Creating a Progressive Infrastructure

Here is an interesting article from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It's about the efforts of some Democratic donors to create a liberal infrastructure, parallel in some ways to the network of conservative institutions and organizations that cater to the GOP. I think this is wonderful news, and not just because I am a Democrat: I think it's unhealthy for only one party to have a network of organizations working to promulgate its ideas, since those ideas will tend not to be challenged as much as they should be. Moreover, to speak to an area I know something about, there are a lot of really interesting political philosophers on the left, and they have at present no organized way to run their ideas past, say, legislators and opinion-makers. Their colleagues on the right, by contrast, can get involved in any number of conservative organizations, and this can lead, if they're good and articulate and interesting, to their ideas getting much broader exposure. (Sort of a system of farm teams.) Providing liberals with something similar would, I think, make our public discourse much richer. Likewise, providing progressive lawmakers and others with a coherent set of ideas, or better yet, several coherent sets of ideas to choose among, would be great.

However,

there are a few things about these organizations that worry me. First, whatever one might think about the pros and cons of having places like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, it is not clear to me that they are in general good for the scholars they hire, as scholars. Academics can be seduced, and there aren't many things as seductive as being given access to an entire world which will provide you with money, power, prestige, and popularity but only so long as you espouse a particular set of views. I don't mean to suggest that this leads to conscious dishonesty, but rather that it can undermine one's intellectual integrity without one's even being aware of it, since there is every imaginable inducement to avoid the thought: but what if this set of ideas is wrong? In some fields, the scholarship coming out of conservative think tanks has a clubby, 'in-group' feel to it which is much more striking than its analogs outside the conservative think tanks. I would hate to see the same thing happen on the left, though it might just be the price one pays for organization.

Second, I really hate the fact that experts in all sorts of fields have become overtly politicized. Obviously, it will always be true that (for instance) some economists are more liberal and others are more conservative. What bothers me is the fact that there are economists whose political allegiances are bought and paid for, and who have basically decided to become agents of a particular party, and that this fact is not clearly noted when they pronounce on various issues. To state the obvious, we live in a world in which we cannot all be experts in all the fields we really need to know about. We therefore need there to be experts in those fields whom we can trust to tell us the truth as they see it. When a scholar becomes, essentially, a paid political operative, s/he ceases to be trustworthy in this way, and instead of getting the informed commentary we need, we get a liberal and a conservative economist on CNN spinning the latest economic news in completely incompatible ways. This might give one side or the other a momentary victory on a given occasion, but in the long run I think it destroys the public's ability to trust experts in general, which in turn harms their ability to judge issues they are not experts on. And this is, I think, damaging to democracy.

I would hope, therefore, that if we are going to (finally!) make some sort of organized effort to develop a coherent progressive philosophy, we'd try to keep the operatives and the scholars distinct, and urge our colleagues on the right to do likewise. (I don't mean that we should keep scholars from becoming operatives; only that we should be clear about when some scholar is a paid agent of the vast left-wing conspiracy, and when s/he is not.)

It goes without saying that we should never emulate those on the right who use underhanded means to advance their goals, or finance any analog of the attempt to bring Clinton down. If we can't win without a leftist Richard Mellon Scaife, we don't deserve to win anyways.

Comments

[hilzoy]

Cool! My first-ever attempt to create a link without a template actually worked!

[hilzoy]

But I screwed up the title.....
I knew it would be something.

[Thorley Winston]

Hilzoy wrote:

Academics can be seduced, and there aren't many things as seductive as being given access to an entire world which will provide you with money, power, prestige, and popularity but only so long as you espouse a particular set of views.

Such as a university for example.

What bothers me is the fact that there are economists whose political allegiances are bought and paid for, and who have basically decided to become agents of a particular party, and that this fact is not clearly noted when they pronounce on various issues.

Really now, evidence please.

[carsick]

I only clicked on because I thought it odd you would create an untitled open thread so soon into your tenure.
I'll actually read it in the morning though because it's way past my bedtime.

