Dick Cheney and the Dark Side

Dick Cheney, who died in November, was by far the most powerful U.S. Vice President in history, and not coincidentally, was one of the Americans who most harmed the United States (and the world) in living memory. That ignominious club includes Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, and although it's arguable who's done the most damage, Cheney's lasting legacy is overwhelming negative and dark. Although George W. Bush bears ultimate responsibility for the decisions he made and the many he abdicated to Cheney during their administration, and Cheney had many allies who also deserve blame, Cheney was the driving force behind many if not all of the Bush administration's multiple disasters, horrible policies and frankly evil actions. And although Dick Cheney criticized Trump and even voted against him in 2024, many of the Trump administration's illegal assertions of monarchial power – and certainly its contempt for due process – were proudly modeled by the Bush-Cheney regime.

Cheney pushed for a war of choice in Iraq, an inherently unconscionable action even if it hadn't turned out disastrously. He shamelessly deceived Congress, reporters and the American people to sell that war. He, his friend Donald Rumsfeld, and others allies created a torture regime, one of the darkest stains on the United States. He fought against due process, and for indefinite detention. He supported warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He pushed for not one but two budget-busting tax cuts for the rich, knowing they were fiscally irresponsible and despite the already extreme wealth inequality in the United States. He fought against disclosure, oversight and accountability. He seeded the government with his lackeys and allowed the politicization of the civil service. The Bush administration made a staggering number of decisions that were bad for America, in large part because Cheney and his team arrogantly assumed they were always correct and actively undermined the checks, balances, discussions and dissents that allow for good decision making.

It's not possible to cover every failing of Dick Cheney in detail in one post. The best book on Cheney I've found is Angler by Barton Gellman, which expanded on a Pulitzer-winning series by Jo Becker and Gellman. I also think it's one of the best books for understanding the Bush administration as a whole, along with The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, which adeptly and chillingly chronicles the Bush administration's torture program, championed by Cheney and others. Mayer's book expanded on her reporting for The New Yorker and fed into the excellent Frontline episode "The Dark Side." Another episode, "Cheney's Law," is very good at looking at Cheney specifically, and the Frontline archive on the Iraq War is both comprehensive and damning. Most of my posts involving Cheney can be found in one or more of the categories Cheney, Bush, torture, Iraq, war and the war series. My fellow bloggers have certainly penned plenty as well. In the meantime, we'll try to recount some of Dick Cheney's most despicable legacies below.

The Iraq War

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- Dick Cheney, August 26th, 2002.

We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
– Dick Cheney, March 16th, 2003.

I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.
- Dick Cheney, June 30th, 2005.

Jim Lehrer: You drew a lot of heat and ridicule when you said eight months ago, insurgency is in its last throes. You regret having said that?

Cheney: No. I think the way I think about it, as I just described. I think about when we look back and get some historical perspective on this period, I'll believe that the period we were in through 2005 was in fact a turning point, that putting in place a democratic government in Iraq was the, sort of the cornerstone, if you will, of victory against the insurgency.
- February 7th, 2006.

I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered.
- Dick Cheney, June 20th, 2005.

"War is hell" is a cliché that happens to be true. War entails death and destruction, pain and suffering, and often involves dismemberment, disfigurement, sexual assault, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other ills. At best, war is a necessary evil, and you should be wary of anyone who wants to go to war. Starting an unnecessary war, a war of choice, is inherently immoral, and lying and misleading others to start such a war is likewise immoral. The Iraq War officially started in 2003 and ended in 2011, and was largely a disaster. I have a 20th anniversary roundup providing retrospectives and useful links, some which bear repeating directly here. As of this writing, the Cost of War project estimates that the "cost of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere totals about $8 trillion. This does not include future interest costs on borrowing for the wars." The Pew Research Center has a superb piece called "A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq" (3/14/23). See also the National Security Archive's pieces that the public relations push for the Iraq war preceded intelligence findings, Britain's Downing Street memo that stated that the Bush administration's "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of going to war, Mother Jones' "Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq" (September 2006), and a similar piece from The Center for Public Integrity, "False Pretenses" (1/23/08).

Dick Cheney was one of the most ardent advocates for war with Iraq and one of the most unconscionable about selling it. In one particularly infamous appearance on Meet the Press, Cheney claimed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had reconstituted Iraq's nuclear weapons program, and pointed to The New York Times as independently supporting his claims, when in fact he had fed those very claims to New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon. (FAIR has some excellent pieces on this and related incidents, including "Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline" [3/19/07] and the retrospective "20 Years Later, NYT Still Can’t Face Its Iraq War Shame" [3/22/23].) As the above quotations show, Cheney not only sold bullshit and delusion, but refused to acknowledge the reality of the disaster in Iraq.

Cheney also relied heavily on bigotry and American ignorance of Middle Eastern history and politics. To quote from an older post, "Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels" (11/11/09):

Bush officials, Cheney most of all, were going around conflating 9/11 and Al Qaeda with one of bin Laden's regional enemies, Saddam Hussein in Iraq. While many of the pre-war assertions were noteworthy for their bullshit factor, one of the most amazing came from Dick Cheney on Meet the Press in September 2003, after the Iraq War had been going roughly six months:

"If we're successful in Iraq . . . then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Honestly, this is one of the most bigoted, fear-mongering, deceptive and unconscionable statements I've ever seen from a high-ranking official. I've covered it before, but note that not only does Cheney indirectly suggest that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, he uses “geographic base” to conflate all Middle Eastern countries (or at least our “enemies”) and all of their inhabitants. This would be like invading Australia because of David Hicks[, an Australian who joined Al Qaeda]. Presumably Cheney's "geographic base" would include the country that produced most of the 9/11 terrorists – our erstwhile ally, Saudi Arabia. But really, who can really tell all those Middle Eastern people apart? Plus, they look and talk so funny. (It's often been quipped that invading Iraq after 9/11 was like attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor.)

We'd also be wise to remember the incompetence and corruption of the Bush-Cheney administration in Iraq. As chronicled well in the documentary No End in Sight and elsewhere, when it came to Iraq, competent, career civil servants were overridden in favor of unqualified ideologues and loyalists. Historically, the U.S. has done very well at infrastructure projects, and reconstruction in Iraq should have gone well. But the Bush administration gave huge contracts to companies that often did shoddy work. The most glaring of these was probably Halliburton, formerly led by Dick Cheney. Cheney received a $36 million severance package from Halliburton, had stock options in the company, and received almost $400,000 in deferred compensation while Vice President. Halliburton in turn received a $7 billion no-bid contract for work in Iraq. It didn't take long for Halliburton to pull shady moves, and chief contracting officer Bunny Greenhouse, a long-time civil servant with an exemplary record, blew the whistle on the company. In response, the Bush-Cheney administration demoted her. Halliburton's record in Iraq was notable for routinely overcharging the U.S. government, including a $108 million overcharge for fuel and overcharging for food at one camp alone by $16 million over a seven-month period. (See also "Dick Cheney and the Making of Halliburton," a lengthy excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair’s 2005 book on war-profiteering, Grand Theft Pentagon.) A 5/16/07 NPR piece, "What Went Wrong with the Rebuilding of Iraq?" is a useful reminder of how bad the situation was (emphasis added):

Thousands of reconstruction contracts were awarded. And there was plenty of money to go around, including an initial $18 billion appropriated by Congress. Another $20 billion was available from the so-called Development Fund for Iraq — money that was derived from, among other things, Iraqi oil sales. Federal investigations have found that the money was quickly spent, with little planning or accounting.

It was a free-for-all climate best demonstrated when Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, successfully requested that $12 billion in cash be shipped to Iraq. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he was astonished when he heard about it.

"It's hard even now to imagine $12 billion in hundred-dollar bills, wrapped into bricklike bundles, then put on huge pallets and brought over by troop carrier airplanes to be dispersed in a war zone," Waxman said.

"We have no idea where that money went. Of the $12 billion, $8.8 billion is unaccounted for," he said.

Bremer defended his action, suggesting it was naïve to try to impose Western-style accounting practices in Iraq during a war. Several investigations led by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, have found that the reconstruction effort was riddled with waste, fraud, corruption and shoddy construction. Bowen told NPR's All Things Considered about one particularly bad construction site he investigated — a $75 million police training academy built by Parsons Corp.

"Essentially, when they put in the plumbing, they had no fittings, so they just joined plumbing pipes, cemented them together," he said. "The connections burst once they started to be used, and the sewage thus leaked from the bathrooms down through the building — and into light fixtures and through the ceilings."

