This diary began as a response to a DailyKos piece that can be read in context here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
[The empircial method] is a powerful concept and one that can be used to easily and effectively advocate for progressive policies. We tried X - it was an experiment. Here's how it worked. We cut taxes a lot in the last ten years - we have a crappy economy; maybe cutting taxes doesn't help the economy. We tried invading Iraq and here's how it worked; maybe making war was a bad idea. We tried reducing the regulatory structure on banks and finance and here's how it worked; maybe banks and financial institutions need a regulatory regime to function. We tried - we experimented - with conservative social and economic policy and the results have been growing economic and social disparity and a increasingly bad economy. In the 1990s, we raised taxes, we balanced our budget and our economy boomed. Maybe tax rates aren't the ironclad predictor of economic performance that conservatives say.
Indeed. In engineering it's called iterative development, in more general use it is similar to the empirical method or pragmatism, and in colloquial speech it can be termed "live and learn". We have a body of experience- data if you will- and we retrospectively analyse that body to derive guiding principles to refine our processes going forward. A practical commonsense approach that has yielded most, and arguably all, of man's advancements.
It's antithesis is working from a fixed canon of putatively axiomatic ideological preconceptions and trying to bash reality into conforming to those principles. Cue Einstein's iconic definition of insanity. This is the approach of hubristic conceit, of one who is irrationally confident in their own knowledge and perceptions and is commonly seen in working from faith in a fixed ideology or unchallengeable set of given or revealed beliefs. Religion and idolization of personalities trains the mind for this mode of thinking.
Although Westen directed his words at Barack Obama, he could have written them about almost every American politician - Democrats who fearfully offered only the blandest of "reforms" to the system, Republicans who wanted to double down on the policies that cause the crash in the first place. Westen reminds us of the importance of story - great leaders tell stories we can understand, which then become the broad framework through which we understand our world. One of FDR's greatest gifts was his uncanny ability to sense the mood of the nation, articulate it, and connect it to specific policies. He wasn't always successful, but every day Americans knew he was on their side, was fighting for them so his missteps and miscalculations were forgiven. He forged a powerful emotional bond with the American people and it served him throughout his long years as President. Bill Clinton actually did the same - which is why he was so popular when he left office, why he survived the impeachment nonsense, why Republicans lost so many battles against him. The deeper part of Westen's analysis is simply that Barack Obama did not forge that bond with the American people - there is no sense that he's fighting on the side of the common man and woman, no sense that's he will swallow difficult compromises in an effort to improve the lot in life of Americans everywhere.
The example of Obama, as illuminated by Westen's tone perfect piece on his inability to effectively communicate a coherent message to the electorate, is I think one that illustrates the other way to fail to effectively formulate a set of solutions to a problem. In Obama's case there are few actual principles in evidence, only a purely reactive tactical approach comprised of charting a course always slightly to the center of the opposition to maximize the demographic area under the ideological Bell curve to his Left. This is the logic of an autopilot algorithm designed to avoid collisions with oncoming obstacles by missing the ones on one side by as small a margin as possible but has no potential to learn experientially or to steer a course with any self-awareness of where it leads relative to any fixed coordinates based on fixed principles. It's also self evidently an easy tactic to game as being purely reactive it follows one's opponents wherever they choose to lead. This is a tactically sound approach assuming one simply wants to maximize the political/demographic space to one side but obviously has no strategic utility as it allows one's opponents to lead you in whatever direction they want.
And of course as a result- and people aren't stupid, they see this- it destroys one's ability to construct any narrative moored in any semblance of principles. There can be no protagonist anyone can relate to when the antagonists are given free rein to steer the plot and the potential protagonist and his narrative perspective have no enunciable goals, no destination to work towards. The narrative potential is further undermined when the protagonist begins the tale with an articulate rhetorical definition of principles and once the action begins immediately starts compromising those. This is a story no one wants to read, a story with no hero.
The Tea Party has erroneous principles- in fact poisonously and dangerously wrong ones- but it can advance a narrative that resonates because it has an ideological basis. The mainstream Democrats have few or perhaps even no discernible principles, no fixed points from which to plot a course. In an effort to keep all tactical options open they have allowed a small demographic minority to game them towards their ideological territory. The saddest part of it all is by cynically tuning their message- whatever it is on any given day- to the next ephemeral election cycle they have abandoned not only any abstract principle but the collective wisdom of their past. Wisdom that was hard-won and tested and proven in the real world.
We Democrats, cynically chasing the next short-term election result uninformed by principle, have unlearned almost every lesson learned through the painful experience of the past 100 years and in the process have failed to a degree I would have thought impossible as recently as three years ago.