The Party of Reason?

It takes no talent to cherry-pick examples of ignorance from either Republicans or Democrats. More worthwhile is a systematic look at some major fault lines between the two political parties. Let’s consider four significant domestic policy areas where Democrats and Republicans differ—the economy, energy, global warming, and abortion—and see which party can fairly lay claim to being the party of reason. 

We will see a pattern. In each case, Democratic thinking will unfold in three stages: (1) Policy is predicated on reality as one wishes it to be, not as it is. (2) That policy fails. And (3) its advocates explain the failure by demonizing their opponents. The demonization of political opponents to cover policy failures is an all too reliable indicator that the policies rest on unsound, anti-scientific, irrational foundations. 

 THE ECONOMY

The Republican party is the party of economic growth, and the Democratic party is the party of redistribution. This, to be sure, is a gross generalization; Republicans support many redistributive policies, and Democrats pay at least lip service to the importance of economic growth. But the two parties clearly have different centers of gravity. Republicans press for tax reform, regulatory relief, and other measures to stimulate economic growth; Democrats express concern about economic inequality and support higher taxes and expanding redistribution programs.

Most societies throughout history have consisted of small pockets of wealth and widespread poverty. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey has noted, a graph of real per capita income would run flat, and very close to the x-axis, from the earliest peoples until roughly 1750. The new capitalist system and its accompanying social values made possible productivity gains that created widespread per capita income growth for the first time ever. It also made possible for the first time significant income redistribution.

Economic growth is and has always been the only meaningful way to raise real per capita income and thus alleviate widespread poverty. Redistribution can doubtless provide short-term relief to those at the lowest end of the economy. But there is no known example of any nation permanently lifting its people out of poverty by redistributing the finite resources of its national product. Indeed, redistribution at any given moment is made possible only by prior economic growth, without which there would be little or nothing to redistribute. Economic growth is the necessary precondition for increasing per capita income, as well as for broad redistributive policies.

This is a fundamental lesson from the economic history of mankind, compared with which everyday policy debates (how long to provide unemployment compensation, which measure of inflation to use to index Social Security benefits, and the like) are second-order questions. Which political party understands the priority of economic growth? Which party understands that putting redistribution before growth changes incentive structures so as to result in slower economic growth—and thus ultimately less wealth to distribute? Which party has learned this elementary lesson from history?

On the other hand, which political party demands that reality conform to its redistributive wishes? And when redistribution fails to alleviate poverty—as it always does—which party seeks external forces to blame? When the good intentions of redistributors fail to bend reality, which party seeks villains and malefactors to explain its failure? Here is where denunciation of the 1 percent, the rich, talk radio, the oil industry, and lately the Koch brothers begins. Redistribution would work, so liberals say, if only it were not sabotaged by villains at every turn. We must double down on the policy and ferret out the villains.

The search for villains—whether the British intelligence service for LaRouchies, democratic protesters in Venezuela, or the Koch brothers in the mind of Harry Reid—always springs from the same impulse. The targets differ, but their role is the same: to explain away the failure of policies that cannot possibly work. Here is a hint about where the paranoid style actually resides in American politics today.

ENERGY

The Obama administration came into office fully convinced that the era of fossil fuels was over and that its own role was to hasten those fuels’ demise. To that end it hoped for—and worked for—higher oil prices. In the process, it wasted large sums of taxpayer money on subsidizing Rube Goldberg alternative energy schemes for the politically well connected.

The Obama administration’s view of world energy realities was not based on science. In fact, to say that its view of reality was mistaken would be to say far too little; its misjudgment was one of epic proportions. As it turned out, America was on the cusp of the greatest fossil fuel revolution since the discovery of oil. New technologies (embraced by Republicans) now permit the relatively cheap exploitation of enormous reserves of oil and natural gas. The United States today can actually move toward achieving its long-stated goal to free itself from dependence on Middle East oil. The end of fossil fuels will come one day, but that day is nowhere in sight.

How was such a massive misjudgment possible? A misjudgment of this magnitude—we are talking upside down, 180 degrees out, flat wrong—is not a miscalculation at the margins. It is the result of turning one’s back on reality, clinging to ideological preconceptions, and drawing all the wrong conclusions. Misjudgments of this scale are never simple errors. They reflect the willful substitution of ideology for reality.

The Obama administration has responded to its embarrassing error with .  .  . further willfulness. It slow-walks new oil drilling permits on public lands, sets up regulatory obstacles to new production and distribution, delays the Keystone pipeline, and indulges in paranoid fears that new technologies cannot properly be regulated to protect the environment (all the while boasting of great progress toward energy independence when doing so is politically useful).

