Right on cue, Michael Barone and E. J. Dionne weigh in on what lessons Americans can learn from the UK elections which have yet to happen.
Barone’s lesson is that the left is fucked, everywhere, worldwide. Dionne’s is that Republicans should move to the center.
What’s great about a foreign election is that you can draw any lesson you like from it. Given any outcome and any possible conclusion, you can find a way of arguing that the outcome is evidence for the conclusion. For example, if the Tories do well, it will partly be because of Labor losing support to Lib Dems. So it could be that the “lesson” is that Dems need to worry more about their left flank. Or that Republicans need to worry about their extreme flank. Or that Democrats should admit they are Beckett-loving atheists like Nick Clegg. So Barone’s and Dionne’s conclusions are just two of a more or less infinite set of conclusions that it is possible to draw from the UK elections…even though those elections haven’t happened yet.
I’m reminded of a Noam Chomsky quote from commenter Mark S. about a very different topic, evolutionary psychology:
You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s’. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.
(It’s no accident that David Brooks and Nick Kristof are both preparing books on cognitive science, btw.)
MikeJ
I thought the lesson to be learned was that *everybody* hates Republicans, the British most of all. They’ve never forgiven Labour for being Bush’s poodle.
And the Lib Dems are doing well because as angry as they are with Labour they like the Tories less.
jibeaux
Well, I learned from the defaced billboards of David Cameron that the UK’s angry populists/liberals are awesomer and funnier than our angry populists/liberals. So if anyone lives near one of those “miss me yet?” billboards and owns a can of spray paint, consider the gauntlet thrown.
jibeaux
I guess it’s also worth noting that our billboards here in car culture land tend to be four thousand feet above the ground instead of nice and accessible, though.
Americanadian
There will be some interesting lessons to be learned, especially contrasting the Tories and the Republicans, two parties with historically close ties that have recently diverged greatly. If Cameron’s middle-of-the-road Toryism wins the election it might provide a useful blueprint for the Republicans. Not like the base would let them follow it, at least not until 2016 or so, but the model will be there for some Republican to learn from eventually.
David in NY
“books on cognitive science”
Brooks and Kristof are trying to further muck up an area already in pretty bad shape after Steven Pinker got through with it?
MikeJ
Billboards, for those haven’t seen them.
Culture of Truth
“David Brooks and Nick Kristof are both preparing books on cognitive science”
oooh I should block out time now to not read them.
Ann B. Nonymous
Are you joking about Brooks and Kristof? No, I can tell by the expression on your face you’re not.
I still want to take a two-by-four to Andrew Sullivan for his promotion of that Bell Curve tripe, although some people have suggested a fire extinguisher as in that French movie I couldn’t bear to watch.
Violet
If those dimwit pundits had half a brain they’d realize that the lesson is that politics is local and that no conclusions about US politics can be drawn based on the UK election.
But that doesn’t make them any money. It just proves they’re useless. So they won’t say that.
V.O.R.
Multiple “stories” may be true.
And some “stories” are better supported than others.
Take your cognitive immunization strategy and stick it up your teleological relativism, why don’tcha!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
So it’s kind of like using the Bible to justify X?
I’m not going to read a Michael Barone piece, but I doubt he at all ackowledges that the vast majority of western European conservatives (based on my casual observations– not an expert) would have been primaried out of today’s Republican party, unless they were one of Mitch McConnell’s useful idiots from Maine. I remember when Sarkozy’s election was proof of the permanent Republican majority. I was chuckling about that when he made his snarky congratulations on our health care bill last month.
licensed to kill time
What’s ‘great’ about the conclusions they draw is that their starting point is the conclusion. That makes it so handy, because all you have to do is work backwards from there, throwing in any random data points to leave a bread crumb trail so their followers can easily find their way to the foregone conclusion.
Culture of Truth
Applebees and Hysteria in the Modern Pundit: the Case of David B.
beltane
Is Labor really left anymore? Sorry, but the party of Tony Blair is not my idea of a leftist party. Blair and Brown have made Bill Clinton look like Hugo Chavez in comparison.
Mark S.
Shorter Michael Barone:
toujoursdan
Barone’s lesson is that the left is fucked, everywhere, worldwide.
Hahahahaha… the only two countries where the conservative party in power is anything like the Republicans is the Conservative Party in Canada and the Nats in New Zealand. Neither party polls more than 35-38% of the electorate which means that 62-65% of the voters voted for leftist parties.
