This is a good start. I look forward to reading the next episodes! Meanwhile, I don't see the whites of your eyes.

Hoppy in Sacramento

Welcome, Mr. Winship. This is going to be fun. Great opening essay.

Of course facts matter. As you allude, the failure of the Iraq war was caused by a political movement that tailored its facts in order to justify what it already wanted to do, which was to invade Iraq. They didn't persuade the country that it was the right course of action. They didn't even try. They advertised the war to the country. They made up reasons, that often changed, to justify what they were going to do anyway.

Obviously, we progressives cannot allow ourselves to view facts in such a way. We are, after all, "The reality based community."

But, to paraphrase Darth Vader, "Don't be too proud of this technocratic mavel you've created, Mr. Winship. The power to analayze the effects of same sex marriage on divorce rates is insigificant next to the power of right and wrong."

On certain issues, and I say same sex marriage is one of them, the fact of a right-leaning population on social issues is trumped by he fact that our current system is unfair and discriminates against a minority. Indeed, on all issues of minority rights (be they race, class or aesthetic minorities) you have to put some of the political facts aside and just do what's right. It's the old principle that says that while 90% of the people will profess to hate Larry Flynt that he's still allowed to publish hard core porn whether the majority wants it or not.

Some principles, like equal rights and free speech just aren't subject to fact-based texts -- they are absolute and we have to get together and support them.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

This question bumps into the one about propaganda vs. reasoned discourse. That is, can one side win against the other if opponents are precluding reasoned analysis, thus de-valuing evidence before it can even be brought to bear?

For example, all the caveats and holes in WMD or Al Qaeda arguments (Iraq) were shoved aside by attacks on patriotism. Facts are fine for actual policy (after one side wins) but seem to fall easily to clever psychological manipulation of the discussion. It may be that too much allegiance to evidence weakens the loyalty to principle that allows conservatives these days to become talking-point zombies.

A better question than the value of evidence is how to undercut the power of framing, thus allowing evidence to have some value.

There is no such thing as agnosticism or empiricism when it comes to pollsters reading and analyzing polls. It's all how you ask the questions, and how you read the results.

But I do I look forward to a week of hearing how the evidence shows it's good for progressives to move to the right. That's where the voters are, right?

(I would also suggest reading Tapped, for a critique of the Third Way's polling "evidence," links here and here.)

Anyway, didn't post-modernism do away with things like facts and evidence, anyway? 

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

Nah-uh!

Oh wait, I'm doing it again...

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

This is where you lost me:

Here's where I'll make the first (but not the last) controversial empirical claim of the week: The country leans right of center.

There is no inherent right-leftness to the American body politic. This is the underlying flaw to all of the "New Democrat" analysis of the past fifteen years. The American public can be led in either direction, to the left or to the right. What happens when the Right is pulling them to the their side, while "New Democrats" consistently undermine any efforts to pull the public to the left, is that the public moves to the right because that's the only side making any attempt to generate momentum.

Indeed, the attempt to project the hodgepodge of policy attitudes on a myriad of subjects to a single dimension, from Left to Right, is hopelessly flawed. Survey after survey shows that the public prefers the policies that the Left has put in place, even when they self-identify as "moderate" or "conservative".

The public's essential problem with Democrats is not that we are Too Far to The Left, at least, not any more - this may have been a problem in 1979 but that was a Long Time Ago. These days, the public is far more concerned with questions about security than questions about social spending, and have problems believing that Democrats stand up for what they believe in.

To that end, "New Democrats" hurt the cause because they are constantly trying to water down the Democratic message and "triangulate" to a position that includes enough "moderates" without alienating too many of the base. A completely different way of governing, one that the Democratic party hasn't tried since the '60s, would be to simply stand up for the principles that have historically put the party in power, and to convince the public of the correctness of our positions.

I was hopeful when I saw that you wanted to talk about "empiricism". Where here are some empircal facts: right now, voters are self-identifying as Democrats over Republicans by a sizeable margin. This has generally been the case for the past fifty years, aside from the 10-15 years when the DLC was running the party. Curiously, the strategy of not standing up for Democratic ideas correlated strongly with people leaving the party and identifying with the Right.

I think the body of your post, when you wander away from your non-empirical truth claim, is simply over-complicated wonkery.

The claim that I'll make here, then, (to be assessed on the basis of the evidence I'll present tomorrow) is that the circular firing squad is a fixture among progressives but not conservatives because the ideological disposition of the electorate makes victory more difficult for our side.

I reject that claim categorically. Now if you'll turn your side of the "circular firing squad" around, you'll find the targets that progressive have actually been shooting at are standing behind you.

