We have met the enemy and he is us.
Pogo (Walt Kelly)
From almost the moment I began to spend time in the blogosphere I noted, and was alarmed by, the prevalence of BDS on the left. Bush Derangement Syndrome was diagnosed by Charles Krauthammer in a 2003 article and became a staple assumption of those on the right. We recognized that once a person succumbed to BDS their ability to remain rational when any discussion touched down near George W. Bush was limited. The most rational discussions were regularly derailed from some fantastic quasi-delusion about George W. Bush. He was alternately an idiot controlled by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney or a devious manipulator whose talons were deeply inserted in all sorts of nefarious deeds. I am now concerned that incipient ODS may be discernible in the Conservative Blogosphere. This is not a happy realization and I risk alienating many people who I consider friends, but it may well be inevitable and I fear it may also be thought to work (at least until proven otherwise.)
Yesterday there were a series of posts on The Corner started by John Derbyshire discussing incipient ODS:
Obamaology — The Extremes [John Derbyshire]
I don't know how it is with colleagues, but I'm getting both extremes of Obamaology in my email bag. That is, I am getting emails telling me that the President is clueless and just winging it, and other emails telling me he's a Machiavellian playing a deep game.
I have received very similar e-mails. Derbyshire's conclusion is apt:
That all brings to mind Roger Kimball's favorite phrase: "the hermeneutics of suspicion." I dunno. I have a deep-rooted conviction that the world is a chaotic place, through which most people stumble and grope their way, and in which most complex 20-stage plans fall in a pothole or run out of batteries around stage 4. Possibly this is only stage 4 of Obama's plan for world mastery … but I think he's winging it.
Yuval Levin, Andy McCarthy, and Jonah Goldberg weighed in, in agreement with Derbyshire's conclusion, and with Jonah Goldberg adding an important additional element:
If I could just add one small point to the discussion. It's worth noting, it seems to me, that the hermeneutics of suspicion (great phrase, that) have a mirror in what we might call the hermeneutics of faith. Two weeks ago — half of Obama's presidency so far — there was a lot of talk of Obama as a "chess master." Bob Herbert: "Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike." Few can hold a candle to Mr. Herbert's facility with clichés. But I think this is a real dynamic. No, I don't mean that Obama is a chess master, but that some of his fans cannot tolerate the conflict between their opinion of the man and his obvious mistakes and short-comings. This is the flipside to political paranoia; the belief that "your guy" can do no wrong. In this sense the politics of hope and the politics of fear are not so different after all.
This is all very familiar to Psychiatrists, since what is being described is the essence of splitting. Those who idealize Obama (positively as with Bob Herbert, or negatively, as with those who imagine him to be some kind of uber-Machiavellian) believe he is acing out a meticulously well orchestrated plan designed to change the country forever into a state controlled by Washington Democrats. Those who devalue Obama believe that he is a bright but barley competent executive who is grasping at straws and leading us to disaster from incompetence.
This morning, David Brooks raised a third possibility which raises the stakes considerably:
Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.
President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.
If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.
Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy. I fear they are going to try to undertake the biggest administrative challenge in American history while refusing to hire the people who can help the most: agency veterans who are registered lobbyists.
I worry that we’re operating far beyond our economic knowledge. Every time the administration releases an initiative, I read 20 different economists with 20 different opinions. I worry that we lack the political structures to regain fiscal control. Deficits are exploding, and the president clearly wants to restrain them. But there’s no evidence that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have the courage or the mutual trust required to share the blame when taxes have to rise and benefits have to be cut.
All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping. And it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.
There is an extremely important point here that need to be emphasized.
The economy is an extraordinarily complex system. In complex systems, during periods of perturbation that exceed the limits of self-correction of the system, interventions often cause disaster by reinforcing oscillations rather than restore health by dampening them. Since the intervention always lags behind the initial insult, the treatment ends up either over-correcting or reinforcing the initial state of failure.
For example, when medical patients enter into the cascade of multiple system failure, there is almost nothing the doctors can do to rescue the patient. Doctors attempt to make specific, targeted interventions knowing that every intervention they make is as likely to have poor consequences (side effects) that will further deterioration, as the intervention is to be restorative. The goal of the Physician is to slow the cascade enough to allow the body to re-equilibrate. When a patient is in cardiac failure, surgery to repair a hernia, even if necessary, would be inadvisable in the extreme. The patient must be stabilized before further invasive and destabilizing treatments can be introduced. Only the most foolish Physicians believe that they understand the complex system known as the human body well enough to address all systems at once. They address the greatest problem first (triage), attempt to stabilize that ,and then move on to addressing the next most problematic system, all the while trying to forestall the cascade.
By all evidence the Obama administration, in thrall to Rahm Emanuel's dictum that one shouldn't allow a crisis to go to waste, is planning on attempting to address multiple systems at once. They are trying to change our approach in international affairs (and are busy convincing our adversaries that we are weak and our friends that we are unreliable) while increasing "fairness", increasing jobs, cutting the defense department budget, raising taxes, etc, etc. Many of the goals of the Obama administration are overtly contradictory (no one has ever shown how raising taxes in a recession can create jobs or speed recovery) and the current cascade of system failures (mortgage industry, finance, auto, soon to be followed by European banks and Nations becoming insolvent, China approaching unrest, etc, etc) suggest that they have not yet gotten ahead of the cascade or slowed it appreciably.
The best Physicians learn the value of humility. When a President emerges from among "the best and the brightest" cocoon of elite academia, and has never operated with real world constraints (ie, the inevitable unintended consequences of all actions) the greatest danger is that they will lack the humility and modesty required to appreciate the danger they face. With a sick patient, a Physician filled with hubris only risks one life; with a sick global economy, a President and administration filled with hubris, with power concentrated in the hands of a very few who consider themselves the smartest men and women in the room, risks all of us.
Obama's errore do not, however, automatically translate into an opportunity for the Republicans. While the left rode their BDS to the White House, that is unlikely to work for the right. By succumbing to the attraction of splitting, (Obama as Machiavelli or fool) the right risks making itself irrelevant. The American people like Obama and on many levels recognize that if he is inadequate to the job we will all suffer terribly. We need Obama to be competent just as we needed Bush to be competent after 9/11. If the Right derides Obama as a fool or convinces itself he is an evil genius, they will make themselves look foolish or venal. The wisest course is to criticize his policies and respond to them with better ideas of our own. For the next two years there is almost nothing Republicans, Libertarians, or Conservatives will be able to do in terms of policy. Obama has the Congress and the Press behind him. As David Brooks pointed out, Obama is the president for at least the next 4 years and has a Democratic Congress until at least 2010; time will tell if his ministrations will help or hinder any recovery. Conservatives, Libertarians, and Republicans need to be ready with constructive ideas if Obama fails.
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