A Fallacy That Should Have Been Caught
by tristero
[UPDATE: Through a bizarre comedy of errors, I inadvertently posted a rough draft before this post was done. That said, I stand by the post, even if I expressed myself less effectively than I hoped. At the end of the post, there's another update which hopefully, will clarify things.]
If my much-loved philosophy professor Sid Morgenbesser had read this awful post by Matt Yglesias, he would have flunked him - and Professor Morgenbesser gave everyone A's on principle::Tyler Cowen’s attempted characterization of American progressive politics involves at several points basically the claim that American progressives want to make the United States more “like Europe.” There’s clearly an extent to which that’s true...
There's a technical phrase in the philosophy business for the kind of logical fallacy at play here: total fucking nonsense. I'll illustrate by analogy:
If an American composer, say his name is, oh I don't know, Steve Reich, learns that the Balinese have a fascinating music called "gamelan" and the concepts of gamelan are helpful in working out problems in his own music, that doesn't mean there's clearly an extent to which it is true Reich wants to write gamelan. And indeed, he never has. His music entirely transforms some very simple concepts and his music sounds absolutely nothing like gamelan. That's because he's one smart fellow (and by the way, he was a philosophy major).
Progressive politics is the politics of liberals, who through long tradition are active seekers of knowledge and information, both old and new. In addition to generating new ideas, progressive politics seeks out good ideas from anywhere and everywhere to transform and adapt to 21st Century American problems. Of course, liberals find much to admire about European cultures and societies: there is much greatness there. That in no way means we want America to be "like Europe." Of course, liberals find much to admire in Athenian democracy. That in no way means we want America to be "like ancient Greece."
I don't know Tyler Cowen's thought beyond this post and based on it, I don't feel impelled to learn more. He sounds like a typical right wing operative of the pseudo-intellectual sort. He isn't interested in serious argument but in setting up utterly ludicrous strawmen so he can pretend to trash liberalism and progressive politics without truly engaging them. If he was serious, he would never engage in utterly dildo assertions about progressivism such as:There exists a better way and that is shown by the very successful polities of northwestern Europe and near-Europe. We know that way can work, even if it is sometimes hard to implement.
You can't argue with this. You can only laugh at it. In fact, arguing with it is dangerous, because you elevate this nonsense to the status of serious discourse. These are precisely the mistakes made by some liberals, including Matt, during the runup to Bush/Iraq - taking truly stupid ideas seriously and accepting fallacious arguments - much to Matt's later regret.
It really is time to ignore ideas like Tyler Cowen's. And Matt, I truly wish you were in Sid's class. I'm no philosopher, but he taught me how to recognize unadulterated bullshit when I read it.
[Briefly, I wanted to make two basic points in this post:
1. Cowen's notion that liberals want America to be more "like Europe," which Matt simply accepts, is illogical nonsense. We don't want America to be "like Europe." We simply want America to be a better country. As Henk says in comments, we'll take good ideas wherever we find them, and transform them into proposals that are specifically American.
2. Cowen's characterization of progressive politics is not fair and balanced, as he claims, but blatantly dishonest. It's a rhetorical setup. For example, if you accept, as Matt does, that progressives basically want America to be more like Europe, then you are almost begging to be refuted by a long list of the many specific failures European states have with their domestic and foreign policies. Furthermore, if you accept Cowen's premise and still declare yourself a progressive, then you are also obligated to make embarassingly lame defenses of America in order to demonstrate that you don't reflexively hate the American Way. In fact, that is exactly what Matt did in his post; he's already playing defense and Cowen hasn't even started to attack!
There are other points i wanted to make, the most important being that liberals and progressives who are interested in serious, thoughtful discussions of different political philosophies, should not, as a rule, accept characterizations of liberal positions by those who are, by their own admission, hostile to the very notion of liberalism. These are not honest intellectual opponents, interested in the serious give and take of ideas, but political operatives. Of course, there are very important critiques of liberalism and progressivism that can be made. However, the ridiculous notion that we want America to be more like Europe is not one of them. Something like that should be a tipoff that the discussion is being rigged. ]