Urine and feces dripping into lights and from the ceiling is an apt metaphor for the Bush-Cheney administration's performance in Iraq, but unfortunately, it inflicted an even worse legacy.

Torture

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
– Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, 9/16/01

Dick Cheney was one of the most zealous proponents for torture in the Bush administration, certainly at his level of power. Wannabe tough guys believe that torture can force someone to tell the truth, but the experts know that torture is only effective at inflicting pain, sowing fear, and eliciting false confessions. The U.S. has scholars, military personnel, and intelligence agents who are fully aware of this, and some sounded the warning about torture to the Bush administration. But torture is about getting the answer the torturer wants to hear versus the truth, and similarly, the Bush-Cheney administration didn't want to acknowledge the truth about torture.

Most of the U.S. media and Congress was and remains reluctant to confront how monstrous the torture regime was, and also how it was used politically. A short piece by Paul Krugman on 4/22/09 summed up a key aspect:

From Jonathan Landay at McClatchy, one of the few reporters to get the story right during the march to war:

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

To recap and rebut the apologia for torture we heard from the Bush-Cheney administration and their allies at the time, I'll quote at some length from one of my more comprehensive posts on the subject, "Torture Versus Freedom" (5/15/09):

Defending torture insistently means one's moral compass is pointing straight down to hell. I continue to believe it's essential to confront the dangerous and evil lie that torture "works" and that we're all going to die if we respect human rights, follow the law, or dare to investigate - let alone prosecute - the people responsible for these horribly shameful and criminal policies. However, as many have noted, that we are "debating" torture's usefulness at all means we've failed somehow as a society. As Scott Horton quipped in December 2008, "Perhaps for Christmas proper we’ll be treated to arguments for and against genocide, and on the fourth day of Christmas we’ll read the arguments for and against the practice of infanticide."

While specific false claims about torture and the Bush administration's conduct should be challenged, it's especially important to emphasize torture's immorality and its clear illegality. Torture is the very antithesis of freedom. The key dynamics are not truth, security or patriotism. They are power, dehumanization and sadism. As Rear Admiral John Hutson observed, "torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough." When someone is tortured, it means that someone else in a position of power over the victim has deliberately chosen to inflict significant pain and suffering on a fellow human being. Torture spreads and corrupts in a democracy. Not only do torturers often not recognize the truth even when it's told to them, sometimes the torturers get so carried away they don't "even bother to ask questions" and "torture becomes an end unto itself." As Soviet-era torture victim Vladimir Bukovsky put it, "Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling?" He also explains how, after several days of torture, "neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again." (See also The Lucifer Effect.)

These abuses have often resulted in permanent or serious physical and psychological damage (although torturers often prefer methods that hide the abuse they've inflicted). Torture is assault of the most cruel variety, robbing the victim of the sanctity of his or her own body, but also his or her very mind and soul. These are not actions to weigh lightly, tactics to endorse or excuse cavalierly, nor damages to forgive quickly before we even know precisely what was done. It's hard to imagine a more clear moral line.

Torture is (1) immoral, (2) illegal, (3) endangers us (especially American troops in the Middle East), and (4) doesn't "work" – unless one wants to inflict pain, terrorize the populace, produce bogus intelligence or elicit false confessions. It's not that torture never produces a true statement, but at best, torture "works" much the same way amputation "cures" all hand ailments. (That's still probably far too generous.) Experienced interrogators know that torture is unreliable and counterproductive in addition to being cruel and illegal. For obtaining reliable information, more humane, rapport-building techniques are far more effective. Furthermore, as John Sifton has pointed out, intel from prisoners typically grows "stale" quickly, and "if you’re relying on interrogations for intelligence, you’re already on the back foot. You’ve already lost the war, so to speak." Regardless, a skilled, experienced interrogator pursuing accurate information would not be approaching a prisoner asking, "How much pain can I legally inflict?" That is a self-defeating, dangerous path that leads all too easily to becoming "the enemies of all humankind."

Almost every excuse from Bush officials and their allies fits somewhere in the following pattern of descending denials: We did not torture; waterboarding is not torture; even if it is torture, it was legal; even if it was illegal, it was necessary; even if it was unnecessary, it was not our fault. Almost every new document and piece of information has exposed lies, deception and crippling inconsistencies in their self-ennobling but accountability-denying tale. The existing evidence does not support a "good faith" defense, but even if it did, an investigation would still be required by law. Anti-torture laws exist in large part to protect all of us from men and women so certain of their own righteousness or need that they torture others (normally until the tortured person says exactly what they want to hear - apparently, precisely what happened here). The "debate" on torture and specific abusive techniques are stalling tactics by torture proponents and apologists, who consistently favor fantasy over reality in their arguments, and want to prevent a full investigation or trial. They will discuss Jack Bauer and hypothetical ticking time bombs endlessly, but not Maher Arar or Binyam Mohamed (among many others). They typically ignore altogether such damning, central evidence as the Red Cross report, which stated authoritatively and unequivocally that prisoners in U.S. custody were tortured. Their specific denials shift depending on their audience, but they almost always ignore that for years we have tortured, abused and imprisoned innocent people. It's much easier to abuse people or justify their abuse, of course, if they're all viewed as guilty, dangerous, alien or subhuman. These practices have often resulted in significant, lasting physical and psychological damage - and even death. (That's not to mention their central role in selling the war in Iraq and the consequences of that.) Ignoring or outright lying about this level of cruelty and abuse embodies the banality and audacity of evil.

(The end of the post links multiple resources on torture.)

After Barack Obama was elected, Dick Cheney still continued to lie about torture, claiming it saved lives but also that he and other members of the Bush administration weren't responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere (which included over one hundred deaths). Although his daughter Liz Cheney joined him in opposing Donald Trump's reelection and did conduct herself admirably during investigative hearings into the January 6th, 2020 insurrection, it's important to remember how awful Liz Cheney has been otherwise, including a utterly despicable 2009 campaign by her and Bill Kristol attacking due process itself and accusing people trying to bring prisoners to trial after years of confinement of being terrorist sympathizers. (For years, the Cheney family essentially argued that if you tried to hold Dick Cheney and his associates responsible for their actions, terrorists would kill you in your beds.)

Due Process

The Bush-Cheney administration repeatedly ignored due process – a cornerstone of civilization – and it and its allies often attacked the people fighting for the basic rule of law as terrorist sympathizers or terrorists. The Bush-Cheney administration asserted that it could simply accuse someone of being a terrorist, not provide any proof, and could imprison or "detain" that person indefinitely. (Oh, and confessions obtained through torture were admissible evidence.) The authoritarianism of all that should be glaring and troubling. It also bears mentioning that the Bush-Cheney administration was incompetent, and seemingly didn't care if innocents were imprisoned, tortured, or killed. McClatchy did a series called Guantanamo: Beyond the Law that found, of the more than 770 terrorist suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, dozens and perhaps hundreds of them were innocent. Nonetheless, innocent Mohammed Akhtiar was held for three years, a nightmare situation. The Bush-Cheney administration also kidnapped and tortured Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian-Syrian citizen (the torture was outsourced to Syria in his case). Innocent Dilawar Dilawar was captured and beaten to death at the U.S.'s Bagram air base in Afghanistan, as chronicled in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Besides common sense and a moral compass, there were plenty of reasons not to defer to the assertions of the Bush-Cheney administration that it was both infallible and should not be challenged.

A 2008 piece, "Using Justice Against Us," looked at the hack arguments of John Yoo against due process, most of all his attempt to get his audience to ignore that he hadn't proven that the Guantanamo prisoners actually were terrorists, and that giving them the trials Yoo opposed would be the normal way to establish any actual guilt. Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, and many of their colleagues and allies often made similar arguments. You can read the piece for more detail, but it includes a relevant passage from lawyer Scott Horton about the 2008 court decision about Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo. Horton contrasts the Bush-Cheney approach with an American tradition of due process and justice:

The Bush Administration could have handled this matter in the tradition that the nation’s greatest modern attorney general, Robert Jackson, set out at Nuremberg. Jackson personally took charge of the first prosecutions, delivering mesmerizing opening and closing statements and a dramatic cascade of evidence that targeted some of the most heinous criminals from the Second World War. Jackson had two important objectives before he reached the question of the guilt or innocence of the individual defendants: he needed to validate the fairness of the process, and he needed to demonstrate, clearly and convincingly in the eyes of the world, that heinous crimes had been committed which justified this extraordinary tribunal process. Jackson accomplished both goals. He also secured the conviction of key kingpins in the Nazi terror state. He did it all within the first year of the Allied occupation of Germany, through a process that helped transform the German people from enemies to friends. In the end, Jackson and his team demonstrated that the American tradition of justice was a potent tool to be wielded against the nation’s enemies.