What parties on the left in the UK, France, New Zealand, Canada and other countries need to do is either merge or form coalitions. Then the Right would be fucked.
jwb
I’m hoping for a big win by the Lib-Dems so we can hear endless stories about how, if you ignore all relevant details, our teabaggers are just like them.
Citizen_X
Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! My brain hurts!
Wile E. Quixote
Even the liberal New Republic agrees that the outcome of the British elections, whatever it may be, will be good news for John McCain.
Calouste
I wonder what the pundits would make of the Dutch election in June (except of course that they don’t speak English over there so are not worth paying any attention to). The Labor party there holds a lead in the polls at the moment.
Brachiator
Ah, pundits can’t help but pund, pointlessly. This reminds me of bonehead reporters asking, “What about L.A.?” when an earthquake devastates a foreign country. The US is not the center of the universe.
It might be interesting to ask how the British elections may affect areas where the UK and the US have common or overlapping interests. For example, a lot of the Goldman Sachs financial crap emanated from their City of London offices, so the views of the various candidates on financial regulation might be interesting. The UK is still a major ally with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, so again here there is room for some intelligent questions.
But what we might be able to learn from the election? Did these guys stay up all night after the White House Correspondents Dinner and chuck too many Red Bulls?
slippy
That is such a coincidence, because so am I! Next week I’m going to write a book about brain surgery, and this summer I will be building and launching a rocket to the Moon! Without blowing myself to smithereens!
Also I design deepwater drilling blowout prevention devices that I sell on the Internet. I coulda saved BP a SHIT-TON of money.
El Cid
Surely this is good news for
John McCainSarah PalinTeaTards:Wile E. Quixote
@David in NY:
How did Steven Pinker muck up cognitive science? I thought that he was a leader in the field. I base this on no other knowledge than my reading of The Language Instinct and the number of copies of same that I’ve seen at friend’s houses.
Calouste
@toujoursdan:
I think you miss out on Italy there. Heavily concentrated media ownership to influence elections, corruption, sex scandals, authoritarianism, Silvio Berlusconi has it all.
Tom Q
I remember a Democratic consultant in the early 90s noting how Dems thought the British election was going to foretell the American election in ’92…until John Major unexpectedly won it. Suddenly, it became irrelevant.
It’s all predictive on about the same level as which league wins the World Series (from ’52 to 76, an AL win meant a GOP win and vice versa…since 1980, forget about it) or which team prevails in the Final Four (Kentucky means Dem!) — a perfect harbinger, except when it isn’t.
Chuck
Wait what? Guess all you need these days is opinions on anything in order to write a book about anything else. Expertise is dead. Await my book on quantum field theory shortly.
John Cole
Awesome. So they can do for that field what George Will has done for climate science.
Because some kid, when he went to college, grad, doctoral, and post-doc for a dozen or more grueling years of eating Ramen and making no money and working his/her ass off just wanted to spend the next twenty years grudgingly appearing on the Today show to knock down conventional wisdom burped up by these two asshats.
frankdawg
This is sort of like how I wonder, every time it rains Gawd knows how to send just the right amount and shape of water to fill the low spot in my driveway. Its really amazing! No matter how hard it rains that spot is always full and always just the same shape. Its a miracle. The when the sun come out and the water starts to evaporate the water knows to stay just the same shape as the hole it is in!
Verily I say onto thee this is proof that what I believe is divine insight and incontestably true!
Brachiator
@Chuck:
Isn’t that the one with the blurb by Sarah Palin, “How’s that string thingy workin’ out for ya?”
Because you just know that a half-time govenor quitter just has to be an expert on stuff like dipolar collisions of polar molecules in the quantum regime. Also, too.
liberal
@Brachiator:
One thing we can definitely conclude, IMHO: first-past-the-post sucks.