Here is a fantasy: What if oil had not been discovered in the mid-19th century? America’s economic modernization would have depended on traditional sources of energy like coal, hydropower, steam, wood, windmills, and farm animals. America might have become a vast continent of ugly, noisy, unreliable, bird-killing windmills from sea to shining sea. What if someone had then come forward and said: Look, here is a better idea. Let’s stop despoiling our environment and get our energy from an abundant, inexpensive, reliable source under the ground. Better yet, this new source of energy has many uses that traditional fuels cannot serve—powering airplanes, for example. Would today’s Democratic party embrace this advance? Here is a second hint about where the paranoid style resides in American politics today.

The Democratic party demonstrates abundant resistance to new technologies—for oil and gas extraction, clean coal, nuclear power, genetically modified food, and strategic missile defense, to name a few. Green technology alone finds favor in the Democratic party. That would be unobjectionable—many Republicans favor it too—if it meant government support for scientific research whose findings are made available to the public. Instead, cascades of public money have been wasted picking politically favored corporations to commercialize technologies that are not ready for prime time.

The Democratic party’s deepest inclination is expressed in its embrace of the so-called precautionary principle, which is a fancy name for fear of the new. The secret is given away in former Obama adviser Cass Sunstein’s 2003 working paper “Beyond the Precautionary Principle.” There Sunstein says that this principle “requires regulation of activities even if it cannot be shown that these activities are likely to produce significant harms” (emphasis mine). Here is an embrace of government control that knows no limit.

This is the party of reason? It sounds more like the party of paranoia. Who then is to blame for the failure of the promised green-job bonanza to materialize? The answer comes straight out of the Democratic playbook: “Big oil” is responsible for the failure of the Obama administration’s energy policies. Evil oil companies have made it impossible for alternative energy sources to compete; they undercut alternative technologies at every turn. Worse yet, their Republican defenders in Congress enable oil companies to do this by means of what Democrats perversely call “subsidies”—obscuring the very real difference between tax breaks to encourage oil and gas exploration and the actual cash-transfer subsidies that go to alternative energy companies.

GLOBAL WARMING

Muh of the Democratic party’s opposition to fossil fuels is rooted in its concern about man-made global warming (though distaste for fossil fuels on the left long predated concern about global warming). The prevailing Democratic party view holds that the science of global warming is settled. A deeper reading would suggest that what passes for the study of man-made global warming is not science at all, but natural history.

Unrepeatable events like the evolution of the world’s species and the evolution of the world’s climate are inherently difficult to explain, and their future course is even harder to predict. Discernment of patterns over time does not constitute knowledge of future developments. The cyclical warming and cooling of the Earth over millennia is precisely not what is at stake; what is claimed is that man-made global warming is a new planetary phenomenon. In the absence of a hypothesis to account for the rate and direction of change, predictions of its future course are simple extrapolations from the past—that is, mere guesswork. 

Even when there is such a hypothesis, predictions may be unwarranted. For example, evolutionary biology—which is held up by some climate change acolytes as the gold standard of settled science—teaches that species have adapted over time. With this theory in hand, evolutionary biology can infer the existence of certain intermediate life forms even in the absence of fossil evidence. If such fossils are found, their discovery supports the underlying theory.

But evolutionary biology does not predict the future course of evolution. Past experience suggests we should expect adaptation and natural selection to continue to operate. But evolutionary biology tells us nothing about the types, numbers, or characteristics of the species yet to come. If and when species evolve a certain way, all that can be said—after the fact—is that this must have come about through adaptation and natural selection. The ability to predict replicable events is one thing, the possibility of predicting the onetime evolution of the Earth, its species, and its climate quite another. In short, climate activists are asking far more of global warming models than is asked of evolutionary biology.

Today’s knowledge of global warming consists of longer and better records of temperatures observed around the world than ever before. This is historical knowledge. The careful recording of global temperatures over time is no different in principle from the recording of the U.S. unemployment rate or the rise and fall of kingdoms. From this kind of knowledge alone, nothing can be predicted about the future.

We also have models which purport to account for the rise of global temperatures, most of which focus heavily on carbon dioxide emissions as a “forcing” factor for global temperatures. The best, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, begins correlating temperatures and carbon dioxide levels in the mid-18th century, when global temperatures were beginning to rise. A persuasive model, however, would be able to map accurately earlier periods of rising and falling temperatures. More, it would contain within it an implicit hypothesis (about the climate sensitivity of the planet) that could generate a correct and potentially falsifiable prediction about the future. No model has done either. None predicted the relatively flat global temperatures of the past 17 years. 

In the absence of such a model, a degree of caution, even open-minded skepticism, about the claim of imminent harm or eventual catastrophe is in order. Our knowledge today remains historical in character. In the case of global warming, it is the skeptics who are the more willing to live with partial and provisional knowledge of the kind that Hofstadter contrasted with the certainty of closed-minded authoritarians.