By contrast, America has now endured seven years of an administration which fears the rule of law, which operates in the shadows as it contravenes criminal statutes and long-cherished traditions and retaliates mercilessly against civil servants who stand for law and principle. George Bush and his political advisors openly castigate law and justice as weaknesses or vulnerabilities–as public suspicions grow that they have darker reasons to be concerned about the law. Instead of following the historic route and using military commissions that follow the nation’s long-standing traditions, they have crafted embarrassing kangaroo courts. When the Supreme Court brought its gavel down on one of their shameful contraptions, they simply concocted another, equally shameful one, openly proclaiming an inferior brand of justice for those who were "not citizens," exalting in the right to use torture-extracted evidence and to transact the proceedings in secret.

The Bush-Cheney administration's contempt for due process can also be seen in its warrantless surveillance program, which completely ignored the Fourth Amendment, among other protections. Dick Cheney and his aide David Addington were some of the most strident proponents of the program, and in 2007, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey gave vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Bush-Cheney officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card being sent to bully Attorney General John Ashcroft in his hospital bed to renew the program. (Ashcroft, despite being extremely conservative, admirably stuck to principles and refused to do so, and pointed to Comey as the acting attorney general.)

An added tidbit: Angler author Barton Gellman read Cheney's memoir, and makes a convincing case that Cheney's account of the incident, that Ashcroft said he would renew the program before Gonzales and Card came over, is a lie. Also, "the relationship between Cheney and Bush, who was unaware of the Justice Department’s objections to the program until the last minute, was never the same . . . [Gellman says it was] 'the day the president of the United States discovered that the vice president’s zeal could lead him off a cliff.' "

Plutocracy

Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.
– Dick Cheney to Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill in 2002, as recounted in The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind.

The U.S. conservative playbook since at least Reagan has been to increase military spending and funnel money to the rich, increasing both the national deficit and the national debt, and then claim that it's necessary to cut the social safety net to balance the budget. This strategy even has a name: "starving the beast." As we've covered in other posts, Reagan did it, and the Trump tax bill was likewise an abomination meant mainly to benefit those who were already wealthy. George W. Bush had two rounds of tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, which mostly benefitted the rich. Even Bush didn't see the reason for the 2003 cuts and his Secretary of the Treasury at the time, Paul O'Neill, also opposed them. But Cheney (and Karl Rove, among others) pushed for them, and ultimately they got their way. Cheney was smart enough to know that the 2003 cuts (and the 2001 cuts) were fiscally irresponsible and bad for Americans as a whole, but still chose to funnel more money to the wealthy (including himself) in a country with already awful wealth inequality. He chose ideology and class warfare (by the rich) over good policy.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is one of the better sites for budget analysis, and wrote many posts about the Bush budgets and tax cuts. "Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years" (6/28/10) provided an analysis of the deficit causes (mostly the Bush tax cuts) and rebutted false claims from the conservative Heritage Foundation that the causes were Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. "Economic Downturn and Legacy of Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Deficits" (2/28/13) updated some data and provided an updated chart of the drivers of public debt:

"The Legacy of the 2001 and 2003 "Bush” Tax Cuts" (10/23/17) noted that the cuts did not boost economic growth as conservatives claimed would happen, and the post also provided a handy chart of who the tax cuts benefited:

Virtually every Republican, nominally "conservative" national political figure of the past 30 years has likewise championed policies to make the United States into even more of a plutocracy. That certainly applies to both Dick and Liz Cheney. They're not unique in that respect, but it bears pointing out that rather than serving the public, they have served Mammon, their rich donors, and themselves.

(Some of my more thorough posts on wealth inequality and conservative tax policies [and their extremity] are "Attack of the Plutocrats" (7/18/10), "Tax Cuts to the Rich Don't Raise Revenues" (10/26/10) and "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" (7/28/11).

Monarchial Powers for the President

Americans who graduated from elementary school might remember that the United States of America was founded due to a revolution against the abuses of a monarch. College-level courses will go into much more depth and nuance (and the hypocrisies of America's founding), but nonetheless, the idea that "all men are created equal" is a powerful, stirring one, and in direct opposition to the notion of aristocratic or dictatorial rule.

The more zealous proponents of the "unitary executive theory" lack the understanding of an attentive elementary school student, preferring instead the batshit theory that America's founding fathers wanted the U.S. president to have unchecked, monarchial powers, or as Donald Trump put it, "I have the right to do whatever I want as president."

Angler has the best account I've found on Cheney's views on presidential power. Reagan and many of his top officials should have gone to jail for the Iran-Contra Affair, but in Congress' report on the affair, Cheney and his aide David Addington wrote the dissenting opinion, and asserted that Reagan and his team had unchecked power, as the founding fathers intended. To support this argument, they cherry-picked passages from The Federalist, demonstrating scholarship so grotesquely crappy and nakedly self-serving that it'd receive a failing grade from any competent professor and uproarious laughter from any non-authoritarians if the consequences weren't so dire.

If you can't get your hands on a copy of Angler, the Frontline episode "Cheney's Law" is a good resource, as is a supplemental page of interviews. (Historian Rick Perlstein is also planning to cover the Cheney-Addington Iran-Contra arguments in a future book.)

Cheney's cherry-picking wasn't limited to the office of the U.S. President; he also practiced it for his own job. Cheney claimed he didn't have to comply with National Archive requests for materials because the Vice President has duties in both the executive and legislative branches, and therefore, somehow, rather than having obligations to both branches and their rules, he was subject to neither. (Obviously, the founding fathers intended that the VP should be an unaccountable political figure.)

A Negative, Dark Legacy

I suspect that Dick Cheney convinced himself that every questionable or flatly illegal action he took was for the good of the country, even those that personally benefitted him. But for all its flaws, the U.S. government was set up in the Constitution to have a set of checks and balances. And on a good team, good ideas can survive scrutiny and discussion. They don't require lies, misrepresentation, or hiding. The torture program was evil. Starting an unnecessary war, a war of choice, was evil. Using deception to sell the war was evil. Ignoring due process was evil. Attacking the patriotism of war skeptics and the stewards of due process was despicable. Making wealth inequality in the U.S. worse is unconscionable. Asserting that the U.S. President should have monarchial powers is anti-historical and dangerous. Dick Cheney's legacy is overwhelmingly a negative, dark, evil one. (If the word "evil" makes you uncomfortable, substitute "extremely harmful" or another term.) Cheney is not someone to be lauded and not a model to follow; he is a cautionary tale. He was convinced he was correct and had atrocious judgment. He fought, often viciously, to have his way, and we Americans and the world are the worse for it.

The Tyranny of the Minority and The Extremism of the Republican Party

Part One: The Tyranny of the Minority

Two government professors at Harvard have a new book out called The Tyranny of the Minority, which accurately warns that the Republican Party has been increasingly anti-democratic and right-wing, despite or because of losing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. The book, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, is a follow-up to their 2018 book, How Democracies Die. The PBS NewsHour broadcast a decent interview with the authors on 9/14/23. You can view or listen to the 7:25 video or audio at the link above, or read a full transcript, or play the YouTube version below:



Some key excerpts, starting with Ziblatt:

To be a party committed to democracy, you have to do three very simple things. Number one, you have to accept election losses, win or lose. Number two, you have to not use violence to gain or to hold onto power. And then, number three, most critically, in some sense, for mainstream political parties, is you have to distance yourself and be explicit and open about condemning anybody who's an ally of your party that commits any of those first two types of acts.

To be a party committed to democracy, in order for democracy to survive, the political parties in a political system have to ascribe to all three of those principles. This applies to parties of the right and of the left.

And I think what is so concerning, as Steve described, is that over the last four years, we have seen a process of decay within the Republican Party where all three of those principles are violated, but, in particular, most recently among mainstream members of the Senate.

Levitsky:

So, semi-loyal democrats are tricky, because they look like regular politicians. They look like mainstream politicians. They are, in fact, mainstream politicians.

They are in the halls of Congress. They are wearing suits. They look and talk and act like regular small-D democrats. But the key difference is their willingness to tolerate, to condone, to justify, sometimes to protect antidemocratic extremists.

And we have seen throughout history that when mainstream politicians of the left or the right tolerate, condone, protect extremists on the right or the left, democracies get into trouble. And so who are we talking about in the Republican Party today? Mainstream Republican Party leaders, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, leading senators, leading governors.

