The new issue of _Perspectives on Politics_ has an interesting back-and-forth between Larry Bartels and Skip_Lupia_et_al. on Bartels’ “2005 article”:http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/homer.pdf about voter ignorance and the Bush tax cuts. Unfortunately the dialogue is behind the paywall (Bartels usually posts his papers on his website but hasn’t done so with this one yet), but this bit jumped out from his riposte:
Well-informed people are sometimes quite wrong about things—even when it comes to straightforward factual matters. For example, well-informed conservatives in the 2002 and 2004 NES surveys were significantly more likely than less-informed conservatives to _deny_ that differences in income between rich people and poor people in the United States had increased over the past 20 years—a denial “grossly out of kilter with available evidence.” Here, as in many other instances, better-informed people seem mostly to have grasped the biased world-view of “their” political elites rather than an accurate perception of real social conditions.
“Alan Reynolds”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/18/bloggingheads-and-lampposts/ should be “taking a bow”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/intellectual_ga.html sometime around now. Bartels appears to be giving us a preview of one of the findings of his forthcoming book, _Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age_, which is coming out from Russell Sage/Princeton next year and sounds very interesting.
Update: This “response”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/12/populism_elitism_and_bs.php by Ross Douthat to David Frum’s “much vaunted”:http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/061154.php attack on conservative anti-intellectualism also seems sort-of on topic
Huckabee’s Fair Tax zeal and Paul’s anti-Fed enthusiasm are genuinely foolish; there is a touch of Miers-ish identity politics in the evangelical community’s Huckaphilia, and Frum’s larger worry about anti-intellectualism in the contemporary Right is one I share in spades. But if you’re going to be hard on the current crop of Republican candidates for making bogus claims about public policy, it seems awfully unfair to leave out the candidate given to running ads in which he announces: “I know that reducing taxes produces more revenue. The Democrats don’t know that. They don’t believe that.” (They don’t believe it, of course, because in the current fiscal landscape you can’t find a serious conservative economist who thinks it’s true.) … If you’re looking for cases where the Right’s anti-elitism has shaded into outright anti-intellectualism – for cases where, in Frum’s words, a GOP politician has deliberately failed to “study the problem, master the evidence, and face criticism” – Giuliani’s frequent channeling of Larry Kudlow seems like at least as telling an example as anything Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are peddling.
(the point being, although Douthat doesn’t spell it out explicitly, that Frum is one of Giuliani’s senior policy advisers).
{ 7 comments }
bbartlog 12.17.07 at 4:44 pm
Frum trying to cite Paul as an example of anti-intellectualism is also off the mark. If he wanted to argue that Paul was a faux intellectual, who *appeared* to know something about monetary policy but was wrong, that would make sense. But in the context of his argument the only reason I can see for him to mention Paul is that Frum just really, really doesn’t like Paul and can’t resist an opportunity to slam him.
Uncle Kvetch 12.17.07 at 4:54 pm
It’s funny how Frum, Peggy Noonan, and the rest of them are acting like this all something new.
Anti-intellectualism was, of course, an enormous part of Reagan’s appeal–he personified the triumph of aw-shucks, good ol’ fashioned horse sense over the “expertise” of effete eggheads. But of course neither Frum, nor Noonan, nor any of the others will ever, ever cop to that. No…everything was going just wonderfully until that damn cracker Huckabee showed up.
Even funnier is this from Frum’s piece:
BZZZZT. Let me stop you right there. “Effective government” is an oxymoron, David. Government can only be the problem, never the solution. St. Ronnie taught us that. Or have you forgotten?
Sounds like somebody needs to reacquaint himself with the Sacred Texts, and pronto.
Robin Green 12.17.07 at 5:48 pm
Inconsistency is an essential trait of the modern politician / political advisor, without a doubt.
From Gordon Brown’s advocating “prudence” but blowing millions on inefficient PFI schemes and rigging the figures to make them look better, to George W. Bush’s famous “opposition to nation building” ( http://zfacts.com/p/136.html ), examples abound.
(Ron Paul is probably less inconsistent than most, but he has no chance of winning the presidency, so he can afford to be.)
engels 12.17.07 at 6:50 pm
For example, well-informed conservatives in the 2002 and 2004 NES surveys were significantly more likely than less-informed conservatives to deny that differences in income between rich people and poor people in the United States had increased over the past 20 years—a denial “grossly out of kilter with available evidence.†Here, as in many other instances, better-informed people seem mostly to have grasped the biased world-view of “their†political elites rather than an accurate perception of real social conditions.
Another way of putting this might be: the more intelligent American conservatives are, the more stupid they are.
P O'Neill 12.17.07 at 7:12 pm
“Well-informed” = reads Wall Street Journal editorials. That’s the problem.
Valuethinker 12.18.07 at 2:49 pm
The irony of the most affluent voters in America aligning themselves as ‘anti elitist’ is manifold and funny if it weren’t so tragic.
It’s particularly funny from David Frum, the son of Canada’s most prominent newscaster at the time (the late Barbara Frum) and a millionaire property developer (Murray Frum). I’m not sure if David Frum is an alumnus of Upper Canada College (the most elite private school in Canada) but I suspect so.
There’s something galling about these children of the affluent and the influential, pretending they like Nascar racing and are really populists at heart.
As Kevin Drum (or Mark Kleiman?) pointed out, the conservative distaste for Mike Huckabee comes down to the discovery that a real conservative, with real conservative values, and inconsistencies, and the logical consequences of not believing in the Theory of Evolution, (as opposed to pretending you don’t), is suddenly popular with the Primary season electorate. Ron Paul could be dismissed as an aberration– but Huckabee?
http://www.samefacts.com/archives/campaign_2008_/2007/12/why_do_the_moneycons_hate_huckabee.php
I am reminded of all those German conservatives who thought that Herr Hitler could be ‘controlled’. I know, I know, Godwin’s Law: just to be clear, I’m not calling the conservatives ‘fascists’: I am just noting the similarity of thought process– you cannot hold ‘your base’ in contempt forever, and you cannot pretend you are what you are not.
Tom Hurka 12.18.07 at 6:20 pm
David Frum didn’t go to UCC. He went to the University of Toronto Schools, a (then) much less expensive and more intellectually than socially elitist school.
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