The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (5 page)

How much such statements stem from ideological preconceptions and
how much they stem from simple arrogance or political spin is always hard to glean. President Obama thinks very highly of himself, and there’s a natural tendency—call it an easy instinct—to assume that other people disagree with you for small-minded, prejudicial, bigoted, or ideological reasons. After all, if you not only believe you understand the facts better than your opponents, but you’re also convinced that the facts themselves are obvious and transparent, it’s only human to think that maybe your opponents disagree because there’s something wrong with how they think. If you see a duck standing in front of you and somebody comes along and says it’s a cat, it’s hardly unreasonable for you to conclude that he’s crazy, or lying, or that he just sees the world very, very differently than normal people do.

It’s a different matter altogether when you’re looking at something a good deal more complicated than a duck, and the other person isn’t saying something that is objectively nuts. Imagine I say to a liberal friend: “Let’s have Mexican food for lunch today.” He replies that he wants to get Chinese instead. We simply have different opinions. We can both invoke facts and arguments for why our preference should win: I might argue that we had Chinese last time, they’re having a special two-for-one deal at the Mexican place, I have a crush on the waitress at the Mexican joint, whatever. At the end of the day the disagreement will boil down to competing preferences. Unlike the situation with the duck, there is no right answer independent of your preferences. But the liberal cannot leave it there. He insists that his preferences are pragmatic, empirical, and based on what works, while my determination to have Mexican food is ideological.

Look again at what he told
60 Minutes
: “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.” The process of deciding whether something is “right for the times” is an inescapably ideological one.

This is the game liberals and centrists play. Sure, you will find pockets on the right doing the same thing, particularly in foreign policy (the best working definition of a foreign policy realist is an ideologue who lost an argument). But on the whole conservatives and libertarians differ from liberals in that we are
honest about our ideologies
. We debate and modify them from time to time to be sure, opening us up to the charge of hypocrisy
by liberals who insist that not only are conservatives inflexible ideologues, but that we are also hypocrites whenever we show signs of flexibility.

Meanwhile, liberals and other progressives hold it as a bedrock article of ideological faith that they are not ideological. In short:
Pragmatism is the disguise progressive and other ideologues don when they want to demonize competing ideologies.

Claiming that you are for what works is nothing like the get-out-of-ideological-jail–free card those who flash it around think it is. To date I am aware of no ideological school—be it Nazism, communism, Fabianism, progressivism, Toryism, Trostkyism, neoconservatism, paleoconservatism, libertarianism, Gandhism, futurism, Ludditism, anarchism, Lovestonism, Chavism, Castroism, Kemalism, Maoism, Stalinism, Uribism, Reaganism, Thatcherism, Thisism, or Thatism, just to name a few—that claims it does not work. And ideology without a claim on reality is little different than a game of Dungeons and Dragons or a Civil War reenactment club.

Now, obviously, just because all ideologues claim their ideology works doesn’t mean they’re all right. Every form of hard socialism promised to deliver prosperity for all. They all failed. Why socialism manages to survive one failure after another can be at least partially explained by the simple fact that the relevant question isn’t about what works but about what works for
whom
? Mexican food works for my lunch because I want Mexican food. Similarly, an intrusive welfare state works for the people who make a living thinking up what an intrusive welfare state should do next.

How much the welfare state works for its supposed beneficiaries is a different question altogether. The debate is skewed a bit because we live in a democracy, and as history shows, once the government starts writing checks to people, the people getting the checks want to keep getting checks (particularly given that the majority of them get more from government than they ever pay in). This has been the aim of liberalism since at least the New Deal, to turn Americans into clients of the state.

Regardless, in that debate liberals insist they are empiricists and fact finders, pragmatists and realists going where the data take them, pitting them against crazy ideologues who insist that a duck is a cat, as it were.
Because, again, pragmatism is the disguise progressives and other ideologues don when they want to demonize competing ideologies.

In 2005, then
New Republic
senior editor Jonathan Chait penned a now famous essay, “Fact Finders: The Anti-Dogma Dogma,”
⁴
stating boldly that liberals go where the facts take them and conservatives go where their ideology commands, heedless of the facts. It’s worth quoting at some length:

Meanwhile, if God told economic conservatives they were wrong, conservatives, or at least most of them, would keep chug-chugging along, because they are dogmatically immune to facts. According to Chait, “Economic conservatism, unlike liberalism, would survive having all its empirical underpinnings knocked out from beneath it.” He continues:

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.

And so on. Chait moves on to his empirical linchpin to prove his point that “empirical reasoning simply does not drive [conservative] 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.” He goes on:

Consider the conservative view of health care. Conservatives repeat the mantra that the United States has “the best health care system in the world”—a formulation used endlessly by President Bush. That isn’t true by almost any objective measure. The United States devotes a far higher share of its economy to health care than any other country. Yet, according to the most recent World Health Organization study, the United States ranks just 37th in overall health care performance.