The Grand Panjandrum
I can’t imagine why anyone would want to take the outcome of an election in another country and make it fit the lesson they wish us to learn. Personally, I think the reason South Korea has been such an economic dynamo is that they have fist fights in their parliament, hence we should have fist fights on the floor of the Senate, between Barbara Boxer and James Infhofe. It would save the taxpayers money AND once again Boxer could smack down Inhofe to prove that elections do have consequences.
psycholinguist
@Wile E. Quixote:
slippy
@The Grand Panjandrum: Alas, the period of cane-thrashing opposing senators is deep in America’s glorious past which shall never come again. These days our right-wing Senators wait until their counterparts are away from the Senate (and the C-Span cameras) and get someone else to actually mail their anthrax, er, sabotage their small light aircraft, or whatever for them because it is unseemly for a Senator to be seen thrashing another Senator with a cane.
licensed to kill time
@Brachiator:
That made me laugh, a lot.
liberal
@psycholinguist:
Which perspectives? There’s more than one fundamental controversy lying around (though they’re all connected).
First, there’s the role of natural selection and the advent of evolutionary psychology, which a lot of people attack because of the prominance of “just-so” stories.
Then there’s the issue of culture vs biology in social science; Pinker espoused a very strong view in The Blank Slate. Naturally, he stepped on a lot of toes there.
There’s also the issue of to what extent language is innate (largely genetically preprogrammed, a la Chomsky, Pinker, etc, or a larger role for environmental inputs, a la the connectionists).
Tied up with those is the “modularity of the mind” thesis.
I find Pinker’s views pretty appealing, but I must admit going to a conference where people from competing schools presented somewhat compelling data.
(NB: I’m not an expert—only read the lay stuff Pinker and Chomsky have published.)
jwb
@The Grand Panjandrum: With a name like Boxer, how could she lose?
JGabriel
DougJ:
More or less infinite?
What is that, like the difference between Aleph-Null and Aleph-One? Or more like between Aleph and Taw?
.
HumboldtBlue
Churchill was a Liberal, so suck on that … ummm … liberal fascists!
Suicidal Zebra
One thing I take from UK election coverage: here the most respected commentary is from the satirists, over in the US talking heads prevail.
See: Charlie Brooker
Oh, and bullshit like nutter this gets a negative press.
Brandon
Doug,
I am glad that you have stopped linking Politico, our collective sanity is the better for it. But what on earth would compel you to do anything other than ignore that racist weasel Barone?
El Cid
Greenspan honored for having been an upstanding Randian ideologue once again, and, also, fuck all you peasants:
Jackasses. These mother fuckers shouldn’t be let out in public, much less put in charge of the biggest god-damned economy in history.
Oh, also, stop all da spendin’, cut tha taxes, and get gubmit offa backs a’business.
psycholinguist
@liberal:
Well, not sure if you were arguing with me or not, but just in case, I’d say all of those issues you mentioned are cut from the same epistemological cloth, with the fundamental issue underlying them being where does that know-how come from? Like I said, Pinker is cool with me, he is a real honest to god researcher (although his methodology is sloppy as hell) – I just lean farther to the nurture side of the argument and he tends to defend the nature point of view.
slippy
@El Cid: Doesn’t being constantly right about everything get so tiresome sometimes?
::sigh::
El Cid
@slippy: SHUT UP HIPPIE
Barry
John, please stop with the wall mart gift card ads
It’s frikkin’ irritating to have that voice yell at me everytime Ioad Balloon-Juice.
Thanks!
R-Jud
@jwb:
Anne Appelbaum already went there in Slate. I’m not linking to it; you can go look if you want. Think it was about 10 days ago.
Also, saw this fabulously defaced Tory billboard in situ this weekend.
Turnout is everything. People don’t need to register to vote here. I hope they bother to go out and do it.
Quicksand
If you like to point and laugh at Bobo’s sloppy pseudo-scientific ruminations, don’t miss the ongoing series at Language Log.
Posts include:
“David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist”
“David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist”
“David Brooks, Social Psychologist”
etc.
all linked from here, which also links back to some of DougJ’s previous thoughts on the subject.
Comrade Tank Hueco
@Ann B. Nonymous:
Get in line. Fucker’s doing it again.
slippy
@Quicksand: This is going to be like begging the question, but what exactly does David Brooks know? On what subject is he actually qualified to converse, let alone author a volume regarding?
I’m racking my brains for an answer because all I can imagine is in the Rational World I would love to inhabit, here is the title of the only book Brooks is qualified to write:
A fascinating expose of What David Brooks Knows, as told by the author.
slippy
@Comrade Tank Hueco: I keep forgetting he endorsed that stuff. But that explains why I cannot stand reading him at all. He is the diametric opposite of an intellectual. Kinda like, well, David Brooks.
