Watching the president of the American Enterprise Institute whine about how the partisan hacks he sponsors don’t get respect among intellectuals is pretty amusing.
To paraphrase Ben Kenobi, you will never find a more wretched hive of question begging and anti-empirical babble than the AEI.
* * *
More generally, I reject the claim of the paper he cites (http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430) that changing partisan affiliation among social psychologists is proof that the field has been overrun with leftists, who are driving out all the conservatives via active discrimination, and who have an agenda of proving that conservatives are evil/stupid/lazy/intolerant/....
There are many possible alternative explanations:
* Perhaps the social psychologists’ views have remained consistent while the US Republican party has become more radicalized, causing former political moderates to now fall in naturally with the Democratic party.
* Perhaps academia as a whole or social psychology as a field has lost status or become less desirable as a career, and folks whose ideological outlook emphasizes money and status have decided to go into industry more than before.
* Perhaps the Republican party’s cuts to education funding in general or diversion of funding away from social sciences toward STEM fields (including cutting direct funding for public institutions, cuts to research funding, etc.), attempt to exert governmental bureaucratic control over universities, etc. has changed the minds of formerly conservative-leaning academics away from supporting the GOP.
* Perhaps social psychologists or other social scientists have the perception that Republican lawmakers are disregarding the direct lessons of social science and thus framing policies which are “bad” for some reason independent of ideological bias.
* Perhaps the easy availability of money at institutions such as the AEI, the Heritage Foundation, etc. has swayed conservative-leaning social scientists to give up on universities and peer-reviewed research, and follow the money to these so-called think tanks.
> Perhaps the social psychologists’ views have remained consistent while the US Republican party has become more radicalized, causing former political moderates to now fall in naturally with the Democratic party.
That is indeed partly the case, at least as far as the US congress goes.
Based on a fivethirtyeight metrics, the average of each group has gradually moved away from the center, but the Republicans did so about twice as fast as the Democrats.
> while the US Republican party has become more radicalized
Not picking on you specially, but I've noticed that the word reactionary has been dropped from the political lexicon. I feel kind of silly rooting for a word to be used more, but most of the time that I see "radical" applied to Republicans, I think "reactionary" would be a better fit..
>* Perhaps the Republican party’s cuts to education funding in general or diversion of funding away from social sciences toward STEM fields (including cutting direct funding for public institutions, cuts to research funding, etc.), attempt to exert governmental bureaucratic control over universities, etc. has changed the minds of formerly conservative-leaning academics away from supporting the GOP.
Only the rhetoric has been changed towards STEM fields. Actual per-capita NIH and NFS funding has dropped.
This comment richly illustrates the partisan divide mentioned in the article. In particular, it reflects the Left's dismissive attitude toward conservative think tanks.
Whether or not you agree with their views and orientation, the American Enterprise Institute is a prestigious organization. I was motivated by this comment in fact to visit aei.org which I've never read before, and I was quite impressed by the kinds of scholars contributing pretty intelligent commentary to the institute:
- a Yale professor of Asian studies, commenting on the Japan-China-Korea summit happening this weekend.
- a former Defense Dept. analyst discussing the tiny military team the U.S. has sent to Syria, and proposing more realistic strategies.
- a professor of military history at West Point, critiquing the current U.S. policy on missile defense
- a GWU professor of emergency medicine and previous advisor to the CBO, commissioner on Maryland's Health Services Cost Review Commission, etc. etc., discussing Medicare's future funding problems.
- a resident fellow, previous commissioner of education for Florida, secretary of education for Virginia, president and (current) chairman of the Black Alliance for Education Options, commenting on Brown v. Board of Education 60 Years Later.
And on and on.
These are not lightweights at all. They're serious, highly influential shakers and movers and to dismiss them as "partisan hacks" or bribed to say things because of "easy availability of money" is to dismiss the roughly 50% of the country with whose views you just happen to disagree.
This, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with the intellectual climate in the university and in the greater society in the U.S. today. There is a "closing of the American mind", as Alan Bloom phrased it, a preference for assumed agreement rather than polite disagreement or debate.
Once upon a time, in the 1970s and earlier (I came of intellectual age in the 1970s so experienced perhaps the last vestiges of this era) there was a kind of open mindedness among the 60-70% of people in the middle.
There were of course the very right wing bigoted "John Birchers", Southern racists, and their ilk, as well as the fanatically left wing Marxists and traditional socialists (Bernie Sanders is perhaps an example of the latter).
