The Era of Making Things Up: Postmodernism, Conservatism, and the Assault on Reality

A very popular conservative blogger recently wrote the following, about the so-termed Ground Zero Mosque project (which, by the way, as we all know by now, is not quite a mosque and isn't quite at Ground Zero either):

Yes it will take years and years but that did not stop Bloomberg and "Big Brother" Obama making it national issue in under 1 minute.

Except that this isn't true. It was Republicans, that party's New York State gubernatorial candidates in particular, who made the project a “national issue.” Republicans well outside of New York State were making it an issue well-before President Obama's remarks. (I'm not counting Bloomberg, because he's the Mayor of New York City, last I checked, and he of course addressed the issue in that capacity. Any Mayor of New York should have addressed it.)

Note the headline of this Fox News story, and note the date, 11 days before President Obama's remarks.

Other mosques, nowhere near Ground Zero and not in New York State, have also caused controversies. Note the date of that story too. The project (Park 51, Ground Zero Mosque, whatever you want to call it) was clearly a national issue well-before Obama's remarks.

On a probably not-unrelated note, a growing percentage of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. But he isn't. Not that a Muslim President would be a bad thing in and of itself. But, Obama is not Muslim.

I keep reading about how Andrew Cuomo wants to shut down local governments and the people will reject it. But when you actually read Cuomo's plan, which mirrors very closely one pitched by his father in 1994, you'll see (I should hope) that it isn't at all like it's sometimes portrayed.

That last example isn't as extreme as the others. Distorting your opponent's position is a long-standing tradition in American politics, as long as you remain more or less within the confines of reality. Ok, fine. One would expect Andrew Cuomo's opponents to distort his plans and ideas. If a plan of his would cost, say, $2 Billion, you'd expect his opponents to say it would cost "nearly $5 billion." 2 is nearly 5, right?

Fine.

But Barack Obama being a Muslim, when he isn't? Or him making the mosque a national issue, when it clearly already was one before he spoke? Those go beyond being distortions. Oh, let's try the one about the drapes in the Oval Office being switched to a Middle Eastern color. Nope, that one's not true either.

It's easy to say what you want when you, in essence, construct reality as an opinion. Opinions can be freely rejected, and everyone is entitled to one. Dinosaurs walked the Earth with humanity, and humanity domesticated dinosaurs, right down to putting them in English saddles for Dinosaur shows. (See Charles Pearce, Idiot America 2009, pages 1 to 12.) Except that neither of those things is true.

When you recast fact and analysis as opinion, all bets are off.

Al Gore wrote a book called The Assault on Reason (2007) wherein he outlined....Well, look at the title. But in fact what's going on, I would suggest, isn't an assault on reason, but on reality itself. The assault on reason is simply a technique. It makes the assault on reality easier. Without reason, reality becomes an opinion, and everyone's entitled to one.

Andrew Cuomo should investigate the funding stream for the Ground Zero Mosque (which again is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero). But we now know publicly what, it seems, has been known privately for a long time: There is no funding stream to investigate.

The project could not yet have been funded in an illegal, or even morally questionable, manner because it hasn't been funded yet at all, not to any substantial degree. This doesn't stop Rick Lazio from saying he should investigate that funding stream, even after the revelation that it didn't really exist.

Political Theorist Sheldon Wolin wrote in 1989 about how the conservative Philosopher Allan Bloom, who was extremely influential in conservative intellectual circles, was defined largely be a rage against Postmodernism (Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past 1989, pages 47-65). Postmodernism is an academic movement that has sought over the years to challenge some very fundamental things about reality, about science, about reason. As Wolin put it:

Although the postmodern mind, as yet, hesitates to provoke a head-on confrontation with modern science . . . the subversion of the supporting culture of science is clearly under way. The postmodern individual has pretty much renounced the objectivist view of scientific knowledge, indeed all forms of knowledge. (Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past 1989, page 70.)

Postmodern Philosopher Richard Rorty, exactly the kind of thinker against whom Allan Bloom was raging, once wrote that abandoning Western rationalism “has no discouraging political implications.” Society can abandon rationalism, the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment, and retain the Enlightenment's politics of human dignity and liberation. (Richard Rorty, Truth, Politics, and 'Post-Modernism' 1997, pages 36-42.)

But there's an important thing Rorty and other Postmodernists didn't think of, and thus didn't account for. And that is that when the sources of reality and the very nature of empirical observation are questioned, when you can no longer accept the results of an empirical test (like dropping 2 objects at the same time to see if 1 falls faster than the other) all that you have left is power. Someone with the power to enforce his or her vision can ram it down the throats of everyone else. To use an exaggerated example from literature, if Big Brother says that 2 plus 2 is 5, then it's 5, even if it's not. Who are you to say otherwise?