Both this book and their previous one offer some welcome international context on democracies in other countries and compare them to the United States – challenges, failures and better systems. Ziblatt touches on this briefly in the interview:

One big difference between the United States and a country like Hungary or other countries where democratic backsliding has really established single-party rule, we have constraints and there's a strong opposition to these forces.

That's certainly the case at the national level. What's so striking, though, because we have a federal system, that there are states in the United States where there are assaults on voting rights taking place, where there's extreme levels of gerrymandering, so that it makes it possible for a party that doesn't win the most votes to actually win control of state legislatures, where courts are then packed at the local — at the state level as well.

So what we see across the United States is increasingly a divide between states where you continue to have voting rights and democracy and states where democracy is really under assault.

Ziblatt closes by listing some concrete steps and perhaps some hopeful notes:

Some of the things that we discussed in the book and we propose, we have a 15-point set of suggestions in our last chapter, including things such as eliminating the Electoral College — we're the only democracy in the world with an Electoral College — introducing term limits and retirement ages for the Supreme Court.

We're the only democracy in the world that doesn't have retirement ages or term limits for national judges. We also propose some reforms that don't require constitutional reforms, such as eliminating or at least weakening the filibuster, the filibuster in the United States, since we're the only democracy in the world that has such a strong tool of obstruction in one of our chambers of Congress.

This tool of obstruction blocks very often majority-supported policies, gun control, efforts to address climate change, the minimum wage. Things get held up in the national Congress, which frustrates citizens. So we think there needs to be a kind of a sweeping reform agenda.

And one of the things we have discovered looking at other democracies, I should add, is that, when constitutional reforms come, they tend to cluster together. Momentum is gained. People get – regain faith in their political system. And we think this is very much part of the American tradition.

Where we are operating today without this is outside of the American tradition. And this is something we need to get back to.

This is all on point, and it's heartening to see more people considered mainstream and respectable sound the alarm about U.S. conservatism and the Republican Party. The phrase "tyranny of the minority" is nothing new; Rebecca Solnit and Michelle Goldberg both wrote good pieces with that title in 2017, and similar critiques go back further. Liberals and progressives have been accurately pointing out these dangers for over two decades now at least, but we're often not heeded, which remains a big problem, but nonetheless any truth that breaks through is welcome.

For more on the book, The Harvard Gazette did an interview, Steven Levitsky gave a lectue at Brown University, and the New York Journal of Books and Vox both have reviews.

Part Two: The Extremism of the Republican Party

Most mainstream media outlets remain reluctant to call out the extremism of U.S. conservatives and the Republican Party, and by their reticence help normalize that extremism, however inadvertently. Politeness takes precedence over accuracy. The Republican Party has become increasingly conservative and increasingly right-wing, and as a result, in mainstream media labeling, the actual political positions held by political figures called "centrists" or "moderates" have moved further to the right as well. (Classic Overton window dynamics.)

The PBS NewsHour is a good program overall, but its team seems to have made an editorial decision that any conservative or Republican who isn't far right should be called a "moderate." I've noticed it for several years, and PBS is hardly alone in this approach. Although PBS' Laura Barrón-López is a pretty good reporter and interviewer, she did exactly this early in the interview featured above:

Do you see Senator Romney's retirement as a sign that, rather than weed out the extremists in their party, Republicans are weeding out moderate Republicans like Romney and Liz Cheney?

I'd let this go if other reporters didn't use similar, misleading terminology so consistently. This approach is an ongoing problem in U.S. political coverage – normalizing conservative and Republican extremism, and not just by hacks, but even by people who presumably are trying to provide good reporting. It would be accurate to call Romney more moderate than other members of his party on at least some issues, and Liz Cheney did comport herself well during the January 6th committee hearings. It is fair to say they're being weeded out. But both Romney and Cheney are conservative, in many ways extremely so, with some horrible positions, which not incidentally are common in the Republican Party. As of a 2021 analysis by FiveThirtyEight, Romney voted with the Donald Trump agenda 75.0% of the time (which was less than many of his Republican colleagues) and Cheney voted with the Trump agenda 92.9% of the time.

Romney does deserve some credit for voting to convict Trump in both his impeachment trials (even if his vote "no" that Trump didn't obstruct Congress remains ridiculous), and Romney did put common sense and by his own account conscience above significant political and social pressure. It's technically true but a bit misleading, however, to say that Romney is "the first senator who has ever voted to remove a president of his own party"; Richard Nixon would have been both impeached and convicted by members of his party as well, but he resigned before it could happen. (The House impeaches, and the Senate convicts.) Liz Cheney, meanwhile, voted to impeach Trump in 2021 for the January 6th insurrection, but voted against impeaching him in 2020 for "withholding military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to extract dirt on rivals including Joe Biden," and said in 2022 she does not regret that vote. Her defense that the "evidence that was put on didn’t make the case" strains credulity, given the evidence presented. The Republican votes in favor of Trump in both cases were pure political loyalty and sheer political corruption.

It's worth considering Cheney and Romney's histories in a little more depth. It is nice that Liz Cheney respects election results, low bar though that may be, but she's always been pretty authoritarian herself. Liz Cheney has supported torture, opposed due process, and opposed investigating and holding accountable the Bush administration torture team, notably including her own father, Dick Cheney. This 2010 post covers some of that territory and includes a roundup of links on a disgusting attack ad run by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol's Orwellian-named group, "Keep America Safe." This 2009 post focuses more on Dick Cheney trying to whitewash his torture record, but also touches on Liz Cheney's efforts to cover for him and the corporate media enabling it. There's also Liz Cheney in 2009 echoing her father's attacks on then-President Barack Obama for proposing to shut down Guantanamo, and arguing for torture to Anderson Cooper, including brazenly lying to his face about the key findings of the Schlesinger report on torture, and shamelessly accusing Obama of covering up the truth of the torture program (she and her cohorts prefer the Orwellian term "enhanced interrogation techniques"). In no world are supporting torture and defending torturers "moderate" positions.

Liz Cheney also can be fairly called a plutocrat, like most of her Republican colleagues, having voted for the Trump tax cuts in 2017, which like the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, were (to quote a 2022 post):

. . . plutocratic, funneling even more money to the wealthiest Americans to please rich donors. Contrary to Republican claims, the corporate tax cuts did not trickle down and the tax plan did not pay for itself; they just gave rich people more money.

As the Council on Foreign Relations summarized in 2022, "income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country, and it is rising." That post, and the website Inequality.org, have some helpful charts. (My most in-depth post on income and wealth inequality was this 2010 one, with several other posts in the category.) Given how extreme income and wealth inequality already is in the United States, especially compared to other developed countries, and the increasing economic pressures on the majority of Americans, I consider it unconscionable (or just evil) to actively work to support more inequality, favoring the rich and powerful. That unconscionable mindset is unfortunately a common one among conservative politicians, but I don't think it can fairly be called "moderate." (I'll add that many political figures labeled "centrist" by the mainstream media are really conservatives in their actual positions, or at the very least establishmentarians.)

Romney was not in the Senate for the Trump tax cut vote, but states on his Senate website that he would have supported it – while simultaneously claiming he "fought against both tax cuts for the wealthy and tax hikes on the middle class"! Romney is counting on readers not knowing his record or details of the law, and not spotting the direct contradiction (or simply believes in his powers of bullshitting). Romney, like many conservatives, isn't merely plutocratic but downright neofeudalistic – when he ran for president in the 2012 election, he adopted his running mate Paul Ryan's extreme policies to give a massive tax cut to the rich but also to gut the social safety net, including ending Medicare as it existed. Romney didn't get the flack an honest assessment of his policies should have received, because voters "simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing." (Much more analysis and links in the stealthy extremist section of this 2012 post.) The same dynamics often play out for conservative political positions – mainstream media outlets seem reluctant to describe them accurately in terms of their likely effects or their extremism, which gives cover for their mostly Republican proponents.

As with almost every Republican presidential nominee since Nixon, Romney used racist dogwhistles. In August 2012, he boasted that "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate," feeding into the racist, bullshit "birther" conspiracies about Barack Obama. He also ran a number of ads with racist dogwhistles about welfare and Medicare, continuing, as Chauncey DeVega pointed out, "the Southern Strategy, and the politics of white racial resentment." Similar dynamics were at play with Romney's infamous remarks in 2012 that 47 percent of Americans would back Obama "no matter what" because they "believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them," and who "pay no income tax." Romney's claims were at best grossly misleading, and taken in larger context were outright false (as I covered in more depth in one section of a broader 2014 post, which did also cover Romney's multiple, contradictory revisions about his remarks).

