One of the questions everyone needs to face is this: can you recognize the idiots and assholes who just happen to be more politically aligned with you than with your adversaries? A key sign that you have gone off the deep end is that you can no longer recognize when someone on your side is at least a saxophone short of a quintet. If you can't hear when your nominal allies are horn-deficient, well... say goodbye to bebop. No, thank you.
And this brings me to the current state of the Democratic Party, how it is being assessed, and some frightening observations.
Last week, I attended the MPSA. The MPSA conference is not really a "regional" conference. The "Midwest" thing once mattered, before people started flying everywhere. Today, for whatever reason, it is a big deal for American politics. Why? Um... such things are lost to the mists of time. Anyway, it means I gotta go and be, like, semi-professional, or something. Last year, I put up a post about the tenor of the discussions there, and I thought it might make a fun post again this year. What do we discuss?
Trump. Um... yeah. He's still the center of the universe. Beyond that, conversations immediately went to: who is going to be the Democratic nominee. Nobody had a clue. Nobody was willing to venture a guess. If you ask me, I don't have a clue either. Don't ask me. Or, if you do, don't expect an answer.
So, here's how I steered some discussions. Spoiler alert: political scientists are a bunch of damned commies. Or, if not commies, very left, and reliably Democratic. Whether or not they are actual commies depends on their subfield. Political "theory" still has its share of straight-up commies.
As my very, very few readers know, though, my assessment of the Democratic Party today is... not kind to people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, just as it was never kind to Bernie Sanders. I see the current direction of very-far-left stuff coming from Ocasio-Cortez, some of Warren's crazier proposals, like locking up CEOs when those specific CEOs didn't actually commit any specific wrongdoing... and this just strikes me as left-wing teabaggerism. Somebody looked at the Democratic Party and said, "hey, let's get us some of that Louis Gohmert magic!," and this is the result. Seriously, people. Locking up individuals who weren't the ones who committed any specific offense? Do I really have to explain this? Elizabeth Warren is as crazy as the worst teabagger.
Anyway, I pressed a few on how they view Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and some of the others saying what I consider to be indisputably batshit crazy stuff. My examples were the federal jobs guarantee being peddled by Ocasio-Cortez, and Warren's proposal to lock up CEOs because someone else did something bad. I present this as a basic standard for cognitive consistency and capacity to engage in self-checking behavior. Can you recognize when someone who is generally on your side says something wacko? Can you recognize when someone who tends to agree with you is two beats short of a waltz? Political biases will predispose you to look for excuses for those who tend to side with you, and magnify the shortcomings of those opposed to you. Can you put the shortcomings of those opposed to you in perspective? Similarly, what do you do when confronted with someone on your side, with characteristics that predispose you to like him or her, when that person turns out to be... a nincompoop?
So here's the thing about, for example, Ocasio-Cortez's federal jobs guarantee. I can't find a scholar who will defend the concept. I mention Ocasio-Cortez, and I get a mix of reactions. I'll admit, I was surprised by the number of people positively disposed towards her. Surprised in a bad way. There are scholars out there who like her, and think she has a clue. This is not uniform, but there are some. When presented with the federal jobs guarantee, or the many other ways she has demonstrated cluelessness, their response is to brush it aside. They can't defend the federal jobs guarantee because... it's indefensibly stupid. It could never be implemented, and no matter what your preferences are, if you think about it for two seconds, you'll realize all of the many roadblocks that would make it impossible to implement. No scholar I have found can defend it. If there is a scholar out there writing about it, I'll read what they have to say, but I haven't spoken to any of them. (I did say, "non-random.") But a lot of these people want to defend her. So, they look for reasons to ignore and excuse the federal jobs guarantee and her many other demonstrations of cluelessness.
To this, I pose the following. If you see someone on the other side, politically, propose a policy that is so obviously stupid that it could never be implemented, do you cut them any slack? When you watch their supporters bend over backwards to excuse the fact that they are proposing policies that are obviously stupid and can never be implemented, how do you react?
Think about Trump's promise to make Mexico pay for his idiotic wall. Were any of these lefty political scientists willing to cut Trump any slack for a proposal so stupid that anyone with a brain would realize, in less than two seconds, that it could never happen? No. How did they look at Trump's supporters, who believed it? How did they look at the Republican apparatchiks who tripped all over themselves excusing Trump's displays of idiocy over this promise? Do you see my point?
The federal jobs guarantee is beyond stupid. No matter what you think of the concept, dispositionally, anyone with a brain knows it can't happen, and even the political scientists I pressed couldn't defend that nonsense. So, they tried to dodge. I don't buy it when people try to defend Trump on the Mexico-paying-for-the-wall promise, and I don't buy it here.
You need to be able to see foolishness on your own side. I'm getting seriously worried here about the Democratic Party. Scholars are mixed in their capacity to call bullshit on some really screwy ideas because they are, for whatever reason, dispositionally attached to people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But she's not smart, and she doesn't know anything.
Federal jobs guarantee. Seriously. No.