. . . his progressive project would come to power, Thomas Sowell explained who progressives are, how they operate, why their programs almost always fail, and why the failures never discredit the authors of those failures.
Mr. Sowell did this in The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (Basic Books 1995). It deserved then, and deserves now -- as the failures of Obamism continue to manifest themselves -- to be much better known, more often read, and better heeded.
I won't abuse the book by trying to summarize it. Here are a few clips to stir your mind and heart:
The great ideological crusades of twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the most disparate fields -- from the eugenics movement of the early decades of the century to the environmentalism of the later decades, not to mention the welfare state, socialism, communism, Keynesian economics, and medical, nuclear, and automotive safety. What all these highly disparate crusades have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government. Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:
1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for action to avoid impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.
. . . .
The prevailing vision of our era is long overdue for a critical reexamination -- or, for many, a first examination. This vision so permeates the media and academia, and has made such major inroads into the religious community, that many grow to adulthood unaware that there is any other way of looking at things, or that evidence might be relevant to checking out the sweeping assumptions of so-called "thinking people." Many of these "thinking people" could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic (emphasis added, in honor of the articulate Mr. Obama). This can be a fatal talent, when it supplies the crucial insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes.
. . . .
Characteristic patterns have developed among the anointed for dealing with the repeated failures of policies based on their vision. . . .
PATTERNS OF FAILURE
A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored by the anointed turn out to fail. This pattern typically has four stages:
Stage 1. The "Crisis": Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a "crisis," [Unca D: the latest being the bathroom crisis,] even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometime the situation described as a "crisis" has in fact already been getting better for years.
Stage 2. The "Solution": Policies to end the "crisis" are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z [Unca D: such as men in women's bathrooms: what could go wrong?]. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and "simplistic," if not dishonest.
Stage 3. The Results: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z.
Stage 4. The Response: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as "simplistic" for ignoring the "complexities" involved, as "many factors" went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors.
Examples of this pattern are all too abundant.
Indeed they are. Mr. Sowell examines three cases do demonstrate his points: the war on poverty, sex education as a means of reducing teenage pregnancy and venereal disease, and crime-reduction programs through preventive social policies beforehand and rehabilitation afterward, together with showing more concern for the legal rights of defendants in criminal cases. His point is that all three failed to accomplish their stated goals and, in fact, made matters worse. He shows, for instance, that the war on poverty increased the number of people dependent on government. [Unca D: Making more people dependent on government being the point, actually.]
. . . . The failure of the "war on poverty" to achieve its goal of reducing dependency -- and in fact increasing dependency as these policies went into effect -- brought no acknowledgment of failure.
. . . .
In short, no matter what happens, the vision of the anointed always succeeds, if not by the original criteria, then by criteria extemporized later -- and if not by empirical criteria, then by criteria sufficient subjective to escape even the possibility of refutation. Evidence becomes irrelevant.
As one of several examples of "criteria extemporized later" for the war on poverty, Mr. Sowell offers this:
A member of President Johnson's Cabinet suggested yet another criterion of success: "Ask the 11 million students who have received loans for their college education whether the Higher Education Act failed." Similar questions were suggested for those who used a wide range of other government programs. In short, the test for whether a program was good for the country as a whole was whether those who personally benefited from it found it beneficial.
The same thing is being done now, of course, for Obamacare. Its failures and shortcomings are by now old news. The failed computer rollout. Rising medical costs. Failed state exchanges. Insurance companies fleeing state after state. Insurance with sky-high deductibles and doctors forty miles away. Use of the law as a sword against religious freedom for, say, The Little Sisters of the Poor. And on and on. Yet Obamacare certainly has its beneficiaries, and their benefits are cited as a complete defense for the failed and failing system.
When progressives and socialists gain control of cities, states, and countries, the failure of individual programs compounds inexorably into systemic failure, which then arrives suddenly and "unexpectedly." Venezuela. Cuba. Detroit, Flint, and, soon, Chicago. Puerto Rico. And soon, Illinois, which hasn't written a state budget in two years as a lonely Republican governor fights to stop living beyond the state's means and a Democrat-controlled legislature that continues, without shame, to ladle more gravy onto the overloaded fiscal train.
Yet the media rarely blames any species of leftism for these sudden and "unexpected" collapses. The New York Times, for instance, blames low oil prices for the troubles in Venezuela. Yes, low prices are a precipitating factor, but they are not the causal factor. Socialism is -- like a weakened cancer patient who dies, finally, of pneumonia.
Yet the American left, to this day, cannot bring itself to criticize the dictator, party, and ideology that are bringing down an entire country. To discredit Venezuela's ruinous price controls, for instance, would be to discredit a much-loved tool of the American left. In New York City, for instance, "temporary" World War II real estate price controls still set below-market rents for many apartments.
Look, I shouldn't try to apply Mr. Sowell's ideas to contemporary political issues. Read the book, then do it yourself. Along the way, you will encounter what might be called Mr. Sowell's philosophical overview -- the different ways in which conservatives (correctly) and leftists (wrongly) understand human nature.
One of the best chapters lays out the contrasts between the vision of the anointed --meaning the prevailing vision of the intelligentsia -- and "the opposing vision, a vision whose reasoning begins with the tragedy of the human condition."
By tragedy here is not meant simply unhappiness, but tragedy in the ancient Greek sense, inescapable fate inherent in the nature of things, rather than unhappiness due simply to villainy or callousness. The two visions differ in their respective conceptions of the nature of man, the nature of the world, and the nature of causation, knowledge, power, and justice.
What follows is simply brilliant. Here are a couple of excerpts:
To those with the tragic vision, institutions, traditions, laws, and policies are to be judged by how well they cope with the intellectual and moral inadequacies of human beings, so as to limit the damage they do, and to coordinate the society in such a way as to maximize the use of its scattered fragments of knowledge, as well as to correct inevitable mistakes as quickly as possible. But to those with the less constrained view of the anointed, the goal is the liberation of human beings from unnecessary social inhibitions, so as to allow repressed creativity to emerge and the vast knowledge and talent already available to be applied to existing problems.
For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before. . . .
Justice Holmes saw modern man as being very much like his barbarian ancestors, with the different conditions of life today being due to economic and social developments based on the very institutions, traditions, and laws which those with the vision of the anointed are anxious to supersede with untested theories. . . .
. . . .
To those with the tragic vision, barbarism is not some distant stage of evolution, but an ever-present threat when the civilizing institutions are weakened or undermined:
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again [here quoting Will and Ariel Durant, The Lesson of History].
The anointed, as Mr. Sowell calls them, are in fact and deed enemies of civilization. They cannot be reasoned with; they can only be defeated.
Comments