Afternoon Must-Read: Ezra Klein: What Is the Liberal Equivalent of Climate Denial?

Ezra Klein: What’s the liberal equivalent of climate denial?: “Kahan… argu[es]… being right is irrelevant.

It’s not whether one gets the answer right or wrong but how one reasons that counts…

A liberal who works backwards from conclusions but happens to believe in climate change is

to be congratulated for being lucky that a position they unreasoningly subscribe to happens to be true…

but nothing more. Here, Kahan makes a serious mistake. Political reasoning doesn’t take place inside our heads. It takes place inside our parties. No one can personally investigate the vast array of issues facing the country. In terms of getting the right answers, the most important decision people make is choosing whom to trust…. Majority parties bear the heavy responsibility of actually getting policy right…. That’s less true for minority parties. They have the luxury of being irresponsible…. But even minority parties have reason to calm the tribal impulses of their members. Winning elections requires winning the support of many voters who aren’t hardcore conservatives or liberals….

Of late, the Democratic Party has had a much easier time crossing its base. When President George W. Bush was in office, Democrats worked with him on No Child Left Behind, on Medicare Part D, on the tax cuts, on immigration reform, on TARP, on the 2008 stimulus, and more. They didn’t take the lockstep approach to opposition that the Republican Party has in the age of President Obama…. So here’s one way to potentially unite Krugman, Chait and Kahan: Republicans and Democrats are similarly prone to partisan self-deception on the individual level, but the weakness of the Republican Party establishment has left the Democratic Party more capable of checking its worst impulses on the national level….

Of course, this presupposes that the Democratic Party, controlling for majority status, has more evidence-based positions. That brings us back to Krugman’s original question: “Can anyone point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change, or the ‘unskewing’ mania late in the 2012 campaign, or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans?”… Climate change is a more solid example. And then there’s the fact that nearly every elected Republican has signed Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge…. So the question, then, is for conservatives: on what major policies is the bulk of the Democratic Party establishment ignoring — or, Norquist-like, promising to ignore — the evidence? And if that behavior isn’t as prevalent among Democrats, why is that?

April 23, 2014

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