Donald Trump lies almost constantly, and may be unbeatable in that category. But during his presidential campaign in 2011–2012, Mitt Romney told at least 917 falsehoods that Steve Benen diligently chronicled and fact-checked, and many were substantial lies at that. This wasn't a new trait, either; Romney was lying and bullshitting at least as far back as his 2007–2008 presidential run. (I have posts from 2007 on some Romney "hogwash" and the sophistry of his anti-JFK speech.)

Mitt Romney has often acted as other people are beneath him and lack the capacity to see through obvious bullshit, as when he argued opposite positions to different audiences in subsequent weeks. (The same trend comes up in Steve Benen's exhaustive series.) The most infamous example is probably from 2011, when at the Iowa State Fair Romney argued against increasing taxes on corporations by condescendingly telling a man that "Corporations are people, my friend." When the crowd responded by yelling out the obvious point, "No, they're not!" Romney replied with a straw man, "Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?" Besides these arguments being ridiculous on the merits, it's interesting that Romney believed they would be effective politically. Faced with a crowd who wanted to protect the social safety net, raise taxes on the rich and corporations, and presumably overturn the Citizens United decision – all for the benefit of the vast majority of Americans – Romney essentially argued that corporate profits benefit stockholders (who are, technically, "people") and thus critiques of economic inequality and unequal power were invalid. Romney did express (smugly) what and who he actually values in society, as he did with his 47 percent remarks, and also betrayed an entitled, privileged narcissism that seems extremely prone to bullshitting audiences he holds in slight to significant contempt. Although Trump remains much worse in this arena, Romney shares some of Trump's worst traits.

For much more on Romney, see Jon Perr's comprehensive 7/4/22 post, "Mitt Romney Is in Denial," which superbly shows how Romney is no elder statesman, and is in fact a raging hypocrite who shares much of the blame for the current problems in American politics, which Romney instead tries to blame on 'both sides.'

So it's fine to give Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney credit for their pro-democracy moments. And it's sadly probably accurate that Romney's replacement will be worse, and his departure means that congressional Republicans as a whole will become more extreme. But let's not ignore Romney and Cheney's records and other positions. Every time conservatives and Republicans get worse, there's a tendency to look back at some earlier time with rose-colored glasses and laud an earlier generation of conservatives and Republicans, who might have a bit better in some respects, but were honestly still pretty awful. It's both possible and necessary to acknowledge both realities.

And how awful are their fellow conservatives and Republicans? The vast majority of congressional Republicans voted to defend Trump's attempted coup on January 6th, 2021 and have fought against any accountability for Trump and his cohorts. Most of the Republican presidential candidates (or vice-presidential candidates) would support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were a convicted felon. Republican legislators in at least 11 states have been working to make it harder to vote. Conservatism has always had an antidemocratic strain, but the Republican Party has become increasingly, overtly anti-democratic and extreme.

Conservatives and Republicans are fighting hard against LGBT rights. They're also fighting against accurate discussions of racial issues and history, with a particularly egregious Florida teaching standard claiming that slavery benefited some black people (a view that Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has promoted several times). Republicans are still both trying to gut the social safety net and lying about it. And as has been observed before, the Republican Party is really the only major political party in a developed nation that both denies climate change and opposes universal health care. Unfortunately, conservatives and Republicans have chosen to be bad on almost every issue. (A 2018 post surveys their policies in the most depth.)

As of the writing of this post, Congress has narrowly averted yet another Republican-led attempt to shut down the government. As the BBC points out, this doesn't happen in other developed countries. And as many folks have pointed out, the shutdowns are Republican attempts to enforce agendas that they cannot achieve democratically. (Conservative and Republican policies tend to be both bad on the merits and unpopular.)

Media coverage has occasionally correctly blamed the Republican Party for this latest shutdown attempt, but as Dan Froomkin, Ian Milhiser and James Fallows via driftglass have pointed out, there's still a strong media tendency to blame 'both sides.' This is inaccurate, irresponsible and dangerous. (It's also nothing new. I haven't covered every shutdown attempt in depth, but covered the same dynamics in 2011's "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" and " 'Serious' Culpability on the Debt Ceiling Hostage Situation" and 2012's "Why We Can't Have Nice Things." See also the more general false equivalencies category.)

Defeating the tyranny of the minority depends on conscientious lawmakers, civil servants, activists and citizens. But it also depends on more accurate and honest reporting. Extremism should not be normalized, blame and credit should be justly and proportionally assigned, and anti-democratic rhetoric and actions must be called out.

Artificially Equalizing Unequal Views on Inequality

The mainstream political press has a horrible tendency to rely on false equivalencies and to conclude, far too simplistically and without nuance or detail, that 'both sides are equally to blame.' It would take much more effort, and seem like taking sides, to call things accurately to the best of their ability, or discuss policy positions in terms of facts and likely outcomes, or contextualize negotiations and other matters for their audience. Even important issues can wind up being poorly covered. Some conclusions, no matter how well supported, are deemed unacceptable; others are essentially predetermined, regardless of the pesky facts. A Washington Post piece from July provides a good example.

The Article

"A think tank wanted to study inequality. It couldn’t get conservatives on board" by Jim Tankersley covers an interesting tidbit. (Its subtitle, "If most of the research on a big economic question comes from one political point of view, can Americans trust it?" seems like an awfully loaded and misleading question, however. To be fair, editors often choose the headlines, not the authors – but Tankersley is listed as the editor for this and other "Storyline" pieces.)

The setup—a new Beltway think tank (Washington Center for Equitable Growth) wants to study an important issue:

What she wanted, [Heather] Boushey said, was to fund an intellectually honest investigation of arguably the hottest issue in American economics right now: the widening gap between the richest Americans and everyone else. She wanted to learn more how and why that gap might hurt the nation’s overall economic performance.

The think tank has some members with a liberal background, but apparently it aims to be inclusive and is officially "non-partisan." Accordingly, it extends a wide invitation:

Boushey was hoping to sign up an ideologically diverse cross-section of thinkers to her effort. . . .

The grant recipients, she explained, would examine questions of inequality and growth from every possible angle, liberal and conservative. They’d report what was true and what wasn’t. Her think tank would live with the findings, whatever they might be.

The think tank's trying to be inclusive and strives to be empirical and data-driven. Sounds good so far. Next, proposals are submitted and grants are given:

There are no identifiably conservative economists among the grantees, however.

Uh-oh! That doesn't sound inclusive! What gives?

No conservative economists applied for grants, among the 70 submissions the center received, Boushey said.

...Oh. Well, it's rather hard to offer a grant to someone who can't even be bothered to apply. Not even one of the 70 applicants was a conservative? That seems remarkable. Why was this? Tankersley theorizes:

Perhaps that’s because the center has, in its early months of existence, engaged in some high-profile blog-and-social-media fights with conservatives over questions of data and policy when it comes to inequality.

Alas, no links are provided for this. This sounds a bit whiny, that the new think tank was mean, so conservatives didn't want to play. The think tank's twitter feed seems fairly anodyne and not combative. Back in May, Boushey did appear on PBS' NewsHour to debate Kevin Hassett of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) about Thomas Piketty’s recent book, Capital in the 21st Century, but it's a pretty polite exchange of disagreements. The most charitable possibility (for conservatives) would be that they judged that their contributions would be unwelcome. (It's a paid gig, though. And wouldn't getting paid to skewer a liberal position be tempting?) But Tankersley's speculating anyway, so let's move on. He floats another idea:

Perhaps it’s because it’s relatively rare in Washington for liberal and conservative thinkers to team up to pursue big questions – especially ones that, depending on the answer, could shake party platforms or basic ideological beliefs.

This is a much more convincing hypothesis, especially if one's familiar with the usual conservative stances on inequality. Tankersley continues:

It’s also true, in this case, that a lot of conservative economists have already decided that inequality – as opposed to mobility or the even broader “economic opportunity” – isn’t a problem.

Aha! Yes, this is much stronger, more accurate stuff – conservatives have often stated that inequality is overstated, or that it isn't a problem, or that efforts to ameliorate it cause more harm than good, or all of the above. Tankersley's link is to conservative AEI and its latest 117-page collection of essays, which argue all of these positions. This is good context for the reader.

