Man, a lot of stuff I said back then was really naive, immature, and stupid. But some of it was downright prescient, no?

~Jon

If I remember correctly, back in the 90’s, an army of snitches and hall monitors aligned with the Clinton camp emerged to compile lists and dossiers of various political factions and publications deemed insufficiently respectful of a sitting president i.e. in league with the “far right.”

Fast forward a few years, and Morris Dees has morphed into David Horowitz. The same Clinton haters now malign the Bush haters as sinister “far left extremists” who are in league with Al Qaeda.

Obviously the Clinton haters didn’t really give a damn about the abuse of Executive power or the ongoing erosion of the Bill of Rights.

I’m willing to predict that many on the left who have suddenly become outspoken civil libertarians will suddenly cease to care once a democrat is elected POTUS…

It’s frustrating, but that’s American politics for you…

I was sort of rooting for Dubya back in 2000, too, because I thought he’d be more amusing than Gore. I still do get the the occasional chuckle out of him, but mostly he just makes me sad.

“Bush Derangement Syndrome” is just a funny political stereotype. And like all funny jokes, it has some truth. There really are hilariously out of touch people who think that Bush is the font of all evil. And it’s natural for those calm, rational (but deluded people) who think Bush is great to try to tar all anti-Bush people with that sentiment.

The important thing for each side to do is marginalize their own crazies. It’s important for calm anti-Bush people to tell the “Bush = Hitler!” people to keep it down, if they want to be taken seriously. Just like I laugh at the crazy nut-case extremists who are ideologically oriented closer to me.

It’s also important for people to realize that just because crazy person A agrees with sane person B, that doesn’t necessarily mean that person B is also wrong or crazy. I think that this may be a realm of sanity beyond our current political environment.

Turning to Julian’s response, I’d say that the friend of delberation can still defend itself in the instance you mention by saying that it is not the motives that make the tobacco study wrong, but that the methodology is terrible. If, being friends of delibeartion and committed to falliblism, we wanted to try to falsify our claims that the tobacco industries studies that say smoking is not harmful to our health are really bad studies, which would be more convincing: an independent person conducting a really badly done replication of the findings or a person who works for the tobacco companies who could show us with complete transparency that their study is legit?
I’d say that the latter is more convincing, and the reason that we cannot be convinced is because the tobacco industry cannot produce a transparent study with a legitimate research design that leads to the conclusions that they want to see.

As for the lay person, I’d say: (1) this ought to motivate us to teach basic methods and truth claims to a broader amount of students in our education system and with a renewed sense of its purpose in preparing people for liberal democratic citizenship in a commercial republic and (2) this is why a broad and open scientific community is important for the hard to understand studies. As long as anyone can review the data, consensus on whether or not a group like the tobacco industry has a case in defending itself will come to the surface as a result of people who will demand acceptable evidence to justify arguments.

Long story short, the tobacco industries studies are wrong. They are designed in violation of the rules of legitimate democratic inquiry. We could make not too imaginative guesses as to why these well educated, well paid scientists would do this, but given the rules of democratic engagement we don’t have to. Hannah Arendt believed that one of the reasons the French Revolution got so messy was that the French were all about judging motives in politics, and this insertion of motives as someting to be judged became a judgment of the affairs of the human heart that are hidden from view. Robbespierre’s war on hypocrisy was part of a larger movement in France at the time to criminalize acting in motives deemed against the interests of the state as a whole, whic in turn lead to the guillotine for quite a lot of Frenchmen. This mixing of power and motive was a toxic combination in French politics, we’d probably be well advised to leave it alone ourselves.

Ascribing motive to statements and proscribing them tainted because they come from a biased source undercuts the value of democratic deliberation in ways that, well, no one really wants to go there.

Let me give an example: I know that Julian and I differ in opinion on smoking bans. Now, as one who disagrees with Julian, I could simply dismiss his view and say, “He’s a libertarian and a smoker”. But this is not a particularly charitable way to engage in argument, either to Julian or to myself (provided I’m concerned with getting the right answers on questions to the public good) One either makes a compelling good faith effort to convince that smoking is a serious health risk for those and others, and that the ideas about market forces solving the problem on their own rests on a creative, yet flawed logic, or one does not.

Julian’s own bias, one way or another, need not color the content of the debate. Notice how in my telling of the story, I have selectively not revealed anything about my own potential biases on smoking while reminding you of Julian’s on multiple occasions. Which, if this were an actual debate over smoking bans, would make my narrative, which is intentionally omitting empirical content and overexaggerating other content much less scrupulous than Julian arguing, “I smoke cigarettes, I prefer markets to state institutions, I think smoking bans are wrong and here’s why…”

The rules of fair democratic exchange are both simple and generic. Two of them include, “you don’t argue believing you cannot be convinced you are wrong if shown the right arguments and evidence” and “you don’t exclude people who want to try to convince you they are right that are playing by the rules.” Julian points out that defenders of the President are increasingly undercutting these very general, and seemingly uncontroversial rules, and it seems to me that he is responded to with more of the same. One wonders what such supporters will say when they disfavor the policies of leaders in some future time and are dismissed out of hand.