Some interesting reads this morning about one of the more bizarre and persistent phenomena that continues to pose a real public policy threat to the country: the "Republican Bubble" and how it continues to distort the general public debate. The last two articles are disturbing because political scientists are increasingly finding that, rather than being self-defeating, the Republican Bubble, and related obstructionism and "incompetence," appear to be diabolically effective at increasing support for Republican policies.
Steve Benen, for example, writes about how the Republican Bubble simply ignores that the U.S. public sides overwhelmingly with President Obama on the Iran nuclear negotiations - leading the press to describe as "controversial" what is actually a policy with rare bipartisan approval:
After months of fierce criticisms from the right – along with sabotage stunts and an unprecedented partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to derail American foreign policy – this poll found that only a third of the public opposes the preliminary agreement. And despite repeated calls from far-right hawks for a military confrontation with Iran, the same survey found that 77% of Americans prefer “a negotiated settlement to the nuclear crisis rather than military intervention.”
In these divisive times, 77% of the country doesn’t agree on much, especially on contentious issues involving national security, but that’s the percentage of Americans who now disagree with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Bill Kristol, John Bolton, and their cohorts. . . .
At the same time, as we discussed several weeks ago, much of the political world doesn’t seem to understand that President Obama is actually winning the p.r. fight. Josh Kraushaar, a National Journal conservative, recently argued that Obama is dangerously “ignoring public opinion,” willing to “bypass public resistance” to P5+1 diplomacy. Around the same time, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) expressed dismay that the White House is “circumventing the will of the American people,” while former Gov. Jeb Bush (R) added that “public opinion” is not on Obama’s side.
All of this is backwards. To date, there are exactly zero independent public-opinion surveys showing U.S. opposition to the diplomatic talks. Americans may be skeptical about the eventual outcome, but support for the effort is overwhelmingly on the White House’s side.
Paul Krugman's column
- Zombies of 2016 - runs through some of these instances of Republican fantasy-thinking, discussing, for example, health insurance:
Before the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect, conservatives made a series of dire predictions about what would happen when it did. It would actually reduce the number of Americans with health insurance; it would lead to “rate shock,” as premiums soared; it would cost the government far more than projected, and blow up the deficit; it would be a huge job-destroyer.
In reality, the act has produced a dramatic drop in the number of uninsured adults; premiums have grown much more slowly than in the years before reform; the law’s cost is coming in well below projections; and 2014, the first year of full implementation, also had the best job growth since 1999.
So how has this changed the discourse? On the right, not at all. As far as I can tell, every prominent Republican talks about Obamacare as if all the predicted disasters have, in fact, come to pass.
But I thought it was
Paul Krugman's subsequent blog post that really hit on the larger issue. Republicans' insistence on wishful, ideological thinking is not just distorting public debate on specific political issues, but warping discussion of entire academic fields such as economics (or, obviously, climate science):
Simon Wren-Lewis tries to put his finger on something I’ve also been trying to get at — the sharp difference between what influential people think they know about economics and what people who actually study the economy think they know. My take may be slightly different at the margin, but I do believe that it’s important.
On one side you have the Very Serious People — politicians, media figures, big business types who like to weigh in on public affairs. On the other side you have mainstream economists. So it’s VSPs versus MSEs.
When talking about “received wisdom” Simon focuses on the views of policy departments at central banks; I’d like to cast this net wider, which means that we have to decide what “mainstream” means. I don’t think I want to base this on journal publications; what I mean, more vaguely, is economists who routinely weigh in on policy issues (so that they have some reality sense) but are not essentially hired advocates for one position or another. Luckily, we now have regular surveys of economists who fit that description, by the Booth School in the US and the Centre for Macroeconomics in the UK.
Now, many people imagine that the views of VSPs must be based on, or at least consistent with, what MSEs are saying. Many people I talk to believe this, for better or for worse; they think that obsession with debt and deficits must be right because “everyone” shares it, or alternatively that the economics profession is responsible for that destructive obsession.
So it’s important, I think, to understand that this isn’t at all right. On questions of stimulus and austerity, in particular, what the VSPs think they know is quite at odds with mainstream economics. In the US, all the important people know that the Obama stimulus failed, while almost all mainstream economists believe — based on actual evidence — that it succeeded. In the UK, all the important people know that austerity boosted the economy, while only a small minority of mainstream economists agrees.
Needless to say, mainstream economists could be wrong. They certainly have been in the past — very few, for example, took seriously the possibility of a financial panic in the modern world. But on the whole the MSEs have been bastions of good sense these past seven years or so as compared with the political world, and understandably so: while heterodox economic ideas sometimes do turn out right, finance ministers are the last group of people you want picking and choosing which new working paper should be the basis of policy.
So by all means let’s keep an open mind about new ideas. But we should bear in mind that the world would be in much better shape right now if economic orthodoxy had in fact been followed. In practice, all the heterodoxy with any real-world influence has been used by politicians to justify policies that have deeped the slump and increased suffering.
The dire challenge to public debate posed by the Republican Bubble, and its cynicism, is usefully explored in two longer pieces.
Thomas Edsall at the NYT writes about how Republicans' constant drumbeat that the "government is not working" appears to result in the counterintuitive effect that public discussion of income inequality actually increases support for the Republicans' policies that exacerbate such inequality:
Even worse for Democrats, the Saez paper found that “information about inequality also makes respondents trust government less,” decreasing “by nearly twenty percent the share of respondents who ‘trust government’ most of the time:”
Hence, emphasizing the severity of a social or economic problem appears to undercut respondents’ willingness to trust the government to fix it — the existence of the problem could act as evidence of the government’s limited capacity to improve outcomes.
Likewise, the American Prospect has a longer piece titled
"No Cost for Extremism," detailing the challenge for Democrats to boldly and effectively confront this Republican bubble machine and committed attacks government efficacy:
Equally important, those who recognize the dangerous implications of extremism are going to have to make a concerted case for effective governance. Currently, Democrats are caught in a spiral of silence. No one defends government and government looks increasingly indefensible. Public life and government are seen as hopelessly gridlocked and corrupt, so they become more hopelessly gridlocked and corrupt. Even politicians who know that government has a vital role to play in making our society stronger have little incentive to make what is now an unpopular and unfamiliar case. Consider the almost complete silence of Democrats about the Affordable Care Act—a law that despite its limitations has unquestionably delivered considerable benefits to the majority of Americans. A 2014 study found that spending on anti—Obamacare ads since 2010 outpaced money spent for ads defending the law 15 to 1. No wonder public opinion remains doubtful even as actual results of the law look more positive.
As difficult as it surely will be, there is no substitute for restoring some measure of public and elite respect for government’s enormous role in making society richer, healthier, fairer, better educated, and safer. To do that requires encouraging public officials to refine and express that case, and rewarding them when they do so. And it requires designing policies not to hide the role of government, but to make it both visible and popular. A tax cut that almost nobody sees, and which those who do see fail to recognize as public largesse, will make some Americans richer. It will not make them more trusting of government.