I always look forward to reading Carlos Lozada, and I’m glad the New York Times, which he has just joined, is giving him room to stretch. But I can’t say I’m persuaded by his essay “How to Strangle Democracy While Pretending to Engage in It,” which touts the prescience and insight of Albert Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction.
I haven’t read that book since college, but I remember not seeing what was so great about it even then—and the occasional invocations of it I’ve come across since then haven’t brought me around. I’ll let Lozada summarize what he gets out of it:
When conservatives decry calls for progressive reform, he wrote, they often deploy one of three theses: perversity, futility and jeopardy. The first warns of unintended consequences: You may think a new social welfare program will mitigate economic inequality, for instance, but perversely, it will only entrench disparity. The second is even more pessimistic: Your policy proposal cannot make a dent in the status quo, and your repeated, futile efforts only make me question your motives. The third is most ominous: Your agenda will have devastating effects on many other arenas that you may have not even considered and is therefore too dangerous or foolish to carry out.
Once you have Hirschman’s categories in mind, they appear everywhere. . . .
That the three theses can be deployed in illogical combinations — your antipoverty program won’t reach those most in need, and it will also destroy their incentive to work! — does little to lessen their appeal. They reflect what Sam Tanenhaus, a dedicated observer of conservatism, has called the right’s “unity of certitude,” the belief that a liberal agenda necessarily equals an assault on American values. With such an enemy, any mix of arguments will do.
Lozada goes on to discuss what Hirschman saw as the characteristic argumentative moves of liberals, but suggests, like his inspiration, that they are less problematic, at least in our time.
It seems to me that Lozada’s example of illogic is too weak to withstand a slight modification: There’s nothing inconsistent with thinking that an anti-poverty program is both poorly targeted to the needy and likely to have negative effects on some of the people it does reach.
Anyway, what’s so telling about the fact that conservatives frequently deploy arguments based on perversity, futility, and jeopardy against liberal proposals? Each type of argument identifies a key defect a proposal can have. For that reason, they’re also types of argument that liberals frequently deploy against conservative proposals. Your ban on abortion will perversely endanger rather than save lives; it will be futile in reducing the abortion rate because of the back alley; it will jeopardize the economy.
To classify arguments is not to refute them. Arguments of any of these types can be made mistakenly or with excessive certitude, but it would be absurd to reject all such arguments out of hand; it would be mistaken even to adopt a bias against arguments that fall into these categories without attending to the specifics of each case. Dismissing such arguments would not “strangle democracy,” but it seems less conducive to robust debate than making them.