The Corner Goes Crazy
And
What If They Were Serious?
A Scientific Proposal

I'm not the only one who's noticed that the folks over at the National Review have slipped the surly bonds of reality to dance the realms of complete freakin' delusion on laughter-silvered wings.

And not a good laughter, either. That crazy kind from the movies.

Hilzoy discusses it here.

O.k., so here's the thing. No progress will be made in this area until we start treating this like a science. For example: Andy McCarthy seems to believe that:

(A) Obama is a Maoist

and

(B) Obama is committed to "infiltrating bourgeois institution from within" in order to change them.

Fine. Write that down. That's what he thinks. If it isn't, he should be given an opportunity to retract what he has said and formulate his hypothesis more precisely.

Now, in science we basically make the content of our hypotheses clear by deducing testable consequences from them. So what observable consequences do these hypotheses have? That is, what would we expect to observe over the next four to eight years if the hypotheses are true, and what would we expect to observe if they are false? It is in no way unreasonable to ask these questions--in fact, they are questions that we must ask if we are to take such claims seriously. If you can't specify at least some at least vague predictions, then you are just talking bullshit.

So what are the relevant consequences, Andy? And remember: they must distinguish the Obama-is-a-Maoist hypothesis from the Obama-is-just-a-liberal hypothesis.

Now, McCarthy won't do this, and neither will anyone else over there. They aren't really engaged in any serious thing. It's probably lunacy to even pretend that they're trying to say anything true over there. But the only way to call them on their bullshit is, well, to call them on their bullshit. It also has the virtue of giving them an opportunity to prove it on the off chance that they are not merely bullshitting. They know that no one will hold them to their claims. They know that it'll all be forgotten by the time it's proven false.

What's actually going on over there, of course, is just trash-talking disguised as serious discussion. They loathe Obama, but they aren't satisfied with merely saying that, nor with merely calling him names. They want to surround their insults with a veneer of intellectual respectability. And it's pernicious in part because some poor souls--bless their hearts--actually listen to them (you betcha'). What happens in cases like this is: folks like McCarthy and Lowry and K-Lo and company think someone is icky. Instead of saying that, they spin out complicated fantasies about why they are bad, and put 'em on the web. Poor third- and fourth-string conservatives read the stuff, and take the fantasies seriously, going away with the belief, for example, that Obama is a Maoist. It's a tragedy, really, despite its overt comedic elements.

Now, I've got some hypotheses, too, and I'm willing to put them on the line. I think Obama is a fairly liberal guy who recognizes the need to govern from the center. He'll advocate some fairly liberal policies--his health care policy perhaps foremost among them. But he won't do much that's very far out of line with what he's said he would do. If some disaster forces him to deviate from what he's indicated he'll do, he'll deviate from it in a fairly centrist-liberal way. He'll be less far to the left that Bush was to the right. So he won't be describable as a Maoist unless, e.g., Bush is describable as a Nazi. We will not, for example, have anything like a nationalized means of production, nor anything like the Cultural Revolution nor any even vaguely similar thing. An Obama administraiton will look very much like the Clinton administration. At the end of it we might have, say, a renewed assault weapons ban, or national handgun registration--but we'll all still have our firearms. I can get more precise about all this if you want.

Another test of intellectual seriousness is a willingness to bet. And I'd have no hesitation to bet on my hypothesis as against McCarthy's.

The long and the short of it: McCarthy and company at the NRO are simply full of shit. I know it, you know it, and at some level they know it. They're like highschool kids talking free-associative trash because they're team is losing. But just in case I'm wrong, I'm willing to hear them articulate the testable consequences of their absurd hypotheses.