This is the real challenge posed faced by Boushey, and her center, and the work that will now begin thanks to their grants: If most of the research into an economic issue is being conducted from one side of a political debate, consumers of that research could – and should – look skeptically on its conclusions, until persuaded otherwise. The burden is on the researchers, on their data and the stories they tell from it.

It’s a heavy burden. It would help to have a more diverse group of thinkers shouldering it.

Umm… what? Where did this come from? How does this follow? And a "diverse group" needs to include people who explicitly don't want to study the issue? I suppose "until persuaded otherwise" and the mention of "data" soften this a bit, but this is quite the sharp turn. It also ignores that there's a great deal of solid research on inequality already. For example, Thomas Piketty's aforementioned book, Capital in the 21st Century, is a new, major work in the field, and it's earned praise for its extensive research and synthesis of previous studies. (It's also received plenty of attacks from conservative outlets.) This think tank story, and discussions about inequality in general, do not take place in a vacuum. Let's recap Tankersley's account and conclusion:

1. A think tank wants to study inequality. It invites conservatives to participate.

2. Conservatives completely decline to participate (zero of seventy applicants).

3. It's mentioned but isn't emphasized in the piece that the think tank is sponsoring data-driven work. (A chart of the grantees and their paper topics is included. The findings of previous major studies on inequality are not mentioned.)

4. The conservative position is that inequality doesn't matter. (It's not really explored that justifications for this tend to be ideological versus data-driven. More on this in a bit.)

5. Conservatives have their own think tanks upholding their position.

6. Somehow… the new think tank's conclusions will be suspect and the burden is on its members, despite conservatives rejecting their invitation and rejecting their entire endeavor (not to mention rejecting the findings of previous studies).

Tankersley sure seems to arguing that if conservatives don’t agree with something, it can't be valid (or at the very least, that it must be viewed with great suspicion). There are several glaring problems here.

It's completely reasonable and fair to let different political factions have their say. It's utterly ridiculous, however, to automatically judge that their positions are equally valid and sound – especially when the facts say otherwise. Serious policy discussions require some level of qualitative analysis and judgment. Tankersley offers a variation on the usual predetermined "both sides are equally to blame" conclusion – in this case, he essentially lets conservatives veto the propositions that inequality matters and that it should be studied. He doesn’t provide much context for the reader, but essentially, he's falsely equating an empirical approach (and extensive data from it) by one "side" in a debate with a conservative ideological position against it. (For instance, conservatives will indeed argue that efforts to lessen inequality are ineffective or counterproductive, but their central, much more common argument is that such efforts are morally wrong.)

But Tankersley's conclusion doesn't even follow his own account. He links AEI's collection of papers arguing that inequality doesn't matter (and is overstated, etcetera). How is this point of view not represented, then? Why does the Washington Center for Equitable Growth specifically need to represent it, too? (Especially when they tried to, and offered an invitation that was rejected?) How the hell is this their fault?

Put another way, Tankersley's stated concern is about "research into an economic issue . . . being conducted from one side of a political debate." Based on his own account, either the other side has refused to engage in research, or the other side is already engaged. Yet somehow, the conservatives are still blameless and the fault lies with the more liberal – in this case, the intentionally centrist – faction.

Realistically, the news business is based on sales, ads, and page hits – content is churned out, and some of its quality will suffer. A short, quickly written piece won't give a full account of an issue. However, it should give a roughly accurate account of an issue and some basic context, and Tankersley's piece is striking for its abrupt and ill-fitting conclusion. It reads as if he was writing up an interesting tidbit, then realized he had to end by blaming "both sides," so he took a sharp swerve. He could have tried a familiar Beltway gambit – holding this incident up as an example of political intransigence and then bemoaning the lack of bipartisanship in Washington – and he kind of does this briefly (the less context on the issue one provides, the easier it is to pull off this move). But that route is slightly problematic here, because one "side" is investigating the issue and the other is refusing to do so – so fault must be invented in the name of "balance." Basically, the piece offers a socially driven conclusion versus an empirical or logical one.

The Bigger Picture

Tankersley's piece exemplifies some persistent problems in coverage of policy and political disputes. Let's return to that loaded and misleading subtitle: "If most of the research on a big economic question comes from one political point of view, can Americans trust it?"

This asks for a simple "yes" or "no" in a polarizing fashion, not for deeper reflection. (As Neil Postman put it, poor questions "insinuate that a position must be taken; they do not ask that thought be given.") Why does any political point of view automatically possess virtue, insight and accuracy? The stated attitude is also a major problem in "debates" about climate change and evolution, among other things. What if one "side" rejects empiricism and facts? What if one side consistently lies? What if one side had obvious reasons for arguing in bad faith? In the context of the paucity of conservatives in academia, PZ Myers has tackled this issue (emphasis mine):

Of course if [Jonathan Haidt] believes there’s no real difference between left and right, it’s a problem that the right is poorly represented in academia.

But what if there is a real difference, a difference of substance, in how left and right approach the evidence and how they respect the methods of science? I think the field of social psychology is suffering because they haven’t hired enough serial killers for their tenure line positions. They’d certainly do a good job of making psychologists question their assumptions about the importance of health, happiness, and security in human welfare, and also, someone would be around who could finally intimidate those prissy-pants on the Human Subjects Review Board. Should we complain about the deficiency, or should we recognize that some behaviors are antithetical to the cooperative and responsible pursuit of knowledge?

The problem isn’t that academia excludes conservatives. It’s that it is a rare conservative who doesn’t prioritize the moral foundations (to use Haidt’s own terms) of respect for authority and loyalty to the ingroup above breaking through conventions and assumptions to test the truth. Also, it’s the rare conservative who will accept a job with high admission requirements that also pays a pittance.

(As commenters in a Lawyers, Guns & Money thread on Tankersley's piece point out, conservative think tanks likewise probably pay much better than the new think tank's grants.)

Returning to the subject of inequality, it's not a secret that conservatives generally defend it and oppose efforts to lessen it; this is a core ideological principle. As conservative David Frum explained to Bill Moyers in 2009:

The Republicans are not the party of equality. They're the party of liberty and they're the party of efficiency. . . .

Liberty leads to inequality just as attempts to reduce equality lead to adoption of liberty.

The data don't always cooperate with the conservative position, however. Paul Krugman's written a great deal about inequality over the years, and a recent op-ed, "Inequality Is a Drag," summarizes some recent research:

It’s true that market economies need a certain amount of inequality to function. But American inequality has become so extreme that it’s inflicting a lot of economic damage. And this, in turn, implies that redistribution — that is, taxing the rich and helping the poor — may well raise, not lower, the economy’s growth rate.

You might be tempted to dismiss this notion as wishful thinking, a sort of liberal equivalent of the right-wing fantasy that cutting taxes on the rich actually increases revenue. In fact, however, there is solid evidence, coming from places like the International Monetary Fund, that high inequality is a drag on growth, and that redistribution can be good for the economy.

Earlier this week, the new view about inequality and growth got a boost from Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, which put out a report supporting the view that high inequality is a drag on growth. The agency was summarizing other people’s work, not doing research of its own, and you don’t need to take its judgment as gospel (remember its ludicrous downgrade of United States debt). What S.& P.’s imprimatur shows, however, is just how mainstream the new view of inequality has become. There is, at this point, no reason to believe that comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted is good for growth, and good reason to believe the opposite.

Specifically, if you look systematically at the international evidence on inequality, redistribution, and growth — which is what researchers at the I.M.F. did — you find that lower levels of inequality are associated with faster, not slower, growth. Furthermore, income redistribution at the levels typical of advanced countries (with the United States doing much less than average) is “robustly associated with higher and more durable growth.” That is, there’s no evidence that making the rich richer enriches the nation as a whole, but there’s strong evidence of benefits from making the poor less poor.

(Hullabaloo has covered inequality quite a bit. My most extensive post on the subject is this 2010 one.)

The conservative American Enterprise Institute's aforementioned work on the subject is a collection of essays entitled, Opportunity for All: How to Think about Inequality. I'm not going to go through all 117 pages in detail (you can read it for yourself), but I did want to note a few key arguments. In AEI President Arthur C. Brooks' introduction, he states:

The conventional wisdom on inequality is built on three assumptions: (1) Income inequality is inherently unjust; (2) it is bad for the economy; and (3) government redistribution is the best way to remedy it. According to this narrative, narrowing the gap between what wealthy and working-class Americans earn should be our top political priority, and policies such as raising taxes or increasing the minimum wage are the answer.