In the absence of thought or reason or empirical observation, all that's left is power. Who has it, who doesn't, and how those with it can enforce their ideas upon those who don't.

The Federalist Papers repeatedly remind us that, in the American system, the base of power is with the people. Federalist Paper # 46 (attributed to James Madison) reminds us, for example, that a reliance on the people as the ultimate source of authority means that the American system can get away with having both a national government and state governments, and yet expect the two layers of government to work together and not against each other. The more-famous Federalist Paper # 51 (attributed to either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton) reminds us that, in a system where the people are the ultimate base of power, the people are also a source of potential oppression.

It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.

In later years, this concept would come to be known as “the tyranny of the majority.”

Outside the offices of the Minority Leader of the New York State Assembly there once sat (and for all I know still does sit) a plaque with a quote:

"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate minority keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."

The quote is variously attributed to either John Adams or Samuel Adams; I forget which one the Assembly Minority's plaque attributes it to. At first, this sentiment may sound healthy. And in fact in many circumstances the sentiment has been as healthy as it sounds like it could be. An irate minority can be a check against the potentially tyrannical majority feared by the authors of The Federalist Papers. Black people fighting for Civil Rights were nothing if not an "irate minority."

The dark side of the sentiment, however, is that you might not need a majority to do something horrendous. Sometimes an irate minority can do the trick. Majorities, after all, can be expensive and time-consuming to achieve. But an irate minority is pretty easy to come by these days, now that reality itself can be called into question so easily. Reality is expensive, almost as expensive as majorities are. But an irate minority that's been spoon-fed semi-plausible falsehoods? Cheap. And effective.

There were no death panels in the Obama health care bill. To bring things back to New York State politics, David Paterson is not “a drug addict,” any more than Carl Paladino is “addicted” to bestiality porn or “addicted” to fathering children out of wedlock.

These are two flawed men, who did what they did, and we judge them according to our wit and our expectations. But neither is, so far as we can reasonably know, addicted to anything.

“As far as we can reasonably know.” Reasonably know. Quite a concept there.

It even comes close to an objective fact that Thomas Jefferson is an excellent example of an important political philosopher. Indeed its hard to imagine someone whose political philosophy has been of greater importance in practical politics. Jefferson more or less invented what we now call American political values.

The Texas Department of Education, however, disagreed,

and agreed to replace Thomas Jefferson as an example of an influential political philosopher in a world history class.

Thomas Jefferson's thought, it seems, also didn't influence any important revolutions:

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

I can't think of any revolutions Thomas Jefferson inspired, can you? If you can, E-Mail the Texas Department of Education.

Reason has made America great. Our country was founded on reason, and New York State led the way for a very long time. Reason helps us deal with reality rather than bury our heads in the sand.

But now, New York State, and the nation as a whole, are losing reason, and reality along with it, and, while I suppose I could find some examples of liberal irrationality (in fact, with the crowd that's currently in charge of the New York State Senate I'm all-but-certain I could), conservatives are clearly leading the way. Fortunate for them that the abandonment of reality ensures they won't have to admit that they're abandoning reality.

Soon, we'll have conservative Christians turning the Bible into a wiki, editing their own Holy Book according to their preconceptions, rather than reading it, or hiring a professional to do a professionally done translation that's more to their liking. (There's plenty of conservative Bible scholars, after all.) Oh wait, that's already happening.

Thomas Jefferson wasn't an important political philosopher, it's President Obama's fault that the Park 51 project is a national issue, David Paterson is a drug addict, and the Holy Bible is a wiki.

Welcome, readers, to a new political era: The era of making things up.

Every Petition Tells a Story

Gubernatorial petitions, like pictures, tell stories.

In New York State, 15,000 petitions, it seems, are required to run for Governor without the endorsement of a major party. 15,000 to launch a third party or independent bid, and to force a major party primary. (Unfortunately, I can't find where in the State Election Law it says this, so I have to go off of press accounts. The State Board of Elections Internet site doesn't seem to have a “how to run for Governor” pamphlet or anything, which is regrettable, if unsurprising.)

Further, the conventional wisdom seems to be that one really needs 3 times the required number, or 45,000. Challenges to ones petitions are seen as almost inevitable, and 3 times the required number should render one about challenge-proof.

There's several high-profile, or at least medium-profile, gubernatorial runs going on that are reliant upon petitions rather than upon major party endorsement.

Charles Barron, a former member of the Black Panthers, has gathered 44,500 petitions to run for Governor on his new Freedom Party line. Libertarian Party candidate Warren Redlich filed 34,000 petitions.