And the Democrats? Their conviction that catastrophic warming is occurring is held with the fervor of zealotry, pretending to a certainty far beyond what the available evidence could possibly demonstrate. And they know who is responsible. For the alleged impending planetary tragedy, Democrats place immediate blame on the Koch brothers, oil companies, and other self-interested parties and ultimate blame on the nearly insatiable human demand for energy.

ABORTION

It is possible to imagine a political resolution to social issues like affirmative action, gay marriage, and illegal immigration, each of which has roiled American politics in recent years. A political resolution of the abortion issue is harder to see; this remains the most divisive social issue on the political landscape. What do science, and more broadly reason, teach us about this issue?

Republicans hold a variety of views on abortion. Some believe that an embryo is a human being from the moment of conception and deserves full legal protections. Others are prepared to accept limited exceptions to a broad no-abortion policy. Still others are uncertain about when during pregnancy a fetus becomes sufficiently human to deserve legal protection. But Republicans generally are open to the idea that a fetus is a developing human being.

For this reason, Republicans favor research into questions relating to the physical and mental development of the fetus—whether, and at what age, a fetus experiences pain, for instance. Republicans also support a measure of consistency about laws governing abortions for minors. Does it make sense that a minor cannot be given an aspirin at school without parental consent but can have an abortion without parental knowledge? Although some dubious studies purport to show that requiring parental consent may harm young mothers, virtually all opposition to parental consent rests squarely on the ground that it might restrict access to abortion.

Science seems to be cooperating with Republicans on the abortion issue. New technologies (like 4D fetal imaging) that graphically display ever-earlier fetal activity have had an indisputable effect on how a fetus is viewed. We should expect further refinement of these technologies. So too we have seen great advances in the ability of doctors to sustain ever-younger babies born prematurely. 

What is the science-friendly Democrats’ position on abortion? It is to close their eyes tight and oppose any and all thought about these questions. It is to shut out the external world and repeat over and over the mantra: A woman has a right to choose. A woman has a right to choose. A woman has a right to choose. 

But a woman does not have a right to choose to murder her infant, her child, or her neighbor. Whether abortion is murder depends entirely on whether a fetus is a human being sufficiently advanced in its development to deserve legal protection. 

This question cannot be elided, which is why abortion remains a political issue. Louder and more vociferous claims about “reproductive rights” do not touch the core question; they simply substitute a higher decibel level for serious reflection.  

To avoid what would probably be a losing argument, Democrats refuse to discuss all such issues. Instead, they demonize opponents as religious bigots who are waging a “war on women.” Name-calling stands in for thought. Labeling the pro-abortion position “choice” is sheer genius as political marketing—but it has no relation to the underlying question at issue. In all, it is quite remarkable to have come to the point where opposition to abortion should be regarded as antiwoman.

So, which is the party of science, curiosity, reflective reason, and a willingness to harbor uncertainty in its views? Which is the party open to reflection about the core question that must be decided to take a consistently moral position on abortion?

IN SUM

These examples could be multiplied many times over—including in foreign policy. While foreign policy is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that here, too, Democrats are guilty of creating alternative realities. The early outreach to the Iranian mullahs, the Russian reset, President Obama’s Cairo speech, the premature departure from Iraq, the early dismissal of ISIS, and the moral equivalence granted to Hamas and Israel all depend on seeing despotic leaders not as they are, but as the administration wishes them to be.

Because the left wishes to eliminate poverty by redistribution, it assumes reality can be made to conform. Because it judges fossil fuels bad, they must be allowed no future. Because it insists on human causation for global warming, dissenters must be hounded. Because the left favors unrestricted access to abortion, a woman’s right to choose must be enshrined. 

The words of today’s political left are much like ancient incantations. They are magic. But there is one difference: Ancient incantations reflected an underlying belief in an external world that was difficult to control, a world in which humans had at best a modest measure of influence.

Liberals have long favored the notion of a command economy; today they operate in nothing less than a command reality. For the modern liberal, we humans have the power to deconstruct and reconstruct reality as we please. In this brave new world, words are all that is required for a new reality to leap into existence. To speak about an issue is to resolve it. Good intentions suffice. If the results of programs created with good intentions disappoint, it doesn’t matter. Disastrous policy results do not reflect a misunderstanding of reality, but the evil machinations of political opponents.

This of course is not reason; it is hubris. The great power of modern science arises from the understanding that we gain a degree of mastery over natural forces and ourselves only by conforming our thoughts and actions to the nature of reality itself. The incantations of the modern left notwithstanding, reality is not easily bent by words alone.

Jeff Bergner is a lecturer at the Batten School of Public Policy at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is
Against Modern Humanism: On the Culture of Ego.