Blaming John Rawls

I would take issue with a variety of things Linda Hirschman says in her article bashing John Rawls, but surely it's obviously insane to blame Rawls for Democratic Party electoral defeats. I read it again, because I thought Hirschman might be making a more subtle claim, but, no, she's actually describing a causal connection between Democratic defeats and Rawls' philosophy, arguing that "It is not a coincidence that the only successful two-term Democratic presidency of the Age of Rawls was engineered in part for Bill Clinton by Bill Galston, a political theorist with a background in classical thought. "

I'm reasonably confident that this actually is a coincidence. You can read the classic essay on political strategy that Galston wrote with Elaine Kamarck "The Politics of Evasion" and you'll see it has very, very, very little to do with the sort of philosophical issues that divide him from Rawls.

Comments

If A Theory of Justice is "the Bible of twentieth-century liberalism," then liberals read their Bible about as faithfully as Catholics read theirs.

Posted by blah | July 24, 2007 3:28 PM

Is Linda Hirschman so desperate to show off her knowledge of contemporary philosophy that she has to write an article explaining Bill Clinton in terms of John Rawls? I guess that's one of those questions that has been answered so completely that it will never have to asked again.

Posted by Alan Vanneman | July 24, 2007 3:39 PM

For TNR, Rawls's major deficiency was that he was a liberal and they can't have that, can they?

Posted by Reality Man | July 24, 2007 3:53 PM

Enigineered by Galston?

So Carville, Begala and Stan Greenberg must be thrilled to hear they had nothing to do with it huh? Not to mention Dick Morris in 96..

I've read Galston's stuff and me, not impressed.

Posted by Armando | July 24, 2007 4:10 PM

Matt, you are so far behind the curve. You have to visit magic punditland! It is the funnest place. In magic punditland, it was the New York Times and various liberals that railroaded Scooter Libby - their irresistable evil force behind every move in Libby's martyrdom. Similarly, John Rawls caused the defeat of Al Gore, while Jacques Derrida caused sodomy to increase among gradeschoolers by 100%.

But fear not! Though Punditland has its shadowside, it has bright spots too! In Punditland, there is now a non-partisan covergence of all but the evil Harry Reid types about Iraq - yes, Obama and Bush have the same plan. Punditland is such a cool place I've been thinking of turning it into a board game - visit, for instance, wizard Tommie Friedman and you get a six month card that bends time. Step over the river of 500,000 Iraqi dead to visit the dark and fearsome Precipitous Withdrawal Falls - who knows what will happen when you land there.

The winner of the Punditland game would, of course, be the one who racks up the most tv appearances and newsmagazine columns.

Posted by roger | July 24, 2007 4:15 PM

And Galston and Kamarck have stuck to their disproven thesis. They basically wrote the same paper last year.

In 1988 they wrote:

"The California Dream

One final element of the myth of mobilization is what we call "The California Dream." The thesis is
that rising strength in the West can counterbalance the collapse of Southern support for the party's presidential candidates and that Democrats therefore don't have to work hard at regaining competitiveness in the South.

This exercise in the politics of evasion fails the test of basic arithmetic. Non-Southern gains
cannot fully compensate for a Southern wipeout. If Dukakis had prevailed in all the Western states
where he had a chance, carried the heartland states he narrowly lost, and won all the Eastern states within reach, he still would not have assembled enough electoral votes to win.

The underlying logic of the electoral college shows why. There are 155 electoral votes in the
Southern and border states, 41 in the Plains and Rocky Mountain states with impregnable
Republican majorities, and 23 more in reliably Republican states of the Midwest and Northeast. If the South is conceded to the Republican presidential nominee, he begins with a base of 219 electoral votes and needs only 51 more. Michigan, Ohio and New Jersey are enough to put him over the top -- and George Bush carried them handily, with margins of 8 to 14 points."

Of course the big flipper was California which destroyed their math entirely.

And in fact, most folks have come to realize that winning in the South is impossible in the short term and that catering to the South hurts everywhere else.

The 1989 paper is a testament to not understanding the essence of politics - wehich is defining the debate - saying what the middle is.