Redlich and Barron can fairly be described as fringe candidates. However, the much-ballyhooed Carl Paladino, who is considered a serious candidate, has filed only 28,000 petitions, less than double the required amount, and well under the preferred “3-times what's required” standard. In fact, Paladino's petition numbers are most comparable to those of Kirsten Davis (22,000), the Eliot Spitzer-affiliated madam-turned-candidate. And even Davis's highest-profile supporter, Republican operative Roger Stone, referred to Davis as a “protest candidate,” and expressed support for Paladino, the 28,000-petition man.

In polls, Paladino scores about as well against Cuomo as Lazio does. (Which, it must be said, isn't a great showing.)

Interesting that Roger Stone's “protest candidate,” Davis, and his other favorite, Paladino, who in his words “has a chance” to win, managed to garner a comparable number of petitions. The other fringe candidates, by contrast, managed to garner noticeably more than either Paladino or Davis.

So who really has a chance here?

Petitions tell stories. They tell stories about who has some degree of popular support, and who has the ground operation that's necessary to rally that support. To get people to openly support a candidate on record. Sure, someone might sign a petition in the name of having an open process, and not intend to vote for the candidate. But I think, and the press seems to agree, that signing a petition is really a display of support for a candidate. (One day I should see if any studies have been done on that, actually.)

What stories do these petitions tell us? Well, let me tell you what I think.

I think either Paladino's ground operation is horrid and ineffective, or that he has more support in the context of an anonymous poll than he does when people actually have to stand behind their views. Fewer people will support Paladino in public than in private. And voting, perhaps even in a primary election and definitely in a general election, is, secret ballot regardless, ultimately a public act.

And I think that, either way, Paladino remains a fringe candidate. If Lazio loses the nomination to him it will far more speak ill of Lazio than it speaks well of Paladino.

Identifying, and Addressing, New York State's Local Government Problem

New York State has a local government problem.

I think that's a fair statement. Almost more important than the statement being fair is that most of New York's political class would appear to agree. New York has a lot of local governments. No one really knows how many, but Andrew Cuomo, several times in his policy book The New NY Agenda, cites a figure of roughly 10,000.

This plethora of local governments has various consequences, few of which good. Political accountability is too-difficult to establish, because it's too difficult to know who answers to whom, who is supposed to do what, and who did what. Certain important political and governmental decisions are in effect subject to no scrutiny whatsoever, because few know who is making them. Further, all these layers of government get expensive. It doesn't take a Tea Partier, or any kind of conservative, to understand that.

I suppose all these local governments might make increase the points of access to citizens. If the citizens know where to look for that access, of course.

New York State has a local government problem. And it isn't new. Look at the following quotes.

The term “county government,” as applied in the commonly accepted sense of a single governing body for county affairs, is misleading. There is no such thing in New York State as a single, or a unified, government for an entire county. Instead, there are for each county several independent governing departments and officials, the functions of each being territorially coextensive with the county boundaries in general. (County Government, Page 85)

And:

For the purpose of government, which means for purpose of raising and expending money for the advantage of the people, we have in this State and within its counties many units or districts. Many of these districts are included within others and many overlap each other. Each has certain officers and certain powers of local government and support. Consider a typical New York county, my own [Oneida County], containing 2 cities, 26 towns, 19 incorporated villages, 23 special districts and 355 school districts outside of the cities. (County Government, Page 27)

The book those quotes are from, County Government, was published in 1915.

The Oneida County official who made the second statement, the one from page 27, went on to point out how all of the 400 or so governments within Oneida County had the power to tax the citizens. In 1915, there were roughly 400 taxing entities within Oneida County alone. It's undoubtedly more now.

79 years later, in 1994 (the year of the so-called Republican Revolution) the situation had not improved. Then-Governor Mario Cuomo raised the issue in his Message to the Legislature (State of the State message).

Trading the unaffordable luxury of autonomy for the substantial economies of consolidation is one of the most constructive steps communities can take to lighten their tax load . . . I propose giving local voters the power to insist that the merits of consolidation be studied—not by politicians with a personal interest in the outcome but by forming Citizens' Restructuring Initiatives (CRIs) . . . The people would have the power both to launch a CRI and to determine, in the voting booth, whether to go forward with its recommendations. (1994 Message to the Legislature, pages 119-120)

It's scarcely deniable that one of the reasons local taxes are so high in New York State is that there are so many entities that can, and do, tax the State's citizens. Even if reducing the number of entities would somehow not reduce taxes, then at least the people would know who was taxing them, and what for.

Mario Cuomo lost the 1994 election to George Pataki, who rode the wave of Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution and entered office spouting a lot of Reagan-era rhetoric about reducing the size and cost of government. Pataki uttered the phrase “the heavy hand of government” again and again during his administration.