[hilzoy]

Thorley: universities do not make your job contingent on your holding any particular set of views. That's the whole point of the tenure system: get tenure and you can say anting you want and not be fired for it. Nor, with a few exceptions (most recently in some lit departments, but that's on the wane) do they make prestige or popularity depend on it either. And they do not have access to the kind of power that the political think tanks can provide.

[Josh]

Such as a university for example.

Hahahahahaha... Yeah, I know *tons* of academics who are making bank for their work. And the power! You wouldn't believe the power they wield!

[von]

You wouldn't believe the power they wield!

As I like to remind my father (an economics professor): The battles are so vicious because the stakes are so small.

Good post, Hilzoy.

[Josh]

As I like to remind my father (an economics professor): The battles are so vicious because the stakes are so small.

I knew that was going to make an appearance in this thread sooner or later...

[von]

It's a cliche for a reason, ya know.

[Phil]

Thorley: universities do not make your job contingent on your holding any particular set of views.

Ooooh . . . to quote Rev. Lovejoy, "Short answer, 'Yes with an if,' long answer, 'no with a but.'" I have no direct experience here -- although I have heard the experience of friends who work in education -- but Erin O'Connor's blog has countless stories of exactly that: Universities making a set of beliefs a contingency for even getting the job, and even more a contingency for getting on the tenure track.

(Obviously this tends to apply more to, say, the humanities or the social sciences than it does physics.)

[Andrew Reeves]

Well, there are plenty of economists who look at the evidence with a fair degree of neutrality. Most of them come to conclusions that are somewhere along the lines of late 1990's Clinton--modest regulation, government fiscal responsibility, and free trade make a healthy economy.

And I would trust Cato or Heritage more if they ever funded a study and came to a conclusion that was *not* part of their pre-held set of beliefs.

[hilzoy]

I didn't mean to be picking on economists; just to use them as an example. And I agree that lots of them are fair; in fact, one of the problems I have with the failure to distinguish between those who are employed by an explicitly ideological group and those who are not is that mainstream economists, when deployed against people from e.g. the Cato Institute on TV, strike non-economists as the liberal counterparts to the Cato people when they are not.

I should also say that I am opposed to the confusion between scholars who have decided to become operatives and scholars who have not regardless of which side they become operatives on. The examples I use are from the right because the right has a much more developed ideological infrastructure, not because I don't think it's just as bad when it comes from the left.

[Tom]

"I didn't mean to be picking on economists; just to use them as an example."

I'd also note that there has been a remarkable convergence of opinion in economics in the past twenty years. cf. http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002174.html

[Anarch]

Universities making a set of beliefs a contingency for even getting the job, and even more a contingency for getting on the tenure track.

Speaking only from my own experiences here -- well, mine and my dad's -- ideological litmus tests are vanishingly rare compared to the usual political ass-kissery required to maneuver through any crowded bureacratic situation (especially one in which, yes, the stakes are so small). The usual caveat is, of course, that this is highly, highly dependent on the particular discipline and locale in which one is pursuing a career.

[hilzoy]

Yo anarch -- what discipline are you in?

Phil -- I checked the website, but couldn't find any (admittedly, I only went back through May.) One or two idiotically applied speech codes, which is equally offensive, but a different matter. In any case, the difference is: most universities, as a matter of policy, do not make ideology the basis for hiring and promotion, but as in any human endeavor, they sometimes screw up. ("Most" universities because I don't know what the situation is at, say, Bob Jones.) Ideologically based think tanks do, and no doubt they screw up occasionally as well and let some centrist stay on the payroll.

[Anarch]

Yo anarch -- what discipline are you in?

My dad's just retired from around 30 years as a Professor of History (specializing in South-East Asia in general, the Philippines in particular) and, in the way of true academics, is now more productive than ever. I'm a grad student in mathematics -- should be ABD in a few weeks -- and I've been querying a lot of my friends who've gone traipsing out into the job market. I also hang out with grad students from a wide variety of disciplines (history, literature, philosophy, psychology &c), so my unofficial sampling pool is somewhat broader than my otherwise-cloistered discipline might imply.

[I thought I might as well save time and answer the larger question too :)]