Today, I want to argue that empiricism is actually more important for progressives than it is for conservatives

why does this website consistently invite these whiny faux democrats on to make their case? you DLC-inspired conservatives are not liberals and we will not let you take over the democratic party from those of us with actual lefty beliefs and goals. you are constantly undermining any programs or ideas that the lefty faction of the democratic party has in favor of kowtowing to traditional conservative pet causes. the country does not lean to the right at all. in fact, nearly every opinion poll that does away with such useless labels as "democrat", "republican", "conservative" or "liberal" clearly demonstrates that a majority of americans are to the left of center on a range of social issues. most support military action only with united nations approval. most support universal health care. most support a multilateral foreign policy. most oppose reckless military spending. where is this right-leaning country? in spite of bill clinton's best efforts, the country remains a rather liberal nation. go peddle your wares elsewhere - little green footballs seems a more appropriate site.

I'm sceptical of the approach you outline chiefly because it doesn't seem to leave a lot of room for crucial effects that actually dominate political outcomes.

For example, George Bush and the Republicans became tremendously popular due to the 9/11 effect, and handily won in the 2002 and 2004 elections because of it. They are now turning tremendously unpopular because of the Iraq War effect -- already highly significant in the 2006, and almost certain to be in the 2008 election.

The real goal for a true empiricist is to factor ALL relevant issues into electoral strategies. For example, it's my expectation that highlighting Bush's catastrophic Presidency, and the Republican hegemony that supported it, will prove a powerful technique for many years to come. Indeed, I'd expect that that connection will play a larger role in elections in the next decade or so than will the other kinds of policy issues you describe.

It does not really matter what polls show or what are asked by pollsters. This country has traditionally been a conservative country . LBJ saw himself as finishing the work of the New Deal. The New Deal and the Roosevelt Presidency was shaped by the Depression. Before FDR and after there have been more Republicans elected president. The Democrats who dominated the post 1940s Congress were generally Southern segregationists, not liberals.

Much of the of the move to the Left following WWII was "enacted" by the Warren Court. How many of the the striking down of various racist laws, enlargement of defendent rights, abortion rights etal. would have been won in a legislature?

The Democrats elected since John Kennedy required an assination and Republicans acting in scandalous or calous ways. This a country in which large majorities go to church and are more tolerant than James Dobson and Jerry Falwell and maybe growing even more tolerant when it comes to Gays and race but this is not the country of TMPCafe. It does not take polling to show that.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I'm with Rick (and lindiana) here. I stopped reading after the paragraph with this (I'll finish after I write this comment, maybe):

In 2004, 21% of voters called themselves liberal while 34% called themselves conservative (the rest identifying as moderate).

Consider Moral-Politics.com. They've been doing a non-scientific survey for a while now, and it suggests that, independent of self-labelling, there are more socialists (28.5%) in the US than either conservatives (20%) or liberals (24%), out of 320K respondents...

Thus, the issue of how people in the US understand the labels they use even for themselves is critically important. And it's this issue that George Orwell was writing about in "Nineteen Eighty-Four:" how political outcomes are influenced by political language.

If you want to make good use of evidence, Mr. Winship, see what you can do to use it to address this broader issue.

And by the way, you repeat a particular odious piece of b.s. that all of you supposed centrists like to use to avoid your own culpability on Iraq.

You say "Positioning on the Iraq war, however, tended to fall back on values far more heavily than either supporters or critics would prefer to admit, and that's because the evidence necessary for an empirically-grounded position wasn't available."

Bunk. Sen. Bob Graham, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, flatly said the classified evidence didn't back up Bush's case for war. Al Gore picked up on this and made the argument forcefully.

Scott Ritter went around the country telling anyone who would listen about the WMD scam, and the only responses to his evidence were ad hominem. Hans Blix told the world he was inspecting every site the US suspected and finding nothing.

I could go on. You're kidding yourself when you say you believe in evidence. You only believe in evidence that supports your position, which is specifically the charge you lay against people to your left.

The shrinks would say you are "projecting."

Please go away.

What Scott's Friends Want:

We're eventually going to have to get into what Scott and the Third Way want so we might as well start with their paper "Winning the Middle Class," which is available by following the link in Scott's post.

It's very close to what Senator Chuck Schumer called for in his recent book. You might recall that Schumer's book didn't go over well around here.

Anyway, here are Third Way's 6 ideas for winning the Middle class:

1) A choice between a $10,000 a year tax deduction or $3,000 a year tax credit for college tuition. Also, establish a $500 college savings account for every newborn.

