Politics, intellectual decline edition

Andrew Norton posts a couple of very interesting posts about the (supposed) intellectual decline of right-wing politics. Starting with Richard Posner ruminations on the US right, characterised by

the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

to which I would add Dick Cheney’s appaling defence of enhanced interrogation techniques torture, Norton contrasts  the situation in Australia, where although the right wing appears temporarily unable to offer concrete policy alternatives, it has at the very least steered itself away from the grotesque nonsense currently enveloping the Republican Party in the US. In fact, the missteps of the supposedly centre left Rudd government opens up an opportunity for the right to renew itself. Sez Norton:

While I expect a period of disorientation on the American right, on the Australian right we may be headed for a period of renewed focus – though not political success for some years at least. After looking like dull managerialists for most of the their first year in office, Fraseresque in frenetic activity but little actual movemement, team Rudd are now looking like reckless Whitlamites. There will be plenty to get fired up about, even if (as last time) the effect in the end is mainly to save social democracy from itself (to turn around the Rudd analysis).

Norton puts down the relative robustness of the Australian right to three main factors: (1) Australia being a much less religious country than the US, enabling the right to avoid divisive and ultimately marginal issues such as abortion; (2) Australia’s better constitutional system: ‘parliamentary conscience votes here, undemocratic judicial fiat in the US’ and (3) pragmatic economic policies of the Howard government, characterised by budget surpluses (contrasting, needless to say, with Bush’s reckless deficits). Nonetheless, some challenges remain:

While Australian conservatism hasn’t failed on its own terms, on the other hand it is not obvious how Australian conservatives will be seen as having solutions to widely-accepted problems in the medium term. Possibly there will be scope for reworking family and social cohesion themes, but just how this will be done I don’t know. Perhaps the most interesting conservative issue at the moment is the charter/bill of rights, because of the significant challenge to our democratic system. But this is largely a negative agenda, and it is not clear whether conservative arguments will resonate with the broader public.

As mentioned above, Rudd’s dismal policies offer an opportunity here. This analysis is largely accurate. It does however fail to account for the flip side of this phenomenon. The right can be charged with intellectual decline. However, so can the left. The range of solutions, the depth of arguments presented by the left in the wake of a global recession and armed – by virtue of being in government in the US, the UK and Australia – with a historic opportunity of re-arranging the political landscape is disappointing to say the least. Take Kevin Rudd’s infamous and superficial essay in the Monthly. It is a largely a tick the box exercise: one can imagine a Rudd staffer going through the list of all possible culpable parties on the Right to lay the blame for the global financial crisis and ticking them off one by one. Bankers, tick, rating agencies tick, neo-liberals, tick, Hayek , big tick, the Liberals, oh, how clever. Never mind that the reasons for the crisis have as much to do with banks or raters as with a global savings imbalance, that Hayek is a somewhat deeper thinker than Rudd imagines (it is possible Hayek would be happy with the rise of globalised markets, it is also certain he would be appalled that the dispersion of risk characterising the financial crisis was not accompanied with a dispersion of knowledge enabling the risk-takers to make informed decisions), or that in practice the Liberals ran a pragmatic government much removed from doctrines of extreme ‘neo-liberalism’. At one point in the essay, Rudd offers three solutions to crisis. He then names the three solutions: regulation, regulation, and regulation. No doubt, better regulation is necessary and would be helpful but this is hardly an intellectual breakthrough.

The recent debate about the worth of economics is another case in point. With free markets under pressure, we are witnessing a return to the tired Keynesian framework. Inter-temporal and inter-general ramifications are taking a back seat. More worryingly, the supposed decline of classical economics is being filled by a growing fad of behavioural economics, prediction markets (see Andrew Leigh’s efforts in today’s Fin) and ‘network theory’. Each is extremely interesting in itself – I am a big fan of blending economics with psychology and network theory approaches to financial regulation are very interesting – but neither are or can possibly be a substitute for traditional economic theory.

In other words, the crisis is not only one of wallets but also of minds: both the Right and the Left are being exposed to have little in the way of intellectual depth or rigorous policy. It is perhaps a sign of times that in the end the politician gaining most success, Barack Obama, is not one informed by any special intellectual cohesion but by pragmatism.