: In Monday’s New York Times, Paul Krugman described a remarkable problem: Within our culture, there is no sanction for being wrong. Or at least, there is no sanction for being wrong if you’re one of our ruling elites.
“The Unwisdom of Elites,” said Krugman’s headline. It was a play on a famous phrase: The wisdom of crowds/of the crowd.
As he started, Krugman described the way certain powerful elites are now blaming the clueless rabble for our recent economic disasters. This whole thing is the public’s fault, these reigning elites have claimed:
KRUGMAN (5/9/11): The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?Well, what I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite—self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing—is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.
“This blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong,” Krugman writes. In the rest of his column, he describes the way those very elites created the mess we’re in. “With few exceptions,” he writes, we got into our current mess because of “policies championed by small groups of influential people—in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us.”
Influential elites created this mess. But so what? They’re still in charge, and they’re blaming everyone else! This is precisely the way our political culture has worked in the past decade or two. At the end of his column, Krugman described the price we pay for this ongoing cultural gong-show:
KRUGMAN: Does any of this matter? Why should we be concerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad policies onto the general public?One answer is simple accountability. People who advocated budget-busting policies during the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass themselves off as deficit hawks; people who praised Ireland as a role model shouldn’t be giving lectures on responsible government.But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.
The same elites who created this mess are “making up stories” to blame other people. If we fail to sanction these people, “they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.”
That is very true. That said, this same pattern obtains among our current liberal elites. But first:
How inane are the regal elites to whom Krugman refers in this column? Krugman is talking about “self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing”—the players who sit at the very top of our political culture, creating the policies, and frameworks of understanding, which guide so much of our conduct.
How low are standards for these hapless players? Consider ex-senator Alan Simpson, who has managed to put his vast (apparent) cluelessness on display once again.
In an interview with the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, Simpson recited a long string of howlers, groaners and hapless non sequiturs about the Social Security program. (To read Grim’s sterling report, click here.) Why is this ignorance a problem? Simpson was co-chairman of Obama’s debt commission; as such, he remains a major player in our ongoing budget debates.
Among current elites, Simpson ranks as a “wise man.” Despite his (apparent) cosmic cluelessness, he is one of the people who has been assigned to lead us out of the fiscal woods.
Is Simpson as clueless as he seems? It’s never easy to tell. In her post about Simpson’s interview, Digby suggest that he really is this dumb about the basic issues he bungled. “Normally I would suggest that he was just a liar,” Digby writes, “but from this account it's pretty clear to me that he really doesn't understand.”
Is Alan Simpson really this dumb? We understand why Digby judged that he (probably) is. Speaking with Grim, Simpson made a string of statements which were just amazingly stupid. Professional communicators don’t have to do this. If they actually understand their subject, they can slide away from unwanted questions without making themselves look like ginormous fools in the process.
Professional communicators do this all the time—but Simpson didn’t take that approach. It may be that he really is this clueless—clueless to the bone.
That said, there will be no penalty for Simpson, certainly not within the elite mainstream press. Indeed, Simpson has put his massive (apparent) ignorance on display on other occasions. For one example, let’s recall his stunning interview with Alex Lawson in June of last year.
Good God. To read the transcript of Simpson’s interview with Lawson, just click this. For our previous account of what Simpson said, see the DAILY HOWLER, 9/9/10.
That interview was truly stunning. In a rational world, it would it have got Simpson fired. In that session from June of last year, the solon uncorked a long string of familiar howlers about the Social Security system. As we noted last year, he ticked off all the golden oldies—the claim that Social Security will “go broke” in 2037; the claim that no one is talking about “cuts” to the program; the claim that the system’s trust fund is just “a bunch of IOUs.” There was more: “When I was your age, there were sixteen people paying into the system and one taking out, and today there are three people paying into the system and one taking out,” Simpson said, in a tribute to the favorite (misleading) talking-point of the late elite kingpin, Tim Russert. Needless to say, he quickly recited the famous old howler about the way the system’s developers had set the retirement age at 65 because “they thought you would die at 57… Now the life expectancy is 78, whatever it is, and so we have to adjust that and make it work for the future people like you in the United States.”
Simpson’s session with Lawson was truly astounding. It was those stupid statements about retirement age and life expectancy to which he returned this week.
Go ahead! Read that HOWLER from last September. Better read, read the transcript of Simpson’s interview with Lawson. If we take Simpson’s statements at face value, that interview showed that Simpson knows almost nothing about the Social Security system. But people! So what? Who cared?
Did anyone in the mainstream press corps react to Simpson’s gong-show last year? If they did, they did so quietly. Indeed, we’ve seen many liberals slam Simpson for this week’s ridiculous session with Grim. But we have seen no one recall last year’s disaster, an interview which was widely ignored by various mainstream elites.
Simple story: There is no expectation of competence for our major elites. There is no sanction—none at all—for complete, astonishing ignorance. (Beyond that, there is no expectation of even modestlyhonest behavior.) Elites like Simpson are allowed to blunder ahead, even after they’ve made it clear that they (apparently) have no idea what they’re actually doing.
This is a form of professional courtesy. This norm has obtained among our elites for a very long time now. Krugman described this banana republic-style culture quite accurately. The K-man was right on the mark.
We will only add one point: This gong-show culture plainly obtains within the “liberal” world too.
Krugman’s description is right on target. Among “members of the policy elite”—among our “self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing”—there is absolutely no sanction for being disastrously wrong. Clueless elites are allowed to retain high position no matter how often they bungle and fail. As Krugman notes, they even get to “make up stories” about their bungles—bogus tales which reinvent the disasters they themselves made.
Through this highly permissive system, these elites are allowed to stay in power. They get to create more disasters.
Sadly, that is precisely the way we “liberals” now run our own burgeoning world! In large part, we’re in the disastrous shape we’re in because of the gruesome past failures of our own “liberal/progressive” elites. One major example among many: They failed us completely in the Clinton/Gore years, never more so than in the twenty months of Campaign 2000. Many of our current “liberal leaders” worked quite actively to take out Candidate Gore. (Huffington, Matthews, Rich, O’Donnell and a string of others.) Most of our other “liberal leaders” agreed to look away. Joan Walsh would be our current ranking example, although there any many others. By the way: Did we spot Joan chuckling with Chris on Hardball just last night?
Today, these tools remain in power; they continue to sit at the top of our burgeoning “liberal” culture. No one has ever asked them why they behaved as they did in the past. If we think they behaved in good faith, this means their judgment is simply awful. In many cases, they didn’t behave in good faith, ofcourse. And of course, they quickly started “making up stories” about what happened to Clinton, then Gore.
These are inept, dishonest players. Their judgment is bad; their morals are worse. But so what? We liberals continue to follow these leaders! In the same pattern Krugman described, they survive, to mislead us again.
Might we adapt Krugman’s language here? “We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our [liberal] elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.”
That will never happen, of course; as it turns out, we liberals are basically ditto-heads too. But that would be very sound advice. It’s advice that won’t be taken.
Three cheers for Ryan Grim: By the way, three cheers for Ryan Grim, who conducted the recent session with Simpson. Grim did something that’s very unusual: He heard Simpson make a deeply stupid statement, then called him up to ask him about it. A remarkable interview ensued—an interview which will have no consequence in the real world.
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