It's not encouraging when the opener offers such a huge straw man argument (and tinier ones). "Income inequality is inherently unjust"? As Krugman and others have noted, some inequality is necessary and useful, but beyond a certain amount it is indeed "bad for the economy." Direct government intervention can work, as can indirect intervention, and whether it's the "best" option or not, sometimes it's the only real option (see the New Deal). That's the practical argument. The moral counterargument to Brooks is that, if the political will existed, it would be relatively easy to have a system that still featured inequality but also much more "equality of opportunity" and a higher standard of living for everybody. Compared to other industrialized nations, the U.S. does relatively little social spending. Income and wealth inequality have increased over the past few decades, and the rich are being taxed at low levels by historical standards; U.S. taxes could become far more progressive and the richest 1% would still be left immensely privileged, if merely filthy rich versus obscenely wealthy.

In the same vein as Brooks, AEI author Aparna Mathur writes:

Like most Americans, I believe in equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome, which is clearly neither desirable nor attainable.

This is both a false dichotomy and a straw man. (Throw in appeal to the majority, too. What efficiency!) Of course, liberals (and the think tank centrists from earlier) don't seek "equality of outcome"; this is a wearily common conservative straw man tactic, essentially attacking communism and pretending that it's what liberals or European social democrats (or centrists) want. The goals are to reduce inequalities of both opportunities and outcomes, not to eliminate them altogether. In liberalism, governing is a balancing act, and theory and practice inform each other. Outcomes aren't the only concern, but they can't be ignored, either. The entire point of empiricism is to collect good data, which, among other things, entails – duh – looking at outcomes, measuring them and trying to determine causes with greater acuity. If the data show great inequality of opportunity, and also show great inequality of outcome – and the perennially preferred conservative policies to address the former have been shown to be insufficient or simply ineffective – perhaps something else is needed, hmm? If the data show that greater government spending does help, but conservatives oppose that, shouldn't they have to give a good reason and not just their position? If slightly higher taxes on the rich would help fund that spending, why not do it? (And do we really have to pretend that conservative arguments against even slight increases in taxes are always in good faith and with sound reason versus self-interest? Some conservatives are at least forthright about it.) It makes sense that most national political coverage avoids discussion of motives and bad faith, but it's not as if it sticks to the data instead – on inequality, climate change and many other subjects, it's been proven acceptable (for conservatives, at least) to simply say the data don't matter. Only rhetoric (which it would be rude to fact-check) can be allowed to prevail.

"Debates" about inequality do not take place in a vacuum – a long history and context exists. As Krugman observed in a July op-ed, "On Inequality Denial":

Not only do the usual suspects continue to deny the obvious, but they keep rolling out the same discredited arguments: Inequality isn’t really rising; O.K., it’s rising, but it doesn’t matter because we have so much social mobility; anyway, it’s a good thing, and anyone who suggests that it’s a problem is a Marxist.

What may surprise you is the year in which I published that article: 1992.

(Krugman's far from the only one writing about this stuff, but he's awfully good at it.)

That's a fine summing up of the arguments from AEI and other conservative outlets. In the same piece, Krugman also covers criticisms of Piketty's work:

At the risk of giving too much information, here’s the issue. We have two sources of evidence on both income and wealth: surveys, in which people are asked about their finances, and tax data. Survey data, while useful for tracking the poor and the middle class, notoriously understate top incomes and wealth — loosely speaking, because it’s hard to interview enough billionaires. So studies of the 1 percent, the 0.1 percent, and so on rely mainly on tax data. The Financial Times critique, however, compared older estimates of wealth concentration based on tax data with more recent estimates based on surveys; this produced an automatic bias against finding an upward trend.

In short, this latest attempt to debunk the notion that we’ve become a vastly more unequal society has itself been debunked. And you should have expected that. There are so many independent indicators pointing to sharply rising inequality, from the soaring prices of high-end real estate to the booming markets for luxury goods, that any claim that inequality isn’t rising almost has to be based on faulty data analysis.

Yet inequality denial persists, for pretty much the same reasons that climate change denial persists: there are powerful groups with a strong interest in rejecting the facts, or at least creating a fog of doubt. Indeed, you can be sure that the claim “The Piketty numbers are all wrong” will be endlessly repeated even though that claim quickly collapsed under scrutiny. . . .

This picture makes some people uncomfortable, because it plays into populist demands for higher taxes on the rich. But good ideas don’t need to be sold on false pretenses. If the argument against populism rests on bogus claims about inequality, you should consider the possibility that the populists are right.

Exactly. But then both sides aren't equally to blame, and there's no good reason to oppose policies helpful for the middle class (and poor) that powerful groups do in fact oppose. That's awkward for media outlets that traditionally toe the establishment line.

Moral arguments have their place (and can have great value), but the honest use of data is extremely helpful for cutting through biases and grounding those arguments. 'My ideology states that I don't need to care' is a position, not a true argument, and shouldn't cut it in serious discussions. Validating it amounts to empowering the fanatic's veto – it isn't even-handed; it's irresponsible. Having an open mind entails giving someone a fair hearing, not ignoring all evidence, judging all opinions equally sound or turning off one's bullshit detector. False equivalencies do not serve the audience (but unintentionally or not, they do serve other parties).

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

Lucky Duckies and Fortunate Sons

A high school teacher of mine told the story of playing a trading game as part of teacher training on race and social issues. The kicker was that the game was rigged. My teacher wound up in the group the game was rigged against. A competitive guy, he grew increasingly frustrated, and eventually stood off to the side and asked others to play his turn for him. Throughout the game, the group the game was rigged for downplayed or outright denied their own advantage and that the game was unfair. They urged him to keep playing (most in a kind manner, some gently upbraiding him for being a sore loser). They insisted that he was just unlucky, and that things could get better.

The lessons he took from this were:

1. People tend to grow discouraged when the game is rigged against them.

2. People benefitting from a rigged game are reluctant to acknowledge that the game is rigged.

The game from his story, StarPower, is more of an experiential teaching tool than traditional game. The Wikipedia entry provides some information and the webpage for the actual game is here. Donella Meadows wrote a good description of what normally happens in the game, while Carol C. Mukhopadhyay has written a lesson plan for it and a detailed description of the game pieces. The experience works much better if the participants go in not knowing the game's nature, and the game's replay value is limited. I haven't played it myself, but apparently the game has made a lasting impression on some participants.

From Meadows' account:

The game starts with players drawing colored chips from a bag. Different color combinations have different point values. The players trade chips, trying to increase their point counts. Very ordinary. Slightly boring.

After the first round, those with the most points are given, with much fanfare, badges with big purple squares on them. The lowest scorers get badges with demeaning green triangles. Those in the middle wear red circles.

Then comes the insidious part. For the next trading round the Squares draw from a bag laced with high-value chips. The Triangles' bag has low-value chips. After this round a few players change fortunes and switch to a higher or lower group, but mostly the Squares stay Squares, the Triangles stay Triangles, and the gap between them widens.

At this point the Squares are given the power to change the rules. They can reshuffle the chip bags, give away free points, do whatever they like. They can consult the other players on rule changes, if they want to.

They almost never want to.

Predictably, and usually gleefully, the Squares rig the game to favor Squares. The Circles concentrate on elevating themselves to become Squares, so they can bend the rules in favor of Circles. But the few Circles who do gain the hallowed status of Squares start to act like Squares.

The poor Triangles, with less and less power, wealth, or hope, first get angry, then apathetic. They sit around waiting for this dumb game to be over. They come to life only if they think up a way of cheating or of creating a revolution. Only subversion brings out their interest and creativity.

After about an hour the game is stopped and the players talk about what happened. There is usually an emotional outburst. "I can't believe how much I hate you guys!" a Triangle says to the Squares. "Why? We were managing things pretty well!" a Square replies in honest surprise.

The Squares seldom see how systematically they oppressed everyone. The Triangles are a mass of smoldering resentment. The Circles are shocked to discover that Triangles consider them materialistic sell-outs, while Squares look down on them as incompetent pseudo-Squares.

A simple, unpleasant game. A crude representation of a much-more-complicated world. Unforgettable to those who play. It's one thing to know intellectually about social classes. It's another to spend an hour experiencing the rage of a Triangle or the self-righteousness of a Square.

When tempers have cooled, I find that surprising insights remain. Having watched myself act like a Square or Triangle, I have to admit that my behavior depends greatly on where in the social structure I sit. Nearly anyone exposed to Square perceptions, pressures, and rewards acts like a Square. Nearly any Triangle gets apathetic.

Those few who don't are easily handled. Once I watched a Square try to convince her fellow-Squares to even up the rules. "This game is unfair, and unfair games are boring," she pleaded. The other Squares appropriated her points and demoted her to a Triangle. They weren't mean people, they were just Squares.