Comment: Inoffensive, though the deduction isn't large enough since private unievrsity tuition costs three times that much and tuition rates are rising much faster than inflation. This does nothing to address the rise in rates.

2) A "New baby tax credit," to help new parents. Paid family leave for new parents. Double the tax break for childcare expenses.

Comment: Inoffensive, but isn't the real problem stagnant wages? This seems like a weak stab at a larger problem.

3) $1,500 tax credit for first-time home buyers.

Comment: Okay. It might help out some home buyers. But I doubt it'll make much difference given the incentives already in place. Besides, the real problem here, again, is that wages aren't rising fast enough for homebuyers to make their first purchases without taking on too much debt.

4) Tax breaks for the costs of caring for an aging parent.

Comment: Fine. But another weak solution to a real problem -- healthcare is too damned expensive. A few tax breaks won't change that.

5) A 25% smut tax on Internet pornography.

Comment: That's just stupid and prudish.

6) More cops on the streets and identity theft protection.

Comment: Cops. Yawn. And identity theft is an overblown problem. Sucks if it happens to you, but it's not as prevalent as people think.

Overall Comments: So, that's it. Not a big idea to be had. No overhauling of healthcare, no attempt to address the stagnant wage issue, no attention at all if you're a single worker without kids and a childish tax on Internet porn.
If you're a middle class homosexual who'd like equal rights, Third Way has nothing for you. If you're a member of the Middle Class who might have an opinion about Iraq -- nada, zilch. Worried that the government is eavesdropping on domestic phone calls? Third Way isn't.

I'm not saying that Third Way doesn't have opinions on all of those matters. They're elsewhere on the site. But in this memo, Third Way is telling candidates to offer a bunch of small, feel-good, ideas that don't address what's really wrong and that leave a lot of major issues unadressed. And this is supposed to inspire the Middle Class?

Pretty weak stuff.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

By the way, 100% - 21% - 34% = 45%. Your claim:

The country leans right of center.

A correct claim might be "the country leans neither left or right," but the data you've presented simply doesn't support your claim, and it certainly doesn't prove it. It doesn't refute it either, but there's lots more to empirical methodology than simply making claims that are not refuted by your data.

With all due respect, Mr. Winship, I don't think you're the person to be talking about evidence and its application.

A tax on porn?

Really???

Any mention of video games? Aren't they just as horrible for society? 

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

All right, empiricism has a specific meaning and it has an even more specific meaning when it is merged with Progressivism. Empiricism as suggested by Hume (who I think should be considered one of its greatest proponents) is based on sense based data. That is you can only really know that which you can experience in real time. Empiricism is simply evidence based - it is a particular type of evidence. That is if you have something that can not be directly observed by the five senses it cannot be considered true knowledge. Empiricism then is a sub-category of what you refer to as evidence based.

Empiricism was taken as the only knowledge that could be truly trust by William James. However he did not see "empirical knowledge" as static, something that could be reified in to an object, but as something that is dynamic. When you think about it this absoutely has to be true, if knowledge is based on your sensory perceptions, and what you observe is constantly changing, then knowledge must be dynamic. So the only knowledge that you can actually have is in answer to an immediate problem, and therefore cannot be subject to any type of reification. As soon as you turn knowledge in to a constant that is separate from a human quality is loses its empirical quality.

Now where does this collide with the Progressive movement? The idea of empiricism was taken up by John Dewey who was one of the founders of the Progressive movement. He wanted to stress the dynamism and the action orientation of knowledge so he moved from an empiricist understanding of knowledge to an experimental understanding of knowledge. That is he wanted all emphasis to be placed on the problem itself, and the idea that you had to go through a logical experimental pattern and if the findings solved your problem then you had experimental (the only true) knowledge. But again, the knowledge is tied to the problem, so as soon as your ecology changes, knowledge changes.

So perhaps now you understand why making the statement that the country is center right is neither empirical or progressive. It is actually a highly ideological statement based in an authoritarian worldview. If I had time I would explain why this is.

Think about the children!

The chil-il-il-dren!

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I concur, Red Planet, and would like to note that we would do well to understand the classical difference between rhetoric and logic, the latter being real, hard, science.

E.g., the claim that the country leans to the right on the basis of a 21%/45%/34% distribution from left to right makes some rhetorical sense, but it makes no logical sense - that 45% is too important, and the distribution is thus too coarse. 21%/34%/45% to the right, yes, that would logically support the claim; but 21%/45%/34% is simply ambiguous and thus, as one of my professors used to remark, "content-free" in logical terms. I'm sure many will wonder what point I'm making, but one who understands how logic relates to objective empirical analysis would hopefully understand it.