EthylEster
I have watched the debates.
Clegg seems best to me by far. David Cameron looks like a perfect entrant for the Monty Python Upperclass Twit of the Year.
And Gordon Brown is just a hack, evidently. But I loved the open mike comments he made after placating the irritated old racist biddy. I doubt he’ll have to endure much more of that after the elections.
D.N. Nation
Which was the same lesson he was giving us just prior to Election 2008 because Sarah Palin was gonna put McCain over the top.
Also, too: Baroney can’t be taken seriously.
licensed to kill time
__
Now what is the message there? The message is that there are known “knowns.” There are things David Brooks knows that he knows. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that David Brooks now knows he doesn’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things David Brooks does not know he doesn’t know. /Rummy
slippy
@D.N. Nation: I think you misspelled that. It’s B-A-L-O-N-E-Y.
I think he has a second name, but I don’t know what it is.
(Sing that to the Oscar meyer theme)
Geeno
@Quicksand: More like David Brooks: Sociopathic Twit
RSA
I know cognitive scientists. David Brooks, you are no cognitive scientist. Jesus, the guy can’t even present his own experiences without lying about them for effect. And he’s going to try to cover some general theories about human cognition?
Nylund
1. Even the Tories are in favor of nationalized heath care and gay marriage.
2. The animosity towards labour has a lot to do with the Brits being mad about being Bush’s lapdog, the war in Iraq, and Brown’s role in the same Bush-like financial policies that wrecked the economy.
Yet somehow, according to the media, this proves that the UK totally wishes Sarah Palin could be their next Prime Minister.
If the Tories were comprised of a bunch of Christianist nut jobs that showed up to rallies with assault rifles spewing off about all the Maoists in parliament, they wouldn’t get a single vote.
The modern GOP probably has more in common with the British National Front that the Conservative party.
R-Jud
@EthylEster:
Eh, Gordon’s no idiot. He’s intelligent and actually understands policy and policymaking. It’s the whole “relating to people” thing that trips him up. I think he also has a LOT of rage– he’s wanted to be PM for YEARS, and Blair handed him a poisoned chalice. Instead of getting the fuck over it and getting on with his job, however, he’s been moping around about it.
MTiffany
Let me spare everyone the task of reading Mr. Brooks undoubtedly insightful, well-researched and informative tome and give you all the Cliff’s notes: 1) people’s brains are wired to be conservative (the science he cherry-picked says so!); 2) liberal impulses are the result of faulty brain wiring which we all possess to greater or lesser degree because, hey, no one’s perfect; 3) faulty brain wiring which results in liberal impulses can be corrected by the body’s own repair mechanisms, if only people learn how to think properly, ie, conservatively; 4) people who are conservative by nature are happier because their brains allow them to see the world as they believe it ought to be, sparing them from unnecessary thought and consternation which comes from embracing truth rather than truthiness; 5) those intelligent design people are on to something because there’s a part of the human brain which produces the sensations associated with religious experience, ergo, ID is right because why else would the human brain have a region dedicated to worship if there wasn’t a diety which wanted to be worshipped by its creations, er, intelligently designed life forms?
And there will probably be some bit thrown in about how Haiti is proof that the Bell Curve is not just a good read but good science too.
I’m sure that will be Bobo’s breathtakingly insightful take on modern cognitive ‘science,’ at least the bits which don’t conflict with conservative truthiness.
4jkb4ia
Relating to the last post, the media meme which I saw was that the British election has become more like the American election with the focus on debates and personalities rather than party manifestos. So the inference is that the British election has less to do with any American issues than with any British issues.
However, I expect to see groaning on this side of the pond from known suspects if David Miliband becomes the new Labor leader.
EthylEster
@R-Jud: i did not and do not question his intelligence.
that’s what i mean about being a hack: he figured it was his turn in the pool and he’s very angry to discover that someone has already pissed in it.
he may understand policy but he does NOT understand people. but still, he reasoned that if he hung on long enough, he’d get his “due”. and IMO he is..just now.
if only somebody would punch that asshole Blair in his smug mug….
Anya
Michael Barone is delusional.
