Wonkblogging and the Liberal Project

A while back Bhaskar Sunkara posted a rather incoherent rant against Ezra Klein in particular and left-leaning (as if there are other kinds) wonk bloggers in general. I say incoherent mostly because Sunkara drifts from explaining why a policy focus is a terrible thing  to slamming the New York Times for focusing on personality during the Chicago teacher’s strike. Apparently, how non-wonk pundits’ obsessions with personality reflect on Ezra Klein is left as an exercise for the reader. Sunkara criticizes Klein for his limited praise of Paul Ryan in 2010 and then praises Paul Ryan himself.

Conor Williams cuts through Sunkara’s hyperbole and weird robot metaphors and sums up the post as such:

Sunkara argues that the new technocrats mistake their obsession with facts for a knowledge of value judgments. By mistaking policy for politics, they set themselves (and their fellow liberals/progressives/et al) up for political defeats.

In making this argument, Sunkara is kind of right, kind of wrong, but in general misses the entire point. As Williams writes, “better chart blogging isn’t about to secure Florida’s electoral votes.” That’s probably true. However, Sunkara is being intentionally obtuse when he writes,

The wonks couldn’t understand. “Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation,” Klein whined. Republicans weren’t playing fair. They were playing at politics, while he was trying to construct sound policy.

Sunkara and I both reside firmly on the left, but I think we are vastly different partisans. I’ve read little of him, so I apologize if I do him a disservice, but I get the impression he supports the left for their goals and values – full stop. There’s nothing wrong with that. I support most of the left’s goals and values as well. But I also believe that, values aside, the Democratic Party does a better job of governing. Sunkara may find it offensive that Ezra ends up making a case for the left without such value judgments. I’m guessing, however, that showing that the Republican party circa 2012 either has no idea how to run a country, or are actively lying about their plans, might be a persuasive argument to many voters. There are whole swaths of the country that still think that Democrats might be nice fellows with their hearts in the right place, but that if you want the trains to run on time you should vote for those sensible Republican businessmen. If that were ever true, it certainly ended in 2000. Political attitudes are sticky, and it’s a political boon to the left to be able to point out that the Democrats can now do a better job of keeping the country going.

But mostly, as I said, Sunkara misses the point. He’s writing as if political speech is a zero-sum game, and that Klein is taking up valuable airtime that would be better allocated to some ideologue that would make value-based arguments for the political left. But again, returning to Conor Williams,

The wonks aren’t really the problem. After all, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with fact-based policies. They beat the hell out of the alternative. Sophisticated policy analysis is fine, even necessary, once we’ve (politically) hashed out the relevant value-laden objectives that we’re after. Snazzy charts alone can’t settle whether or not the United States should pursue educational equity or stratification. That’s a moral and political question. Wonky analysis can help us get a better sense of which policies might encourage one or the other.

There’s a place for technocrats, and there’s a place for firebrands, and in general the left needs both. Whatever “I’m not a liberal” stuff may come out of Ezra’s mouth, it’s obvious he operates with liberal assumptions. Read a few of his columns and try to imagine any of it coming from somebody with an R next to their name. It’s hard to imagine Klein and his team spending so much time and effort detailing how government interventions can be done efficiently if they didn’t think such interventions were a worthy use of government in the first place.

Really, Ezra’s whole project depends on liberal assumptions, and that’s where I think he and technocracy are so important. There aren’t conservative versions of Klein.¹ There are conservatives who pretend to do what Ezra does, but they’re like Ryan: they don’t want government to work effectively. They don’t want government at all, and in fact the less effectively it works the better for them, because it’s easier to get rid of a poorly run institution than a well-run institution (For the life of me I can’t find the link, but as I understand it there is no technical reason the IRS couldn’t simplify tax returns for 90% of the population by mailing out pre-filled forms based on the standard deduction and an individual’s W-2’s, and people could just sign the form and return it. Basically there are two groups that block such a reform: tax preparation firms, and the anti-tax lobby who wants to keep tax payment as ostentatiously difficult as possible in order to affect public opinion).

I think for why technocrats are important today, we should at least listen to their (if oblique) justifications for their project. As Matt Yglesias – another dreaded wonkblogger, but at the time writing for safely liberal ThinkProgress – wrote,

For the past 65-70 years—and especially for the past 30 years since the end of the civil rights argument—American politics has been dominated by controversy over the size and scope of the welfare state. Today, that argument is largely over with liberals having largely won… There are big items still on the progressive agenda. But they don’t really involve substantial new expenditures. Instead, you’re looking at carbon pricing, financial regulatory reform, and immigration reform as the medium-term agenda. Most broadly, questions about how to boost growth, how to deliver public services effectively, and about the appropriate balance of social investment between children and the elderly will take center stage.

This is (as is Yglesias’s wont) rather glib, and I and any other liberal could come up with a hundred things we’d like the federal government to spend money on to improve society. But we’ve had republicans running on protecting Medicare for two cycles now. Sure, they’ll try to kill if it nobody’s looking, or if they can pin it on anybody else, but the social safety net has become such an accepted, if not cherished, part of American life that they can’t come out and say “we want to kill Medicare, we want to kill Social Security.” They can just hand-wave about reform – and it takes wonks to point out that handwaving for what it is. Arguments about values and goals don’t help when Republicans ape liberal values and goals of supporting seniors financially and medically and then try to push privatizing Social Security and switching to Medicare vouchers. You need to argue that the Republican proposals won’t work, and that they’ll make things worse, and these are empirical arguments that need to be grounded in the data. Moreover, there needs to be a liberal voice calling for these programs to be well-run, not only so that they do more good with less, but so they’re harder to kill.

And I think that this is what Klein, consciously or not, sees as his raison d’être. Ezra, quoting Yglesias three years later, wrote,

The progressive project of building a decent welfare state is giving way to the more technocratic work of financing and managing it. How government is run, more than what exactly it does, seems set to be the main battleground of American politics in coming years.

This sentiment may offend Sunkara. But rather than seeing it as an abdication of values, I see it as a project that of necessity grows out of the values that Sunkara himself presumably holds. Moreover, I see it as an extension of the Progressive Movement of the early 20^th Century – only rather than trying to put technocrats in charge of everything, Klein and the wonkblog movement are trying to make technocrats out of voters, building democratic support for technocratic policies. What separates the wonkbloggers from their fellow wonks is that instead of making their cases in whitepapers meant for elite audiences, they seek to educate readers on topics that were formerly locked away in unreadable OMB reports.

One of conservatives’ biggest victories in the last thirty years has been to discredit the very notion of governmental intervention. Think of Ronald Reagan’s famous quote: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'” I don’t believe that conservatives successfully sold their values to the majority of the American people, but I think they did a good job of arguing that liberal values were unworkable. To the degree Klein et al can restore faith in the possibility of efficient and successful liberal programs, I think he does the left a favor.