One indicator, not a perfect one of course, of reducing the size of government is reducing the size of the government workforce. It's even better if this can be done without layoffs (and State layoffs did not happen under Pataki) because layoffs hurt local economies more than high taxes.

By this measure, during the Pataki era the size of State government did indeed shrink. According to an annual Rockefeller Institute of Government publication called the New York State Statistical Yearbook, the State workforce had approximately 17,419.89 fewer full-time positions on January 1, 2007, when Pataki was replaced by Eliot Spitzer, than on January 1, 1995, when Pataki replaced Mario Cuomo. (The Rockefeller Institute's State workforce data uses a thing called a “Full-Time Equivalent.” 2 half-time workers would count as 1 FTE.)

On the surface, we can congratulate George Pataki on accomplishing one of his policy goals. (Even though this figure doesn't include the public authorities, or the Legislature, or private sector consultants hired by the State.)

However, during that same time period, according to the same publication, positions under the jurisdiction of the County Civil Service agencies, outside of New York City, actually went up by 31,506. And there's a lot besides New York City that this figure doesn't include: certain political appointees; employees of cities; local elected officials; employees of local legislatures such as Town Councils. Somehow I doubt that the increase noted by the Rockefeller Institute was somehow compensated for by a decrease in areas not recorded by the Institute.

New York State has a local government problem.

There are currently 3 major candidates for Governor of New York State. Andrew Cuomo has the Democratic nomination. Carl Paladino and Rick Lazio are currently in a bitter contest for the Republican nomination.

As far as I can tell, neither Rick Lazio and nor Carl Paladino have a plan for dealing with New York's local government problem.

Lazio, in his policy book (entitled Building a Better New York), outlines a plan for a property tax cap (Building a Better New York, pages 4 and 12). He also professes a desire to “end” State unfunded mandates on local governments (Building a Better New York, page 9). But I see nothing there for the problem of there being simply too many local governments and too much overlap between them all. We know that these issues are not simply byproducts of unfunded mandates, because as far as I can tell unfunded mandates were not considered a big issue in 1915, and we know that New York's local government problem goes back at least that far and probably a lot further.

Paladino makes no mention of the local government issue whatsoever in the plan for New York (which consists of 8 bullets) that is posted on his website. The one mention of property taxes on the site appears to come in reference to Medicaid spending.

By contrast, however, Lazio's campaign website mentions the word “mosque” 33 times, and Paladino's 294 times, according to a Google search on both sites.

Andrew Cuomo has, by far, the most detailed plan to reform local government. It's found on pages 82 through 92 of his policy book, The New NY Agenda. The details are available for anyone to read, so I won't get into them, but broadly speaking it revolves around allowing local governments, and local voters, to initiate and lead efforts to cut layers of government and share services. It would ultimately, it seems, be up to the voters to decide if they prefer the unaffordable luxury of autonomy, or not. While he also deals with unfunded mandates (The New NY Agenda, pages 55, 56, 155), and has a fairly detailed property tax cap plan (The New NY Agenda, pages 42-45), it's clear that Cuomo is placing most of his faith in this area in the local government reform plan.

Importantly, Cuomo also appears to have a good handle on the depth and extent of the local government problem.

Our system of local government was constructed hundreds of years ago and is the product of historical accumulation.109 As a result, at the local level there exists overlap and duplication, resulting in high taxes, inefficiency and waste.110 In fact, there are more than 10,500 local governmental entities --- including 62 counties, 932 towns, 555 villages and more than 7,000 special districts --- imposing taxes and fees across New York State. (The New NY Agenda, page 82)

If there's a similar understanding of the issue displayed, or a plan for the issue outlined somewhere in documents on either Carl Paladino's or Rick Lazio's websites, I somehow missed it completely. E-Mail me a link and I will take a look.

It should be noted that Andrew Cuomo's local government reform plan has a lot in common with the one his father outlined in his 1994 Message to the Legislature, as cited above. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it might suggest that Andrew, like his father before him, understands that the local government issue isn't totally the fault of Albany, but rather in part is the fault of the localities themselves, and thus the solutions might also be found locally.

But, I have to wonder if anyone could really solve this problem. It's long-standing, and to the degree to which Andrew and Mario Cuomo are correct, the local government problem is one in-part of local government's making. And therefore, indirectly, of our own.

Andrew Cuomo, at least, appears to recognize that a problem exists, and that it goes beyond the “unfunded mandates,” a term which during the Pataki years was used so often that it effectively lost all meaning.

Whoever wins the Gubernatorial election will have to deal with the issue, one way or another. Andrew Cuomo, it seems, will at least have a head start.