What is intellectual honesty and why is it important?
This article about the politics of mandating disclosure of campaign contributions got me thinking about what intellectual honesty means and why it’s important. Someone who is intellectually honest follows the facts where ever they may lead, and does so in spite of discomfort, inconvenience, or self-interest. That means that someone’s opinions may shift as the facts change, but if there is no change in the situation, then there’s no cause for an intellectually honest person to change positions.
There are at least three recent examples where members of one political party, after previously holding one idea, became diametrically opposed to that same idea within just a few years. The first is disclosure of campaign contributions, the second is the individual mandate in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the third is the use of cap and trade to address environmental problems. All three of these ideas were developed by Republicans because they solved particularly thorny public policy problems in ways that seemed to be more conducive to their ideology, but have since been abandoned by most members of that party, for no apparent reason other than political convenience.
In the arguments leading up to the 2010 Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, contribution disclosure was almost always paired with advocacy for unlimited donations, which were seen as an expression of free speech. There is of course an issue about whether corporations should be treated in the same way as people, but if you put that question aside as not germane to the current discussion, disclosure is a healthy and sensible way to counterbalance the potentially corrupting influence of unlimited contributions.
As Hiatt points out, however, as soon as Citizens United unleashed unlimited contributions, the Republicans abandoned support for disclosure, because it was to their political advantage to do so. The same thing happened to the individual mandate for health care, as Ezra Klein recently documented and to cap and trade, which was a Republican idea to put market mechanisms to work reducing emissions. In all three cases, the facts on the ground didn’t change, but the politics did.
On cap and trade, one of the most fervent Republican proponents of the use of such market mechanisms is former Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State George Schultz. At a recent event at Stanford, Schultz decried the demonization of cap and trade: "That was our idea, and the environment is our issue!“ he said. But in today’s Republican party that is at best a minority view.
Intellectual honesty is one way to judge the actions of politicians (or anyone else, for that matter). An intellectually honest position is one that has a fair chance of actually solving the problem that a policy proposal claims to address, and that is both consistent with the evidence and internally coherent (i.e., not self-contradictory). While it is not always possible to know in advance if a policy proposal will work, intellectually honest positions always have significant evidence supporting them.
On campaign finance, it is incoherent to argue for unlimited donations without immediate disclosure. The public policy problem is corruption in elections, and there’s no reasonable basis for believing that donations without disclosure will have anything other than a corrupting influence (any student of history could tell you that)..
For health insurance, if you choose to require private health insurance companies to insure everybody regardless of pre-existing conditions, the only way to preserve the private health insurance system in anything resembling its current form is to have an individual mandate. It is incoherent (and intellectually dishonest) to argue for universal coverage in such a system without a mandate, because the whole thing will fall apart quickly. Healthy people will not pay into the pool until they get sick, and then they’ll buy in, driving up costs for everyone.
The same goes for cap and trade for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The use of market mechanisms can substantially reduce the costs of improving environmental quality. There are certainly legitimate arguments against cap and trade, but most of them point towards a carbon tax, something equally distasteful to most Republicans. So the question here comes back to the public policy goal. If the goal is environmental protection, then market mechanisms like taxes and cap and trade can reduce the costs of accomplishing it.
It is possible that the core disagreement relates to the public policy goals, with many Republicans not even acknowledging that these issues (corruption, lack of access to health insurance, and climate) are something to worry about. But it’s not politically safe to disagree with fixing those problems, because they are popularly acknowledged to be important, so perhaps the demonization of financial disclosure, the individual mandate, and cap and trade was solely a political tactic used to slow action on these issues. If so, that points to the failings of our media (and to the people fighting for solving these problems); neither apparently explained the broader context of these issues in a way that people could understand. If true, it would also point to the intellectual dishonesty of those advocating such positions solely for political gain.
Now I’m sure there are some examples where members of the Democratic party could stand to be more intellectually honest as well, and I’m eager to hear from readers with additional ideas. The three examples cited above are so clear and well documented that they are hard to ignore, which is why I highlight them here. If you have some other proposed examples about intellectual honesty in the political sphere, please email me and I’ll post them.
Addendum, June 19,2012: Dave Roberts of Grist wrote me an email about the post above (an excerpt of which he’s given me permission to publish below):
I actually disagree with your post a bit. GOP shifts make perfect sense – not in terms of policy put in terms of tactics. Their primary goal is to defeat Democrats. Supporting any major Democratic initiative, even if it is similar in substance to things they’d supported before, does not advance that goal. Intellectual honesty, as you define it, does not advance that goal. But they are perfectly consistent in pursuit of their goal.
Dave and I agree: the Republicans are pursuing a strategy that they believe will result in victory. But this just proves my larger point. The argument above makes it clear that someone who actually cared about solving people’s problems wouldn’t (couldn’t!) change his position on these issues solely for political gain. It reveals the Republicans as craven opportunists, and if the news media did its job (which is admittedly a lot to expect nowadays), that would be clear for all to see.
Now there are surely some Democrats who are also craven opportunists, but it’s hard to make the argument that Democrats in general don’t care about solving these problems. The fact that they have attempted to pass cap and trade and did actually pass health care reform (flawed though the final product may be) is evidence for this idea. And this conclusion is an important one that should make its way into the political process.
2nd Addendum, June 19, 2012: Jonathan Bernstein at the Washington Post takes up this issue, and quite appropriately quotes Monty Python:
Again: some of this is normal; some of it, in fact, is healthy — part of what parties do is provide alternatives, and it’s not at all a bad thing that the out-party reexamines things a bit if they find the president embraces a position they used to hold. But it’s the difference, as the Pythons explained long ago, between an argument and contradiction. What we’re seeing, as Michael Palin explained, is “just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.” And as long as that’s all that Republicans are doing, the political system isn’t going to function very well at all. And the fact that the parties are just not at all the same on this is one of the key things to know if you’re trying to understand American politics right now.
And of course, this issue also reminds me of the famous Groucho Marx song: I’m against it!.
3rd Addendum, June 24, 2012: Ezra Klein just yesterday posted this video of his dissection of the Republican switch on the issue of the health insurance mandate. Over the span of six months or so (during the 2nd half of 2009) the Republicans went from being supporters of this idea to being unanimously opposed, which is further evidence that this change of position has nothing to do with the merits of the argument. As I indicated to Klein in an email earlier today, the issue is deeper than hypocrisy, it’s about whether Republicans are honest when they say they want to solve problems that the public is concerned about. The evidence cited above indicates that they are not (I await evidence to the contrary).
4th Addendum, October 17, 2019: I just saw this excellent article from January 2014 summarizing how the Heritage foundation health care plan differed from the Affordable Care Act. The main similarity was the individual mandate, so the discussion above is still valid, but there are key differences between the Heritage plan and the ACA, and it’s important to make those clear in any discussion of these issues.
