Thursday, May 24, 2012
It's comfortable living in a cocoon -- associating only
with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only
reinforces them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.
Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972,
the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that Richard Nixon was winning
the election, because everyone she knew was for George McGovern.
Kael wasn't clueless about the rest of America. She was
just observing that her own social circle was politically parochial.
The rest of us have increasingly sought out comfortable
cocoons, too. Journalist Bill Bishop, who lives in an Austin, Texas,
neighborhood whose politics resemble Kael's, started looking at national data.
It inspired him to write his 2009 book "The Big
Sort," which describes how Americans since the 1970s have increasingly
sorted themselves out, moving to places where almost everybody shares their
cultural orientation and political preference -- and the others keep quiet
about theirs.
Thus professionals with a choice of where to make their
livings head for the San Francisco Bay Area if they're liberal and for the
Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (they really do call it that) if they're
conservative. Over the years the Bay Area becomes more liberal and the
Metroplex more conservative.
But cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and
conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream
media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama
administration.
They're made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of
those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own
responses.
Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults
from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure
their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio
dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.
The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make
the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of
holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely
disposed to agree.
We have seen how this works on some issues this year.
Take the arguments developed by professor Randy Barnett
of Georgetown Law that Obamacare's mandate to buy health insurance is
unconstitutional. Some liberal scholars like Jack Balkin of Yale have addressed
them with counterarguments of their own.
But liberal politicians and Eric Holder's Justice Department
remained clueless about them. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Obamacare was
unconstitutional, could only gasp: "Are you serious? Are you
serious?"
In March, after the Supreme Court heard extended oral
argument on the case, CNN's Jeffrey Toobin was clearly flabbergasted that a
majority of justices seemed to take the case against Obamacare's
constitutionality very seriously indeed.
Liberals better informed about the other side's case
might have drafted the legislation in a way to avoid this controversy. But
nothing they heard in their cocoon alerted them to the danger.
Another case in point is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's
law restricting the bargaining powers of public employee unions. The unions and
the crowds in Madison, which is both the state capital and a university town
and which with surrounding Dane County voted 73 to 26 percent for Barack Obama,
egged each other on with cries that this would destroy the working class. No
one they knew found this implausible.
The unions had an economic motive to oppose the laws and
seek to recall first Republican legislators and then Walker himself. The law
ended the automatic checkoff of union dues, which operated as an involuntary
transfer of money from taxpayers to union leaders.
But voters declined to recall enough Republicans to give
Democrats a majority in the Senate, and Walker currently leads Milwaukee Mayor
Tom Barrett in polls on the June 5 recall election.
The Madison mob seemed unaware that there were attractive
arguments on Walker's side.
Why should public employee union members pay less for
health insurance and get fatter pensions than the taxpayers who pay their
salaries? Why is it a bad thing for property taxes to be held down and for
school districts to cut perks for union members enough to hire more teachers?
Beyond the Madison cocoon, in Wisconsin's other 71
counties, which voted 55 to 44 percent for Walker in 2010, such arguments are
evidently proving persuasive. Maybe liberals should listen to Rush every so
often.
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