I know you are beefing about blamiong Rawls but my beef is with the holding up of Galston as being someone who got it right. Galston got it absolutely wrong.

There is only one candidate who worked in the Galston scheme - Bill Clinton. Those don;t come around very often.

Posted by Armando | July 24, 2007 4:24 PM

The winner of the Punditland game would, of course, be the one who racks up the most tv appearances and newsmagazine columns.

No, surely the winner would be the one who gets elected "Hottest Media Type 2007 (Off Air)" . . .

Posted by rea | July 24, 2007 4:25 PM

Started reading A Theory of Justice last week. The entire theory is based on logical errors. Nice try, but by page 18 the dependence on justificationalist beliefs turn the entire text into a left-wing version of Hegel. In other words, no objective knowledge and a lot of superfluous language that serves no other purpose than to conceal that fact.

Liberalism is objective, it is the political expression of rationalism, yet Rawls misses both those marks by a longshot. Rawls isn't alone though, these errors pervade US political philosophy, which is unfortunate, because his sources were falsified by the 70's and rendered his effort largely wasted.

Bill Bartley's The Retreat to Commitment should be required reading in all 4 year schools. I'm really quite shocked that I haven't found anything by Rawls or his supporters that deals with the semi-trailer sized holes that Bartley and later Miller put in Rawls epistemological claims.

The reason why Rawls is on the hook for the Democrats failure is the fact that he's held up as the shining example of Liberal thought, when in fact it's pretty much worthless for that effort. Rawls is a distraction and because he offers no answers, we will continue to lose if we point to Rawls as the basis of our beliefs. This is something that Hirschman completely misses; I'd have to agree with Alan on that point.

BTW, Rawls sucks ass as a moral philosopher too. Same errors, different spin.

Posted by cjohnson | July 24, 2007 4:52 PM

cjohnson,

I don't want to start a debate but there are a couple things you might consider:

1. Bartley's basic argument was made long before that book.
2. The reflective equilibrium isn't obviously inconsistent with a "critisizability" standard.
3. Its possible you're not smarter than the thousands of tenured philosophy professors who have spend large parts of their lives studying, writing about, and teaching Rawls. Maybe you're just simplifying your thinking for the purposes of a blog comment but you seem to really miss a huge part of the epistemoloy debate here.

Posted by Jack | July 24, 2007 5:29 PM

Rawls is a distraction and because he offers no answers, we will continue to lose if we point to Rawls as the basis of our beliefs.

It seems to me that you will lose as long as you point to ANYONE (or their philosophy) as the basis for your beliefs.

If you cant say something simply and in your own words then you dont really understand it. If you can't explain the basis of your beliefs in your own simple words (and have to, for example, point to the writings of another person), it means you do not actually understand the basis of your beliefs. If you dont understand the basis of your beliefs then you dont understand why you believe what you believe. If you dont understand why you believe what you believe then you cant reasonably expect to convince others in the rightness of those beliefs.

Posted by r4d20 | July 24, 2007 5:54 PM

Mark Thoma at The Economist's View quotes much of the article and hosts a very good discussion in comments by people who know some Rawls.

Posted by bob mcmanus | July 24, 2007 6:01 PM

Jack,

I also don't wish to debate on a blog comments section, but I'd really like to hear where Bartley's argument for a non-justificationalist definition of rationality was made in the West before Bartley. The only reference I've heard is Ionian. Perhaps you were referring to a non-Western source?

Furthermore, Miller doesn't mention any reference where these "basic" arguments were made before and he has done quite an extensive catalog. Perhaps I'm not understanding what you're referring to as his "basic argument". I was referring to his pan-critical rationalism which Miller reconciled with critical rationalism in the 90s.

Rawls is dancing around a Kantian categorical imperative. It's the same basis as natural law theories, none of which can be rationally supported. All should statements require an irrational goal that they are predicated upon. Without making this distinction, Rawls fails to offer a proposition which can be freely consented to.