I'm not an opponent of rhetorical analyses, but even at that, I find Mr. Winship's discussion to be lacking useful content, with all due respect to him. A good rhetorical analysis and debate can serve well to focus ideas and issues, but I don't see the prospect for that here, and the talk of evidence seems distraction at best, considering that requisite preliminaries are apparently going to be ignored, as lindiana has pointed out.

I also hesitate to make constructive suggestions for Mr. Winship; that's the job of his Ph.D. advisor. Having been through that process, I'm not sure I like the prospect of handing a really good thesis topic to a student in a blog comment, unless the student has done his or her part in motivating it. I would feel differently if his starting point, i.e., his current thesis, were stronger, but it's simply not very strong in my view. I'm much more inclined to walk away from this discussion than to further engage in it.

But hopefully, we've identified as least one area of improvement for Mr. Winship, i.e., the difficulty with self-reporting, but there's much more for him to take up - again, as lindiana has pointed out; his advisor should be helping him with that sort of thing (but who knows, his advisor may have sent him here to get exactly this kind of constructive criticism).

Mr. Winship, I recall my own difficulty of similar nature; I did my dissertation in Computer Science, but had to depend upon empirical analyses for some support. So, I tend to be sympathetic. I'm just not impressed by the discussion you've presented so far.

When progressives start talking about "a commitment to empiricism," and "empirical agnosticism" they are talking down to the people they are supposedly trying to win over. Why not just say, "telling the truth" and let it go at that? Why do liberals always have to prove how intelligent and well-educated they are? Don't they realize that turns people off?

Democrats are already experts at showing how smart they are. That's the problem. They are already reading too many polls. That isn't the problem.

Progressives need to communicate an overall vision of government and society that is as compelling and consistant as the one that conservatives have disseminated over the past 30 years. They need to be able to appeal not only to facts, but to people's core values and aspirations. To basic values like human equality, basic fairness, Christian charity, and building a better future. It's not a matter of following or interpreting the polls correctly, but of leading the American people in the direction that we believe is right.

Re: whether self-reporting of liberalism vs. conservatism is accurate -- the very concepts liberal and conservative are almost impossible to define in the first place. I think, as liberals or progressives or whatever we want to call ourselves, we have a fairly good intuition about what progressivism/liberalism is, but it's pretty damn difficult to explain to someone else. There are plenty of contradictions in each of the two ideologies. The more precise we can be about the particular issue our belief refers to (e.g. "I am liberal on the abortion issue", "I am liberal on the question of whether so-called illegal immigrants should be granted amnesty", etc.) the more accurate and coherent our statement about our beliefs becomes; but at the same time, the smaller the "group" (liberals vs. conservatives) we belong to becomes, since our choice on an issue causes others to split off.

Furthermore, these beliefs and definitions change over time. The original Port Huron statement came out strongly in favor of nuclear power; if that was a "progressive viewpoint" at the time, it certainly wasn't 15 years later.

So I think that simply asking people whether they self-identify as liberal or conservative will produce more coherent answers than trying to define liberalism or conservatism first.

----------------

But the problem then becomes that people do have negative or positive impressions of liberalism and conservatism, whether or not they really understand what the terms mean. And for the last few election cycles, anyway, one can make the case that liberalism was not a popular ideology. And as several others have pointed out upthread, the electorate can be led to a position they didn't previously hold.

So what is the situation now, and what benefit can trying to measure it possibly bring? Basing one's policy, or strategy, on measurements of slippery and ill-defined numbers can serve to make the policy/strategy overcautious as easily as it can serve to make it "reality-based". It can lead to appeasement of the opposition. It can lead to triangulation. What's worse, in service of actual belief, it can lead to moral relativism.

"Reality", as measured empirically, should definitely inform policy and strategy, but it shouldn't drive them; policy and strategy should instead seek to change reality.

=== You and I are uninvited open house guests, allowed to comment on his post in hopes that he might converse, but no guarantees on that. ===

We are also the people who provide the advertising eyeballs that pay TPM's bills. And some of us have participated in the "taking myself hostage" campaigns for cash donations to the site(s).

I agree that doesn't justify rudeness, and I realize when I come here that the owner has a liking for Marshall Wittmann-type mushy center-rightists. But it is also a good thing to remember that we are actually the customers.

sPh

Wow. You're the only game in town? The right's think tanks, which helped bludgeon progressives throughout the 1990s, are no match for you guys? Why? Because you say so?

