The Uncaring Public
Everyone’s already said what needs to be said about the most Broderific aspects of David Broder’s latest column but I wanted to take a stab at another angle it contains:
It is the reaction of those swing voters — or the politicians’ anticipation of their shifting opinion — that drives the outcome of the big policy debates. You’ve had an example of this already with Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal for protecting the environment from carbon discharges.
Swing voters aside, there’s just very little reason at all to believe that public opinion has much of anything to do with the cap and trade debate. I got a briefing recently based on a pretty in-depth look at public opinion on climate energy issues and one clear finding is that the overwhelming majority of people have no idea what the phrase “cap and trade” refers to. And they certainly don’t have opinions about questions like auctioning permits or giving them away. People don’t pay that much attention to politics, and tend not to form detailed opinions about policy questions.
If anything, causation is likely to go the other way. If Barack Obama starts talking in high-profile situations about how it would be great if we had some “cap and trade” then people will start forming opinions about the policy based on their opinions about Obama. After all, Obama is something almost everyone has opinions about. People also have opinions about their local elected officials. If Mary Landrieux (D-LA) and David Vitter (R-LA) were to both start telling constituents and local media that there’s an idea called “cap and trade” and it’s bad for Louisiana and likely to kill jobs, then many Louisianans will conclude that this bipartisan consensus probably reflects some larger truth about the Louisiana economy.
17 Responses to “The Uncaring Public”
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April 13th, 2009 at 8:58 am
I think Yglesias is quite mistaken about how politics work optimally. One of the best governance systems in the world has been observed in Switzerland in the past half-century, which is better-governed, and wealthier, than almost any other European country.
Switzerland never had a definitive left-wing majority. Nor did it ever have a definitive right-wing majority. Instead, it had a collective executive of a 7-member council that is apportioned according to party standing in the parliament. (2 or 1 seats for each party). What you end up with is the best sort of status-quo bias; incremental, carefully thought-out change. So a climate scheme, for example, would take into consideration the opinions of the conservative, nativist People’s Party as well as the Greens. (In fact, with greater weight to the PP than the Greens, as the PP has two seats while the Greens have one)
I would note that Switzerland has a purely private, but very efficient, health system; a high per capita income; a thriving pharmaceutical and other high-technology industries.
Perhaps Yglesias should forsake his left-wing fantasies for a minute and see how the truly successful governments operate. That is, like Switzerland.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Actually the Greens have none; even better.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:06 am
People may have no idea what “cap and trade” means, but elected representatives do understand that a cap and trade police will result in higher energy prices (something Obama wisely acknowledged in the Presidential debates) and that it will have some effect on the economies of oil producing states. Those politicians probably have a good idea about what constituents’ reactions will be to those consequences; so what’s the difference?
Now if Mary Landrieux and a moderate Republican or two wanted to take a stand and say that higher energy prices are necessary to control carbon emissions and that the extra cost will be worth it in the long run, then that might sway some people based on their opinion of those politicians. But that seems to be exactly Broder’s point, as Broderific as it may be!
April 13th, 2009 at 9:12 am
@1: please, please, please notice that there’s a difference between descriptive and prescriptive analysis
April 13th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Matt YG: “This is how politics works in America.”
Myles SG: “Matt is wrong because this is how politics works in Switzerland.”
April 13th, 2009 at 9:31 am
My point was that Yglesias has got to stop looking for these sort of silly shortcuts:
What Yglesias implies is that the Democrats should simply ram cap-and-trade through in the shortest time possible with the least publicity possible. But it simply doesn’t work. Not in America, not in Switzerland, not anywhere. The other party is not going to oblige, to begin with. And that’s not the biggest point.
What he doesn’t realise when he is suggesting and advocating all those sort of very partisan line of legislating is that in the long-term, it comes back to boomerang at you. And that’s why I raised the comparison of the Swiss system, where you don’t have Democrats or Republicans or whatever trying to push stuff out of sight. And it works a lot better. Not just because it does so intrinsically, but because in the long term it is the only system that works.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:34 am
This is strangely reminiscent of the healthcare debate, where liberals like Yglesias won’t give an inch on the government-run plan option. What he doesn’t realise is that, say, if the non-public-option reform does not work or does not work well, another round of reform would be inevitable, and that reform, given that we would have already solved universality, must necessarily revolve around a strong public option.
It’s frightening how many liberals have an apocalyptic view of politics; either the Liberal Programme in its full glory, or perdition.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:36 am
And this blends with a strange predilection for rejects facts and realities. Switzerland has a fine system without public participation. Germany does so also. Yet Yglesias insists on a public option the States, out of an almost apocalyptic sense of mission.
Who was it that said that liberals have a Messiah complex?
April 13th, 2009 at 9:41 am
“market based”, people, “market based”
April 13th, 2009 at 10:07 am
MylesSG, you must have a strange idea of public participation if you believe that Germany has none in their health care system.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Myles, what the hell are you talking about?
From the post: If Barack Obama starts talking in high-profile situations about how it would be great if we had some “cap and trade” then people will start forming opinions about the policy based on their opinions about Obama.
How does you mind read “talking in high-profile situation about how great it would be if we had some ‘cap and trade…’” and jump to “ram cap-and-trade through in the least time possible with the least publicity possible?”
That is exactly the opposite of what Matt wrote!
April 13th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Also, Myles seems to have complete missed the point of this post. Matt is responding to a Broder column in which Broder says that Obama’s stance on cap and trade is driven by the opinions of swing voters. His point is that this isn’t true because very few voters have any opinion on cap and trade whatsoever. Did you even read the post?
April 13th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Why would he read the post? It is time to talk about the Alpine Conservative Utopia! Now is the time we talk about the Alpine Conservative Utopia!
April 13th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Myles saw the photo of the sheep and it brought back a particularly vivid sexual fantasy that involved being dressed up as Heidi in the company of a frisky ram.
April 13th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
@12: “Did you even read the post?”
I did. That is why many of the comments, especially at the very beginning of this thread, confused the shit of me.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
when i went to college, in the dark ages, there were endless dorm bull sessions, sometimes chemically lubricated and sometimes not, about every manner of subject, from politics to music to sports to girls (no co-ed dorms in MY day) to whatever.
apparently for childe myles and his cohort, posting blog comments has replaced the old bull sessions.
nothing intrinsically wrong in that, except: the bleary 2am bull-session conversations evaporated like the steam from underground vents, never to be seen or heard again. nobody could jump on you a decade, a week, a day or even an hour later about how stupidly puerile your absolute, but ephemeral, surety had been.
but childe myles, as you grow up (as i hope you will) and find out that absolutes neither govern nor reflect the way any real world works, your bull-session-level cocksure absolutes will still be there, somewhere, to haunt you, because nothing ever really goes away forever any more.
be warned.