As to your comment about tenured professors. I seriously doubt that I'm smarter than many, I only claim to be less in error in this instance. I mean Hegel was obviously a pretty smart cookie, but that doesn't change the fact that he was wrong.

Posted by cjohnson | July 24, 2007 7:05 PM

I don't know anything about Rawls' philosophy (embarrassing for a U of Chicago grad to admit that), but it's been obvious to me for some time that Linda Hirshman is a self-important nut.

Posted by beckya57 | July 24, 2007 10:33 PM

And all these years I've been blaming Lou Rawls. Lou you're forgiven. (Dating myself again.)

Posted by Klein's tiny left nut | July 24, 2007 10:36 PM

Blogs are mostly devoid of serious interpretation so it's not surprising there's a pattern of people thinking they follow a text when it's really a laughable ego trip unhindered by a reality check. I don't find Rawls interesting but one only need browse through his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy to recognize the comments and discussion are mostly ignorant. I had a look again at his collected papers and noticed some comments in the margin from my first year in undergrad, some so stupid I'm glad for the bitch slapping I received in courses for being a know it all without the necessary background knowledge.

Posted by anon | July 25, 2007 12:00 PM

I remember when, as an undergraduate student, I first encountered John Rawls and A Theory of Justice. I had a wonderful and award winning teacher and the class contained several very astute students who have gone on to graduate work at respected universities. Now in graduate school myself and studying Rawls, it is not unfair to say that, on reflection, our grasp of his theoretical project was, while perhaps not inaccurate, certainly a long way from being comprehensive. Without making presumptions, I do wonder whether many of the above criticisms reflect a deep analysis of Rawls's thought, or whether they reflect a superficial and tenuous grasp of Rawls's theoretical project. There is much that can and has been criticized in Rawls's thought, but it is an informed and measured criticism that reflects conscientious and comprehensive study. Few of the above criticisms seem to reflect a similar depth of study.

Posted by Dave G. | July 25, 2007 7:38 PM

... maybe I'm just really dense, but I don't get why it's insane to see a connection between a party's ideology — and Rawls has greatly influenced the Dem's ideology — and its electoral fortunes. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Posted by Shoshana | July 26, 2007 4:45 PM

I think it's probably a stretch to say that Democratic leaders have even heard of Rawls, let alone have actually read him or, even more crazy, follow him so loyally that it has cost them elections.

Rawls never intended TJ to be a practical guide to politics, and it seems almost too obvious to point out that no one else thought that either. He spent his entire career refining his ideas in response to other other philosophers that aren't widely read outside philosophy class (Nozick, Sandel, Walzer, Habermas and others).

He, unlike all of these other philosophers, never weighed in on current events or invested any effort in adapting his idea for popular consumption. TJ did frame academic (emphasize, academic) political philosophy for 20 years or so after it's publication, but he spend most of that time answering the technical objections of technical political philosophers.

Even if I did believe that Carter, Mondale and Dukakis lost because they, or liberal rhetoric in general, were controlled by Rawlisanism, it's not like Rawls was wanting for compelling criticism (from liberals, no less). Not only was it compelling and widely read, much of it was widely accepted by Rawls himself.

Note that this has very little to do with whether or not Rawls was actually correct. All I see identified is a correlation between the rise of Rawls and the decline of liberalism. If that's really the case, I can think of, I don't know, thousands of reasons other than John Rawls. Whether or not Hirshman is correct, this article, well, beside the point.

Posted by Mr. X. | July 26, 2007 5:05 PM

Liberalism is objective, it is the political expression of rationalism, yet Rawls misses both those marks by a longshot

Wow, uh, care to defend that one? How does liberalism have a unique bond with rationalism that say, Burkean conservatism doesn't? How is it more "objective" than social democracy or libertarianism, and how can any provisional, mutable, contingent political ethos be "objective" to begin with? And which flavor of liberalism do you mean, anyway? And so on. Perhaps Rawls is trying to wrestle with some of the sorts of fine distinctions and objections of which I am only scratching the surface here, and the sort of unequivocal and absolute claims you want him to make can't stand up to them.

Posted by J. Dunn | July 28, 2007 11:49 PM