Suppose we could admit that most of us act as we do because of our places in the system. Suppose we turned our energy from blaming each other to blaming the structure of the games we play. Starpower games -- games in which the winners gain ever more power to win again -- occur everywhere, on both the Right and the Left...

My teacher's story about the board game stuck with me, probably because studies in the social sciences, life experiences and conversations with others about theirs have consistently borne out his conclusions. It's also persisted because those conclusions about the way people tend to react to a rigged game – discouragement or selective blindness – are pretty common sense, yet are vociferously denied nonetheless by significant segments in the United States.

Digby's noted before that Americans are more likely than Europeans to attribute poverty to a lack of character rather than to unfortunate circumstances. Racism often plays a role in these attitudes, but not always. The StarPower experience is somewhat reminiscent of Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes experiment. Several more recent studies show that, as social psychologist Paul Piff puts it, "As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases." (Interestingly enough, some of his studies have also employed rigged board games.) Piff performed another study that indicated that the poor were more charitable than the rich. Regarding the behavior of the Circles in StarPower, studies on last-place aversion are relevant. Meanwhile, social psychologist John Jost's multiple studies on system justification are also valuable.

(To counteract these negative dynamics, some programs do try to encourage the development of empathy. The chronically underfunded arts also have a fine track record in this regard. Discussing the social contract in more depth in our national political discourse could be nice, too.)

Some people (particularly conservatives) tend to get upset when they hear the term "privilege" in relation to themselves. I believe it's because it feels like an accusation that they haven't worked hard in their lives, and that often isn't the case. Yet acknowledging privilege doesn't disregard the presence of hard work or setbacks – it just recognizes consequential advantages. John Scalzi, in a good post (and two follow-ups) using a gaming analogy, called "straight white male" the "lowest difficulty setting." That doesn't mean a guaranteed win, or a life free from struggle, or a better outcome than everyone in a different demographic (being rich tends to be an awfully good trump card). Still, all other things being equal, the odds are better with some "settings" or starting positions than others. Horatio Alger stories of rags to riches can occur, but relying on them makes for poor public policy. A fairly recent study suggests that socioeconomic mobility in the United States hasn't changed much in decades, but also that it isn't great compared to other industrialized nations, and as John Cassidy points out, the study "doesn’t mean that the effects of inequality aren’t more serious than they used to be." (Since by definition there will always be a poorest 10% and 20%, perhaps it's wise to ensure that relative poverty is less dire and some basic needs are met for everyone.) Hard work and talent are indeed important, but the reality is that luck, and "choosing one's parents at birth," play an enormous role in success, and certainly prosperity. It takes a pretty cloistered life not to realize this.

Although cloistered, privileged, entitled wankers have always been with us, it does seem that in the last decade or so they've become more aggressive crowing about their own preciousness and expressing contempt for the (supposedly) lower orders. It's hard to keep up all the extremely wealthy figures indignantly insisting that a slight raise in their taxes would be like Hitler invading Poland, or Kristallnacht, or making similarly ridiculous claims. (Unsurprisingly, they won't mention that tax rates for the rich are lower than in earlier decades or provide context about the significant and increasing wealth inequality in the U.S.) We've seen periodic rants from egomaniacal Wall Street players that read like parody but have been linked approvingly by conservative outlets. Nor is it hard to find material that, for instance, praises Ayn Rand and insists that the '99% give back to the 1%' – countless pieces give voice to the persecuted privileged and promote the plutocratic, neofeudalist view.

Jonathan Chait's 2009 piece "Wealthcare" (about the conservative adoration for Ayn Rand) took a good look at this mentality:

Not surprisingly, the argument that getting rich often entails a great deal of luck tends to drive conservatives to apoplexy. This spring the Cornell economist Robert Frank, writing in The New York Times, made the seemingly banal point that luck, in addition to talent and hard work, usually plays a role in an individual's success. Frank's blasphemy earned him an invitation on Fox News, where he would play the role of the loony liberal spitting in the face of middle-class values. The interview offers a remarkable testament to the belligerence with which conservatives cling to the mythology of heroic capitalist individualism. As the Fox host, Stuart Varney, restated Frank's outrageous claims, a voice in the studio can actually be heard laughing off-camera. Varney treated Frank's argument with total incredulity, offering up ripostes such as "That's outrageous! That is outrageous!" and "That's nonsense! That is nonsense!" Turning the topic to his own inspiring rags-to-riches tale, Varney asked: "Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent?"

There seems to be something almost inherent in the right-wing psychology that drives its rich adherents to dismiss the role of luck--all the circumstances that must break right for even the most inspired entrepreneur--in their own success. They would rather be vain than grateful. So seductive do they find this mythology that they omit major episodes of their own life, or furnish themselves with preposterous explanations (such as the supposed handicap of making it in American television with a British accent--are there any Brits in this country who have not been invited to appear on television?) to tailor reality to fit the requirements of the fantasy.

The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that "the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity . . . there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America." In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person's income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

In addition to describing the rich as "hard-working," conservatives also have the regular habit of describing them as "productive" . . .

This mentality fits perfectly with Mitt Romney's infamous 2012 remarks about the "47 percent":

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. . .

Romney's claims were at best grossly misleading, and taken in larger context were outright false. Still, that didn't stop him from sticking by them (as did many surrogates), eventually apologizing, then making similar remarks and finally claiming he didn't say what he did. It's also worth noting that he said this behind closed doors, at a private event, which suggests that Romney really believed this bullshit himself or at the very least thought his donor base did. Likewise, for the past several years, Romney's running mate Paul Ryan has offered various plans to funnel more money to the rich while gutting the social safety net, an old con that never seems to go out of fashion with conservatives. The essential story of the past fifty-some years for movement conservatism and the Republican Party has been selling bigotry and delivering plutocracy, of the Southern Strategy and Reaganomics (also know as supply-side economics or trickle-down economics). The theme for one day of the 2012 Republican National Convention was "We Built It," referencing clumsy remarks by Barack Obama taken out of context, lacing them with resentment, and pushing any sort of "debate" about the social contract and the role of government to a petulant, childish and dishonest extreme. The leaders of movement conservatism agree that the game is rigged, but they deny it's for the benefit of the rich and powerful, instead offering scapegoats such as liberals, Democrats, feminists, ethnic minorities, gay people... (really, something for everyone – but then, that's why Republicans are the inclusive, big tent party).

In recent years, there's been an interesting variation on the ol' "I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps" claim. The stories to deflect charges of privilege and about the value of hard work from Rick Santorum, Ann Romney, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, among others, have focused on their fathers and grandfathers. Naturally, they don't come right out and say 'I'm not privileged because my (grand)father worked hard,' or 'I deserve it all because of my (grand)parents,' but that is the gist. (Apparently virtue, like money, is passed down through the generations.)

(I've focused on conservatives and Republicans here, but obviously, the Democratic Party has a significant plutocratic, corporatist faction, and that shouldn't be ignored when it comes to reform efforts. That said, the Republican Party is definitely more plutocratic and their rep in that regard is well-deserved. Despite several notable electoral defeats, it still doesn't have anything beyond lip service and dogma for the middle class, not to mention the poor – remember them? It certainly has nothing comparable to what the Congressional Progressive Caucus offers, policy-wise.)

Sadly, conservatives have become increasingly intent on screwing the poor and anyone fallen on hard times, with consistent attacks on food stamps forming one of the more glaring examples. More striking is the relentless demonization, including claims that Jesus hates the poor (who have it good), that Jesus opposes progressive taxation and social services, that the filthy homeless should stay out of the sight of their betters, that those who have lost their homes should be mocked, that food stamp recipients are akin to animals, and that that starving schoolchildren should dive into dumpsters for food.

The game is rigged. Some people are too cloistered to know it. A percentage of that group can be reached. But some people know the game's rigged, want to keep it that way and tilt the game even further. And some are so filled with hatred it's unlikely they'll ever significantly change their views. After all, in contrast with those lucky duckies they decry, theirs is a hard life, and it requires sustained cruelty for them to live with themselves.

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

Update: In September 2014, Mitt Romney offered yet another account of his "47 percent" remarks, that he "reflected back to the man" who asked him a question at the fundraiser. David Corn of Mother Jones offers a good account, and Daily Kos, Paul Waldman and Steve Benen provide more context, including the staggering number of falsehoods Romney spouted during his presidential campaign. (Fodder for its own post, perhaps.)