagree? He might say that only conservatives operate in ideologically blinkered bad faith and God-defying false-consciousness. But I think the real answer is that in Chait’s formulation the facts can only be what he finds them to be. And one senses that he really thinks God should come down and tell everyone that’s the case.

...and:

On almost every significant area of public policy the Democrats are atrophied, rusty, and calcified. They're dependent upon old (condescending) notions about blacks, the patronage of teacher’s unions which care very little for the facts, and feminists who define liberation almost exclusively as the freedom to abort pregnancies despite all of the new, inconvenient facts science is bringing to bear. Liberals are not the “reality-based community,” they are the status-quo based community. They wish to stand athwart history yelling "Stop" — in some rare cases, even when history is advancing liberalism in tyrannical lands. The Buckleyite formulation of standing athwart history yelling "Stop" was aimed at a world where the rise of Communism abroad and soft-liberalism at home were seen as linked trends. Today, liberals yell "Stop" almost entirely because they don’t enjoy being in the backseat. If they cannot drive, no one can.