It’s an illustrative choice of facts. I want to be careful here not to sound hyperbolic, so I am relying on the work of Scott W. Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of radiology and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford Medical Center when I say that the lengthy WHO study Chait uses to prove the empiricism of liberals might be the worst study ever. This is what Atlas concludes, or at least that’s what I take him to be saying, in his article titled “The Worst Study Ever?” He calls it “an intellectual fraud of historic consequence—a profoundly deceptive document that is only marginally a measure of health-care performance at all. The report’s true achievement was to rank countries
according to their alignment with a specific political and economic ideal—socialized medicine—and then claim it was an objective measure of ‘quality.’”
⁵

To take one small example: A full 25 percent of a health-care system’s final score in the WHO study is derived from what it calls a health-care system’s “Financial Fairness.” Essentially, the more socialized a system is—with the wealthy paying more through taxation—the better it is. Indeed, Atlas shows that “almost two-thirds of the study was an assessment of
equality
. The actual health outcomes of a nation, which logic dictates should be of greatest importance in any health-care index, accounted for only 25 percent of the weighting. In other words, the WHO study was dominated by concerns outside the realm of health care.”

Oh, and the data behind these rankings weren’t even empirical. Rather than collect hard numbers about health outcomes or anything else, these rankings were weighted by polling the
impressions
of “key informants” in the health-care profession, half of whom were WHO staff and had a bias toward state-run health-care systems. At least that’s my reasonable guess (if the World Health Organization bureaucracy is a hotbed of free-marketers, I’ll be glad to retract).

As Atlas suggests, a reasonable person, even an avowed empiricist, might think a ranking of health-care systems would score the quality of the health care those systems provide and not how successful they are at redistributing costs. A government-run soup kitchen might do wonderful and vital work, but only an ideologue would declare one a contender for the best restaurant in the world simply because they give away free food to the poor that is paid for by the wealthy.

Or, here’s a better example. Most surveys find that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and a handful of other schools are the best universities in the country or the world. And while all of them have generous financial aid packages, nobody would count the generosity of financial aid as two thirds of a school’s score. If we did, then the top twenty schools in the country would be community colleges and public universities.

Conversely, it
is
true that America has the best health-care system in the world in some ways and not in others. For example, if you are very ill and/or very rich things look better here than pretty much anywhere else.
Saudi kings and Chinese billionaires come to the United States when they are sick because they know this. If you have a bad heart or a scary cancer diagnosis, America is where you go to seek treatment. And if you’re already in America, you have a better chance of surviving such a diagnosis than you do elsewhere. Our overall cancer survival rates beat every industrialized country in the world.
⁶
We beat Canada—glorious Canada!—when it comes to preventative care.
⁷
In other words, what you think of our health-care system depends at least to a significant degree on how you define best. And that depends to a great extent on your ideological preferences.

The empirical measures most frequently cited as proof not just of American health care’s inferiority but as evidence that liberals care about the facts are similarly loaded. For instance, Chait and others are very fond of pointing to our allegedly low life expectancy as an indictment of our health-care system. “Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world,” writes Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman in the
New York Times
. “But it isn’t true. We spend far more per person on health care… yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.”
⁸

Again, this is just a reiteration of the logic behind the WHO study. Saying we spend too much on health care—which we do—is not really an argument against the
quality
of our health-care system but against its cost (and I very much doubt liberals would complain about costs nearly so much under socialized medicine). If you read Krugman, Chait, and others closely, they often seem to conflate bad health-care outcomes with high costs, as if lowering the costs will improve the outcomes. Lower costs are nice and desirable (and in my opinion achievable with market reforms), but paying less for ineffective health care isn’t as desirable as paying more for effective health care. I’d like to pay ten dollars for a cure that works. But I’ll pay one hundred dollars, if that’s what it costs, rather than “save” ninety dollars on a cure that doesn’t. At times it seems as if any argument is a good argument if it justifies (or seems to justify) inserting government into health care.

And on that point, comparing infant mortality and life expectancy rates aren’t great arguments either. A lot of the claims that America lags behind in infant mortality hinge on, not to be indelicate, how different
countries count dead babies and how they treat sick ones. In America, if a mother gives birth to a very low birth weight or otherwise gravely ill baby, doctors will spend time and resources trying to resuscitate it. When these nonviable babies die, it counts toward the infant mortality rate. In France or Japan, they’re more likely to record it as a stillbirth, which doesn’t count toward such rates.
⁹
Meanwhile, just to twist the ideological knife for a moment: The government policy with a near 100 percent mortality rate for babies? Abortion.