But in the middle, people were willing to debate the issues and listen politely to the opposition. It appears that this willingness has disappeared, just as that generation of Depression babies and WWII soldiers have largely disappeared.
Younger generations raised during the passionate us-versus-them demonstrations of the 1960s, the "me generation" 1970s, and the self-absorbed materialism of the 1980s-90s, do not have that kind of training and orientation. Furthermore, their teachers largely have a left/liberal orientation (something like 80-90% of K-12 teachers in the U.S. are Democrats, and similarly the professors on college campuses).
I really miss the days when you could actually sit down and debate the issues with someone, over a beer. It seems that today, people are loathe to even bring up politics unless they know they're among likeminded company and then it's like an echo chamber.
AEI does have very well-credentialed members and prestige, but if you look at their history they are still partisan hacks, providing intellectual justification for dangerous partisan nonsense. I used to try to be even-handed and give people like them equal credit, but it was a false equivalency and they are parasites on that open-mindednes. There are reasonable conservative ideas, some of which I support, but climate change denial, torture, the Iraq invasion, absolute refusal to increase any taxes rates, default on the US debt, and many others are absurd and outside the pale (I don't know AEI supports all of those). It's time we started calling it what it is; the damage is too serious. (There are partisan left-wing think tanks, though not as many AFACIT, and I think they are equally absurd.)
> There were of course the very right wing bigoted "John Birchers"
The backers of the modern Tea Party are John Birchers by a new name. The policies are similar and the Koch brothers' father, for example, was either a John Birch Society founder or at least a leader (IIRC; I don't have time to check the details, sorry).
> But in the middle, people were willing to debate the issues and listen politely to the opposition. It appears that this willingness has disappeared
It is the right wing fringe that has created this situation, and it's still mostly a problem of the right. There is no influential left-wing equivalent of Fox' propaganda, by far the leading cable news channel, the Wall St Journal editorial page (the NY Times isn't nearly as partisan), or of right-wing talk radio (Limbaugh, etc.). For example, the Tea Partiers in Congress refuse to respect that their fellow citizens should have a say in the nation's laws and oppose everything that doesn't go exactly their way. They literally try to do serious damage to their own nation's government and economy to get their way. There is no equivalent on the left. Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans (not voted out by Tea Partiers) are willing to make deals.
It hasn't always been a problem primarily of the right; the radical left was ascendent and probably equally problematic a few decades ago. But it's a dangerous delusion to overlook the problem on the right now.
The real division needs to be between moderates and radical idealogues, who will sacrifice the rest of us to their dogmas. The idealogues of 2015 are mostly on the right.
If you bothered to read the paper, you'll discover none of your proposed explanations actually explain the results.
Republicans becoming radical or republicans cutting education funding will NOT explain why simply transposing data/conclusions on the exact same study suddenly results in more rejections.
I did read the paper. In my opinion it was a big hodge-podge of unrelated stuff strung together without much reasoning between, and a conclusion not strongly grounded in the evidence.
The cited studies about transposing data/conclusions seem like they might be more interesting, but were only tangentially relevant to this paper’s point.
To paraphrase Ben Kenobi, you will never find a more wretched hive of question begging and anti-empirical babble than the AEI.
* * *
More generally, I reject the claim of the paper he cites (http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430) that changing partisan affiliation among social psychologists is proof that the field has been overrun with leftists, who are driving out all the conservatives via active discrimination, and who have an agenda of proving that conservatives are evil/stupid/lazy/intolerant/....
There are many possible alternative explanations:
* Perhaps the social psychologists’ views have remained consistent while the US Republican party has become more radicalized, causing former political moderates to now fall in naturally with the Democratic party.
* Perhaps academia as a whole or social psychology as a field has lost status or become less desirable as a career, and folks whose ideological outlook emphasizes money and status have decided to go into industry more than before.
* Perhaps the Republican party’s cuts to education funding in general or diversion of funding away from social sciences toward STEM fields (including cutting direct funding for public institutions, cuts to research funding, etc.), attempt to exert governmental bureaucratic control over universities, etc. has changed the minds of formerly conservative-leaning academics away from supporting the GOP.
* Perhaps social psychologists or other social scientists have the perception that Republican lawmakers are disregarding the direct lessons of social science and thus framing policies which are “bad” for some reason independent of ideological bias.
* Perhaps the easy availability of money at institutions such as the AEI, the Heritage Foundation, etc. has swayed conservative-leaning social scientists to give up on universities and peer-reviewed research, and follow the money to these so-called think tanks.
etc.