Gregg Easterbrook and the problem with neoliberalism.

Andrew Sullivan, who hasn't actually seen An Inconvenient Truth says that Gregg Easterbrook has "the best" review of it.

Since I haven't seen the movie either -- and haven't been blessed with the sort of ESP that Jacob Weisberg uses to decipher the political calculation behind Hillary Clinton's iPod lineup -- I don't actually know if Easterbrook's tangential complaint that it too much like a campaign commercial is accurate or not. But I do think Easterbrook's column, taken as a whole, displays a lot of the problems inherent to neoliberal punditry.

Central to the neoliberal worldview is the belief in human rationality, and the assumption that everyone, at some level, and including your political enemies, is rational and therefore deserves a hearing. There's also huge emphasis on the individual and the world, the individual's ability to reason, to accept responsibility, to specifically choose to be part of the community while standing distinct from the mob (or, as the case may be, the interest group.) The belief that we can work through our problems using the power of our secular technology, by harnessing progress, by the whiring of our beautiful minds, is fundamentally hopeful, profoundly elegant even, and maybe even broadly accurate. But it requires first and foremost the banishment of demagoguery, which is incompatable with the rationality of the cutting-edge modern man we want to encourage.

And then that beautiful worldview runs smack into politics, which, in the US, comprises largely the desires, demands, and obsessions of two broad coalitions of loosely alligned interest groups who compete against each other every two years and whose members must be kept in a party's fold over the course of interminable election cycles, then turned out regularly at the polls. To lose a part of the coalition is basically to lose an election for the whole coalition. Plus, there's the famous "swing contingent" of people who actually believe things like that presidents directly influence the price of gas or the number of days we can expect before the apocolypse in whatever form you believe it's going to take. It's not just that voters aren't rational, it's that when they are rational, it's usually in terms of promoting a fairly narrow set of policy goals that yield direct payoffs to their closest interest group. Those goals vary enormously and in meeting them all, politicians sometimes are thematically ineloquent or a bit intellectually dishonest.

Neoliberals have a lot of trouble dealing with this discrepency between Rational Man and the Political Animal. Take Joe Klein's new book, which is -- from my reading -- mainly a lament about how most people don't share his exact views on everything. Or, more accurately, it's a lament that people problably do share his views... they must share them, because Klein so damn rational, so modern, so centrist, so jolly, yet so demanding of excellence in our leaders. But fucking Democrats and fucking Bob Shrum (who fucking refused to be interviewed!) just don't seem to get it. That's partly because the same discrepency invariably turns neoliberal politicians (like, say, Al Gore) who would move us beyond the old liberalism of self-interested interest-groups into regular politicians who give those groups exactly what they want in order to keep them in line and turn them out on election day.

This is the ultimate fall from grace, and it only ups the bitterness of the neoliberal pundit. Klein's optimism is perpetually thwarted by the people he wishes he could idolize. That thwarting, repeated enough times, can turn Neoliberal Man into a cynical crypto-conservative like Mickey Kaus, or into a self-impressed perpetual yearner like Klein. It creates world-weariness by the bucketload. But it also provides an easy intellectual out: the disgrace of modern politics isn't the failure of Rational Man; it's the failure of the irrational, pandering politician to reach Rational Man! In this way, politicians haven't changed much since Washington Monthly put out its first issue*. But neoliberal pundits' political analysis has become increasingly detached from reality.

Easterbrook is an especially sad example. Unlike a lot of people I admire in the blogosphere, I often enjoy Easterbrook's policy work (though that may because I don't know enough about his subjects -- environmentalism, livability, technology and space issues -- to challenge.) But it doesn't bother me like it does Atrios that Easterbrook is sympathetic to ID, or at least it doesn't make him irrelevent on the other subjects he writes about. It doesn't bother me that only now, after years of following the science, he's decided to accept the liberal case on climate change. Informed skepticism is mainly a good thing, and Easterbrook's optimism about finding policy solutions to climate change -- based on earlier environmental policy successes -- is comforting.

From my perspective, the problem with Easterbrook is that he doesn't, as far as I can tell, understand a goddamn thing about politics. On the subject, he's a pure pollyanna and he writes like a churl. His view on campaigning is invariably that liberal politicians are not optimistic enough, and don't appeal to our sense of pride in all the progress we've made, that they instead try (and fail, fail!) to make us angry and irrational. He searches still for that enlightened perfectability in his own side, and despairs still of finding only demagoguery and various forms of crassness.

And partisanship. If man is rational, the other side can't be all wrong. And yet certain unenlightened people would still, in our modern world with its falling rates of violence, seem to think it is! In An Inconvenient Truth, for instance, Gore insinuates all sorts of things about anti-science rightwingers, but doesn't attack Hollywood liberals for their conspicuous consumption! He doesn't propose the sort of concrete but demanding solutions that he tragically fails to recognise in an electorate hungry to make sacrifices, so long as they understand that their would-be leaders are as enlightened and rational as they are. (The last time Gore proposed a carbon tax against the wails of Democratic strategists his party went on to lose the Congress for the first time in 50 years.)

But Gore's biggest "moral flaw" is simply that he doesn't acknowledge the good in technology, how far it's brought us, how wondeful modern life is! He completely underplays the legitimate view -- voiced recently by lots of conservatives -- that we should be thankful for the fruits of carbon-based industrialism, not denigrate them. This might seem like a strange criticism to make of an Atari Democrat. And various people have pointed out the irony (and fatuity) of Easterbrook's coming around on climate change on the same day he trashes the latest effort of a fellow neolib who has been arguing the case for years. But that misses the essential neoliberal dilemma. The science might be right, but the politics is always wrong. And so long as the politics is wrong, the best -- a nebulous concept for sure -- remains unattainable.

Of course, after so many years of disappointment, Easterbrook hardly expects any better. He looks on the political world in sorrow rather than anger. Rational man finds no outlets here for joy. Political animal always raises its angry, demagogic, partisan head. The Dems will never defeat their interest groups. They're always focused on getting themselves elected -- Easterbrook just wishes Guggenheim and Gore would be a little more honest about it. In the process, neoliberal pundits will forever be disappointed. Faced with this great tragedy, the messy issues about how voters actually think about dealing with global warming, or why certain conservative groups want them to think a different way from how Gore and his allies do, or, you know, who actually wins elections -- are relatively minor details.


* The Washington Monthly itself, in my opinion, suffers from some of these problems in some of its articles. But it's still a really fine magazine. And many individual neoliberal writers are still really excellent.


Update: Media Matters actually has a pretty devastating attack on Easterbrook's hisotry of writing about global warming.