We Still Need Adlai Badly

One of the most depressing aspects of both major political parties circa 2007 is their utter lack of lack of intellectual seriousness. Not that we have had an unbroken string of intellectuals in public office -- far from it -- but at least in the 19th Century people actually read the candidates' speeches and politics was a national pastime. In our age of instant communication and 24/7 entertainment, however, politicians must appeal to our emotions, not our intellect, in order to get our attention. There is very seldom even the pretense of intellectual persuasion. Even the so-called presidential "debates" are little more than opportunities for the candidates to garner name recognition by reeling off clever one-liners, or trashing opponents with higher poll numbers. This is hardly a novel insight, but it's troubling nevertheless -- our leaders know their positions are seldom scrutinized by the public, so they don't have to withstand intellectual scrutiny. Whatever you think of Al Gore and his jeremiad against the Bush Administration ("The Assault On Reason"), his condemnation of the poll-driven manipulation of the American public at the expense of intellectual discourse is spot-on.

Let's begin with the Republicans. From the Goldwater debacle in 1964 through at least the Reagan Administration, the majority of innovative public policy proposals sprung from conservative think tanks; not all of them were good ideas, and most were never enacted into law, but that's where the action was. Even before then, President Eisenhower ran a sound and sober administration, ending the Korean War, constructing the national highway system, and facing down the British, French, and Israelis over Suez.

No more. Now we are faced with the sorry spectacle of a Republican president advocating amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit that mortal threat to the republic, gay marriage. Now were forced to endure the dismal display of Republican presidential candidates questioning evolution. This isn't what serious people in the twenty-first century do, particularly presidential candidates. Last year, when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote his long -- and bizarre -- letter to President Bush, the Administration didn't deem it worthy of a response. Why not? Lincoln answered Horace Greeley and other critics. A tightly reasoned, forthright defense of Western values would have heartened Iranian dissidents and improved the President's standing with our allies, or at least couldn't have hurt.

And the Democrats? They can boast of a proud history of leaders from FDR through JFK -- politicians of intellectual heft like Adlai Stevenson and William Fulbright. The Arkansas Senator's critique if American foreign policy in Vietnam, and of the sometime American habit of looking "at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism" is a legacy of which the Party is justly proud. (It is not so proud of his rigid segregationist views.) So too with Robert Kennedy: what politician today can we imagine having the physical courage to break the news of Dr. Martin Luther King's death to an African American audience, and the political courage to quote a Greek poet (Aeschylus) in an effort to assuage their grief? ("And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our own will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.")

Again, no longer. Hillary Clinton's lack of political courage and her willingness to say or d0 anything to get elected are shocking even for a politician. Her position on Iraq shifts with every shift in public opinion, while the Clinton spin machine spits out exactly what it thinks the media wants to hear. (This is why she has performed well in the "debates"; every syllable she utters is calculated to burnish her image.) John Edwards decided long ago to jettison his image as a moderate Southern Democrat and pander to the base. Neither has a coherent, consistent political philosophy.

Barack Obama intrigues me the most because he seems to appreciate the weight of history on the present and distrusts ideology. His opposition to the Iraq War, for example, was deeply conservative in the Burkean sense of the word, echoing Fulbright's condemnation of the strain of "angry moralism" in U.S. foreign policy: "[W]hen our idealism spills into that kind of naivete and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.” (I will revisit the Senator from Illinois in another post.)

Senator Obama is an exception, unfortunately -- as are original Republican thinkers such as Newt Gingrich -- very few "eggheads" like Adlai Stevenson run for president anymore. But the problems that confront the country are complex and multifaceted, and do not lend themselves to simple solutions. I think the country is ready for someone smarter than the rest of us.

The Incompetence Theory

Before I start posting political commentary, I thought it best to begin with some personal perspective. All of us see the world through the prism of thousands of experiences and assumptions, some conscious, most not. Our views of politics and public policy, for example, are directly related to our faith, or lack thereof, in our fellow humans -- their intelligence, their judgment, and their capacity for good. For example, I have always believed that random chance, ignorance, and and human frailty play a greater role in human misery than "evil." For this reason, I have never given much credence to conspiracy theories -- most groups of people lack the degree of intelligence, efficiency, and coordination required to agree on where to go to dinner, much less assassinate a president. Or run the world. I call it the Incompetence Theory, which I didn't invent but gladly appropriate: "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence" was how Napoleon allegedly put it, but whatever its provenance, it has great explanatory power.

What I mean by the Incompetence Theory is simply this: most of us are essentially lazy or selfish, at least to some degree, and due to this, and due to differences in education and experience, as well as emotional and psychological factors, many of us are incompetent in at least some areas. Some of us are even incompetent in our chosen profession. Of course, human nature being what it is, people won't admit their deficiencies, and in fact expend considerable energy covering up their mistakes, passing the blame, and taking credit where none is due. (Politicians are the experts at this, of course.) This constant blame-shifting and credit-hogging tend to obscure incompetence, or even simple lack of efficiency, and so when things go wrong people suspect that sinister forces are at work. This explanation has the added value of being simple to understand, and simple to solve -- just root out the bad guys.

I believe that this generalized lack of competence, together with the randomness and cruelty of life on this planet, explain reality far better than conspiracy theories. Conspiracies are like religion in that they offer decipherable answers to vexing questions -- 44 years later, people simply cannot accept that a bitter loner could cut down a vital young President. (No, I'm not expressing any opinions on the Kennedy assassination, or saying that there are not legitimate questions about the Warren Commission's conclusions; I'm merely offering a theory as to how and why conspiracy theories arise.) Yes, there are evil people out there, and yes, they do sometimes conspire to do us harm (9/11), but the modern world is the product of vast (and often, unfortunately, in the case of the United States) imperfectly understood historical forces that are often immune to the designs of humans.

With this background in mind, The Extreme Center will approach political questions with what I call principled pragmatism. Reality is complex and inconvenient, and the ideological bromides of the left and right are no longer adequate to the task of governing the country. We should not fear what FDR called "bold, persistent experimentation" in public policy, particularly at the State level. Of course, none of us should discard deeply-held beliefs; we should always bring our principles to bear on the problems that face us. But perhaps we can at least eschew empty rhetoric and worn-out formulae: To quote Lincoln, "we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."