Ideology and Policy

Here’s a liberal commenting on reading conservative works:

Conservatives have big appetites for ideology; liberals don’t. There are, of course, taxonomies of conservative schools of thought. People on the right classify themselves as libertarians, neoconservatives, social conservatives, traditional conservatives, and the like, and spill oceans of ink defining, debating, and further subdividing these schools of thought. There is no parallel taxonomy on the left. Maybe, in part, it is because a central tenet of liberalism is that ideology should be eschewed in favor of the supposedly enlightened, pragmatic approach of making ad hoc judgments about issues. But on this conservatives are more realistic. Ideology is inevitable; we all have an ideology, whether we are aware of it or not. First of all, ideology is about values, and we can’t decide how we wish to solve policy issues without having a firm grasp on the values we are seeking to advance. Second, the world is too complex for us to make informed judgments about all of the issues that confront us. We need a philosophy to serve as a north star. One way I’ve been enriched by reading the great works of conservatism is that I’ve come better to appreciate how central ideology is to thinking about matters of governance and public policy.

This observation bears out what I’ve experienced firsthand.  At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, nearly every liberal I’ve met was remarkably shallow and nearly impossibly naïve.

The shallowness stems from, I suppose, a tendency to look at surface problems as separate entities.  For example, systemic poverty is seen by liberals simply as a lack of money, possibly stemming from a lack of education or absence of social opportunities.  Liberals never seem to be able to connect systemic poverty with broader cultural issues, like spiritual poverty—as evidenced by a high illegitimacy rate, drug use rate, and crime rate—or like cultural backwardness—as evidenced by high dropout rates or poor literacy.  There is more than one variable that strongly correlates to poverty—like absence of money.  Material poverty is connected with a variety of terrible life decisions, many of which used to be referred to as sin, like fornication, illegitimate births, and licentiousness.  But liberals rarely connect these dots (the late Senator Moynihan being a notable exception).  And so, liberals address issues as singular entities, and rarely look beyond the most obvious correlating variable.

The naiveté appears to stem from a tendency to assume that people are either rational or have good intentions, although some liberals are simply self-interested and want the government to divert other people’s hard-earned wealth to themselves directly.  Most people are irrational and illogical.  Some are evil, and some have nothing but evil intentions.  One must be either highly sheltered or an optimist of the highest order to think that men are angels and will use a system as intended instead of gaming it for maximum profit.  Quite simply, when it comes to programs designed by liberals, there is a huge disparity between how liberals think people will behave and how people actually behave.

Liberals, then, would benefit by thinking less pragmatically* and more ideologically.  What do they believe about man?  How do the various components of their policy fit together as a coherent whole?  I’m not claiming that these answers will ever be answered satisfactorily by liberals, but asking these questions should eliminate some aspects of the schizoid approach to policy.

* I’ve also noted that pragmatism tends to be associated with moderately intelligent people.  I think this ties into the arrogance of the moderately intelligent, wherein they think things are more certain than they are.  In essence, there is a tendency among pragmatists to have a pretense of knowledge.