This smacks a bit of "Whether you like it or you don't like it, learn to love it." But I'm not so sure that the best ideas are coming out of the progressive think tanks. Far bolder and more interesting notions have been put forward on these boards than have been put forward by the Third Way.

I don't think I'm willing to cede command of the party to the think tanks just yet.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Why do liberals always have to prove how intelligent and well-educated they are?

All the money we spend attending elitist colleges? :-)

Personally, I don't think being intelligent, or someone demonstrating they're intelligent and well-educated, is a turn off. I think it can be done in the right way --Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Russ Feingold, they all seem to be very smart people who can also be plainspoken. 

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

I think you're overstating things. Sharpton made a mockery of himself, not the civil rights movement. Mistakes have been made in feminism, but I'd hardly call the movement "discredited."

Heck, the data-loving people at third way want a 25% smut tax on Internet porn so they'd be right at home with the people on the fringe who think there's something morally wrong with porn.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Here's where I'll make the first (but not the last) controversial empirical claim of the week: The country leans right of center

You are absolutely 100% wrong. No, check that: you're *not even wrong*.

You're *not even wrong* because you *haven't defined* "right of center" or "conservative".

We're undergoing a realignment at this time. Libertarians are leaving the Republican Party and joining the Democratic Party.

Before you say *anything* about "right of center" or "conservative", you *have to define what you're talking about*. And you didn't. This renders *everything you said* meaningless.

To make it worse, the definition you *appear* to be using is an obsolete one, and for that definition, most people in the US are neither liberal nor conservative, or perhaps they're both right of center and left of center.

If you had said "People in the US, on average, want the government to let them carry guns with very few restrictions", you'd be correct. If you had said "People in the US, on average, do not want the government spying in their bedrooms", you'd also be correct. The first is "right wing" and the second is "left wing" traditionally. Get my point?

I should mention (you surely know this) that Jesus hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors, and lashed out at religious hypocrites. I'd say he was somewhat of a social libertarian in that respect, albeit a principled one.

E.g., "let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone." Sounds like something the ACLU would endorse, at least to me...

But Jesus was clearly, in my view, a socialist. The more I study the New Testament, especially in Greek, which I've taken to doing in recent years, the clearer that has become to me. This isn't the place for that, but I point it out only to observe that there is no necessary conflict between social libertarianism and socialism, even religiously motivated socialism.

One last quick thing: the passage in Romans 1 about homosexuality was, in Greek, very graphic (as in pornographic), I think intentionally so. Paul thus was likely not talking about "love relationships;" he was talking about sex, and more generally, about people ignoring God in their lifestyles. But one shouldn't ever read Romans 1 without reading the first few verses of Romans 2...

True enough--values often trump political facts (and should). On the other hand, values are often based on an understanding of the world, which can be altered by facts as well. Misperceptions about LGBTQ people can be the source of homophobia, but the value of "traditional family values" can be replaced by the value of "tolerance" with new information.

Nice point. Sometimes facts don't matter to the electorate (or rather, to key segments of it).

But the question of how to undercut the power of framing is, of course, an empirical one, right?

This is what I meant about problems vs. solutions.

People think of "economic socialism" in terms of particular ideas for economic solutions, more to exclude what they reserve for capitalism (i.e., markets) than to include what they consider socialism (i.e., governments and "planned economies"). Red herrings.

Socialized medicine is economic socialism. The question really is, "what is economic socialism?"

Insurance, even private insurance, is economic socialism. So it doesn't make sense if it's for profit instead of "promoting the general welfare."

The entire US Federal Reserve is economic socialism.

WalMart is a planned economy. It's now called "supply chain management" and the like. That's why the company so easily hooks into the Chinese system, which by the way, is still as communist as it ever was.

Capitalism can indeed be very efficient; in the future and maybe even now, too efficient, in fact. Technology has changed this fundamental issue, and has tipped the balance. Technology makes economic planning not only possible. but preferable (globalization depends on economic planning), and devalues labor, which eventually will make free markets based on marginal value impossible.

Knowledge has context. Past conclusions about socialism, even if valid in their time, are not necessarily valid now. And anyone who believes otherwise should stop criticizing us religious fundamentalists who believe similar things about the Bible.

Hmmm...love that "non-scientific survey". I'll leave it up to you whether you want to believe the accumulated wisdom of political scientists on the question of how popular socialism is in the US or whether you want to rely on a survey described in this way (on the creators' own website):

"The Moral Politics Test was introduced in September 2004. It was built by the developers of Xignite (an internet software company located in Foster City, California) on their free time."

Bob Shrum is widely viewed as a *populist liberal*, not a centrist. The man tried to elect Ted Kennedy for President in 1980.