The Fallacy, continued

The fallacy Scott identifies in the post immediately below needs a pithy, clever name or acronym (I’m bad at this sort of thing–suggestions?), and the community of liberals needs to become better at quickly identifying it and hanging it around the necks of prominent perpetrators. We’ve identified a few other prominent versions of this argument–Beinart on Iraq, Sullivan on abortion (MY also catches her in somewishful thinking about Mormons), David Velleman’s bizarre arguments about Roe at L2R–I’m too lazy to search our archives for links), and of course we’re not alone in doing this work around the blogs. If you’re a good writer, as many of the guilty parties (including Lind) are, it’s not too hard to make your argument sound superficially compelling. But as Scott ably demonstrates, they generally collapse under the slightest scrutiny. A few suggested rules for those who think they might be in danger of committing this fallacy are in order.

When good politics and good policy dovetail, it’s a wonderful thing. Feel free to celebrate it. For liberals in a country that elects reactionary weirdos at an increasingly alarming rate, these two things coincide more often than one might expect. Opposing the phasing out of social security. Most existing environmental protection. Not readjusting the tax code to favor the extremely rich and explode the deficit. This is a very partial list of our good politics/policy positions; there are many more. We don’t need to descend into our own fantasy worlds to find such combinations.

We owe it to ourselves to keep our policy and politics sensibly discrete for analytical purposes. Not because they’re not related–they are, of course–but because sorting out what’s wise and appropriate in each case is necessary before we can come to terms with what to do about the existing gap between them. If you sincerely hold a position that most liberals and Democrats disagree with, by all means, try and convince us. It would be illiberal (in the Millian sense, at least) to keep your arguments to yourself. I promise to listen carefully to your arguments, and I’ve been known to change my mind. I’m not alone here. Furthermore, if you think our current political message and strategy is harming our electoral chances, please let us know about that as well! We need to work on this stuff, obviously, and no one has all the answers. But if you’re politics and your policy arguments coincide in suspiciously convenient ways, you should be required to take a couple of extra steps.

First, as I’ve already suggested, you need to make each argument independent of the other. This is for your benefit as well as ours–if your policy argument is good, you don’t want to obscure that fact with a bunch of weak, speculative hokum about the political necessity of such a position. It has a better chance of becoming good politics if you can convince a number of people it’s good policy first.

Second, stop and reflect. Consider the possibility that if you know a number of people who are frustrated with the Democrats because of X, and you agree, that doesn’t make it a national trend. People who agree on things often associate with one another. If, in my formative years, I were to have attemoted to generalize from people I met about what hurts the Democrats electorally, I might assume that it was their positions on environmental protection, as the parents of many of my friends tended to be social and economic moderate/liberals who wouldn’t vote for Democrats because they were in bed with those damn environmentalists. Now, a little simple research easily demonstrates that such people are idiosyncratic, and my acquaintence of a high proportion of them has to do with a the rather specific economic history of the small town I’m from. This sort of thing is easy for smart people to figure out, but if they’re policy preference is in alignment with what they observe socially, it’s all too tempting to not bother.

This leads to the third step. The fact that there exists some portion of persuadable people doesn’t prove your point. I’m sure there are people who’ll embrace the first mainstream political party who admits the truth about what the government has been doing with all those UFOs, but that doesn’t make such a strategy good politics. A common pathology of the fallacy in question is to talk about these people, and ignore the various costs associated with such a strategy. Naderite arguments about shifting the Democrats to the left are famously and wildly myopic on this front, but the left is far from alone in our coalition when it comes to such matters. If you’ve identified some number of potential persuadables with your new strategy, bully for you, but you’re not even halfway done.

Update: Kevin Drum passes along some Tim Roemer nonsense and I’m forced to add another rule for our aspiring contrarians. Here’s the increasingly annoying Roemer, in his own words:

Roemer said Democrats should learn from the Republican Party, which has allowed former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to play prominent roles. Both of them support abortion rights.

“Republicans have a big tent; why can’t we?” he asked.

Here’s step four: make sure your argument doesn’t rely on some odious, risible stereotype of the Democratic party or liberals in general. If it does, back to the drawing board.