Liberals, Conservatives and All That Jazz

I just finished reading Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, in which he tells the history of statistics and shows how we are inclined to find (and trust) patterns where there are none. Our illusions about significance, he says, blind us to how much chance rules our lives. In his crosshairs are, among other things, polls, wine ratings, sports scores, and the stock market.

This is the kind of book I love: rational, demonstrable, skeptical, and amused at the human ability to willingly delude ourselves into meaning where there is none.

While I enjoyed all the statistical blunders he describes (including the OJ trial), one of the founders of the field of statistics he discusses particularly interested me for another reason. This is one Thomas Buckle who wrote two volumes of a planned trilogy on European civilization from a statistical point of view. The third never materialized because he caught typhus in Damascus and died in 1841. This might be unexceptional except a doctor offered to treat him, an offer Buckle declined because the man was French. Therefore, as Mlodinow points out, Buckle died.

British xenophobia aside, I find myself imagining a modern counterpart: Mr. Buckle as a Republican choosing death over being treated by a Democrat.

While we may dismiss my musing as merely playful, I wonder if that’s not what has been happening in our politics. Rather than solve anything together, both parties would prefer to see the patient die while pointing the finger at one another and calling one another names.

This leads me to another musing: why has the word liberal become so vilified when the word conservative is just as culpable. Both words describe the outer edges of the bell curve Mlodinow describes. Statistically neither side of the statistical deviation has any claim to moral majority, liberals and conservative claim about 30% on each end, with the rest of us clumped somewhere in the middle. Yet the conservative deviation has set itself up to be the middle.

Conservatives, of course, are (primarily although not exclusively) Republicans who disapprove of the party and wish to distance themselves from policy decisions that are unpopular or difficult to defend. They claim it was Republicans (not conservatives) who allowed themselves to be bought and sold by corporate interests thus bringing on the corporate bailout; it was Republicans (not conservatives) who took the country to war on the basis of a flimsy excuse; and it was Republicans (not conservatives) who racked up a massive budget deficit.

Conservatives like to cherry pick the ideals of the party. They argue they are fiscally prudent, flag waving patriots, free enterprise supporters, and believers in free enterprise and American predominance in the world. Their banner holders are the new populists who promise to listen to the people (until corporate money starts pouring in). You must forgive my cynicism here as, being senior, I have seen so many protestations of political virtue dashed upon the rocks of opportunity.

I must admit I am no fan of liberals either when they display the same absolute behavior (and they do). That I find the moralistic posturing of the conservative right more annoying is really my own problem. My particular wrath is reserved for the invisible hand (and not Adam Smith's) that runs the government and country.

That invisible hand is not the marketplace but Big Business and Big Finance. I've talked before in this blog about how corporations are not governments and I am discouraged how many segments of the population simply cannot see the larger picture any more than they can see how their own behavior contributed to our meltdown.

Our gullible media (itself a corporation) does from time to time expose the corporate benefit behind the Middle East wars, yet the same people raising hell over lapel pins can find nowhere near the same anger against the financial manipulations that have robbed us of pensions and home values; in fact, they seem poised to vote back in the very same people who allowed the mayhem in the first place. I am confounded.

Corporate America will support conservative candidates because they will be less likely to regulate the financial markets; it does not take much to predict where they make the major contributions in their own interest. The recent Supreme Court decision means they have no limitations on their donations to political campaigns, so there will not be even the pretence of covert funding. Conservative candidates can be expected to reap a funding bonanza.

Given all this, I don’t understand why anyone would want to be called conservative, let alone choose that name for themselves, when it implies being a stooge for big money. Liberal is bad enough—but to be called conservative? I’d be pretty upset if someone tried to call me that.