The Tories are running away from the right. Let’s review some of what they said they stand for in this election: same-sex unions (Cameron even supports marriage); strong environment and climate change policy; and regulating the Market. In some aspects they are to the left of our blue dogs. As for the GOP, it’s simple, their policies are based on hating the other (which is anyone but rural white hetro males). the difference between Britain’s Conservatives and America’s conservatives is striking. I don’t know how anyone can look at that and come up with the idea that the left is in trouble, unless they are in denial or hoping that no one will notice.
dslak
I’d take Sullivan and the other Bell Curvers seriously if they bit the bullet and acknowledged that the whites are usurping the power which rightfully belongs to their intellectual superiors, such as Jews and Asians.
Funnily enough, they only ever want to talk about the comparative intelligence of blacks vs. whites. They get mum when it comes to acknowledging that, according to the standards which they think ought to have bearing on social policy, Jews, East Asians, and South Asians are more intelligent than white people.
Anya
@dslak: so in your pecking order blacks rank last? Are you validating that theory then?
aimai
I think there’s a kind of white supremacist, as well as run of the mill giggly “Just Asking Questions” white guy, who at this point gladly admits to some notion of jewish and/or asian superiority. I think they find that kind of liberating–they think it liberates them from being accused of self interested racism. But it actually functions to excuse them from having to compete where they think they can’t win or have already lost. Eugene Volokh who (apparently) is jewish seems to have thrown this “I believe lots of things are genetic, including the accusation that my own people are hyperacquisitive and the ones who aren’t religious are all bastards…” because he thinks it excuses him from the overt racism of believing–against all real scientific evidence–that both race and racism are phony constructs empty of scientific meaning.
aimai
dslak
@Anya: I thought I was clear that I was referring to the pecking order that Sullivan et al are trumpeting. I was not endorsing it. I was however pointing out that, when the rubber meets the road, they don’t, either.
If that was not clear, it should be now.
dslak
@aimai: I don’t doubt that such creatures exist, but they’re more often a facade for the truly pernicious forms of racism. The white supremacist does not respond to the “fact” that certain non-whites are “smarter” than he is with acquiescence, but by calling for the state to act to mitigate that fact. Not in the interest of equality, but in the interest of promoting the white race.
If they consider this use of such data to be illegitimate – as they assure us they do – why do they at the same time insist that it has ramifications for social policy at all?
Nutella
The technical term for what Noam Chomsky describes in evolutionary biology is “Just So stories”.
prufrock
@Violet:
…that politics is local and that no conclusions about US politics can be drawn based on the UK election. But that doesn’t make them any money. It just proves they’re useless. So they won’t say that.
Aw, you just killed the NFL draft! Mel Kiper hates you!
liberal
@psycholinguist:
No, just asking for clarification, as there are many controversies.
I’m fond of Chomsky’s rendering of this as “Plato’s problem.”
Belvoir
I’m happy to be a Yank, but I’ve always been a keen observer of Over There. I’ll just say that when American pundits try to wring meaning from UK elections, they always seem to get it wrong. They have no feel for the currents of the British psyche that are in play, at all. Words like “liberal” and “conservative” there have different meanings there than they do here.
And even the rightiest politician in the UK would be considered a flaming hippie here, in some aspects.
Mike in NC
Barone has had his nose stuck up the ass of the corpse of Ronald Reagan for decades.
Tattoosydney
@4jkb4ia:
I’d hit that.
aimai
@dslak:
Oh, absolutely, there’s a strong strand of white supremacist stuff that regards non whites as extremely cunning, dangerous, and unfairly talented. In fact the call to a white homeland is explicitly a protectionist one–the government is called in to protect a vulnerable white population that is seen as unable to protect itself from competition. Not sexual competition (protect our women!) nor competition for fertility (they’re outbreeding us!), nor intellectual (damned eggheads!). The real period of white supremacy is pushed back and back, before the hordes overwhelmed us with their cunning, creativity, and fertility.
aimai
d.s.
Let’s not kid ourselves. There are only a few possible narratives that will dominate:
If Brown somehow wins, it’s because Cameron sold out his conservative principles. Therefore Republicans must end their centrist outreach to the teabaggers and move to the right.
If Cameron wins, it means the British public repudiated Obama and the Democrats.
If Clegg wins, they’ll ignore everything his party actually campaigned on and compare him to Ross Perot. Therefore Obama must immediately close the deficit or the Democrats will go the way of Labour.
Mark S.
Evolutionary Psychology Bingo Card
I especially liked “The gender dynamics of our savannah ancestors looked curiously like those of 1950’s America.”