Introduction:
1.1 How Delusions Spark Polarization
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
—Richard Feynman
(physicist, second only to Einstein)
“An incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat … my brothers carried pails of water to [my father], but water seemed useless against this infernal fire—indeed, made it burn even more furiously. … Meanwhile, the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions.”
Oliver Sacks, the renowned neurologist and author, published a memoir of his childhood in 2001. He had grown up in London during World War II, but it was a memory he would not “hesitate to swear on in a court of law and had never doubted as real.”
After his account of that night was published, an older brother assured Sacks that: “You never saw it. You weren’t there.” Sacks was astonished. Despite all his training, his own mind had deceived him.
As his brother explained, “We were both away at Braefield at the time. But David [our older brother] wrote us a letter about it.” When Sacks carefully compared this manufactured “memory” to an equally old and validated memory, he could find no difference in quality between the two.
We know that millions can be deceived by political propaganda, but we believe this happens because those being duped are biased “low-information voters” like we believe our political opponents to be. We are equally sure that our team, whoever they may be, can be trusted to have accurate information, at least on any point of significance.
But what if that’s wrong? What if all our minds are designed to make us feel far more certain than we have any right to be? Then our side may also be subject to delusions. Could such delusions, masquerading as certainties, cause the infighting that’s polarizing Democrats and adding to the national polarization that is the lifeblood of Trumpism?
As I will show, this is our plight, and the reason we will lose again unless we take corrective action.
To solve a problem, first admit there is a problem, then comprehend its magnitude. Most of us have peeked at these delusions, but we still fail to recognize them when we ourselves are most in danger.
So let me show you some hair-raising examples. Some are believed by millions of good Democrats yet cause untold damage to our cause. Skeptical about this? Good. Skepticism is your friend in this battle, but it’s not enough. We need evidence.
When I started researching this book, I had recently read a review of On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit—a book by political scientist George Edwards, based on 10 years of research, showing that presidents nearly always fail in their attempts to persuade the public. And not infrequently, presidents speaking from their “bully pulpit” have even had the reverse effect of what they intended.
For example, Edwards found that support for “regulatory programs and spending on health care, welfare, urban problems, education, environmental protection and aid to minorities all increased rather than decreased” during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Known as “the great communicator,” he had opposed all of these programs from his bully pulpit. And he had favored increased defense spending yet support for that decreased.
However, I soon came upon an argument by someone I trusted who seemed to be staking his political reputation on the contention that the bully pulpit works wonders. Because he was an economist, as I am, I suspected he might not be up on his political science. So I decided to check. What I discovered was a political version of the manufactured thermite-bomb memory.
What the Expert Said
Robert Reich has long been one of my minor heroes because he exposes socioeconomic problems simply and with humor. Furthermore, his credentials as a policy expert with hands-on political experience are unmatched. He served under Presidents Ford and Carter, became Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, and was part of Obama’s transition team. He is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and has taught at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has been a contributing editor of The New Republic, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Given his leftward leanings and his expertise, it is no great surprise that he became Bernie Sanders’ most illustrious and astute surrogate and interpreter. And unlike many of Sanders’ supporters, he treated Hillary Clinton fairly, possibly because their political backgrounds overlapped, and they had become friends.
Reich kept a cool head in the Sanders-Clinton war even when he explained in a 2016 op-ed why Clinton would make the best president for the status quo, but Sanders would be the only president who could bring about fundamental change.
His argument was simply put and powerful: Sanders was the one who would use the “bully pulpit” of the presidency to lead Americans to stand up for positive social change. Clinton, like Obama, would only be a “dealmaker-in-chief.” That’s a persuasive argument only if the bully pulpit really works. And Reich knew that.
To prove it worked, he used the example of how Teddy Roosevelt had achieved four miraculous progressive changes by using his bully pulpit:
- “A progressive income tax,
- Limits on corporate campaign contributions,
- Regulation of foods and drugs, and
- The dissolution of giant trusts.”
All that from His Presidential Pulpit?
I had heard the usual things about Roosevelt, so I was not surprised by the list of his accomplishments. But On Deaf Ears had me doubting that all this was mainly the result of Teddy’s preaching. I read what is considered the best biography of Roosevelt, The Bully Pulpit, and then double-checked a few more sources. Here is what I found:
1. The income tax. The Democrats passed the first federal income tax in 1894, and it was highly progressive. But the next year it was declared unconstitutional, and it remained so until the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1913. Teddy Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909. So he had nothing to do with “getting a progressive income tax.” He didn’t even push for it.
What was Reich talking about?!
It seemed incredible that such an experienced and esteemed policy expert could be so completely wrong about something so central to his politics and so easily checked. And he was spreading this myth to tens of thousands of his devoted followers.
To top it off, the real story shows the exact opposite of Reich’s theory—we got the income tax through, you guessed it, exactly what Reich said Clinton was best at, political dealmaking! President Howard Taft championed the 16th Amendment and secured its ratification. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of The Bully Pulpit:
As he pursued his tax agenda with [Senator] Aldrich, Taft engaged in “some pretty shrewd politics.” He met individually with members of the Finance Committee and “committed them separately” to [backing the 16th Amendment].
That’s not using a bully pulpit. That’s back-room dealmaking, and that’s how we got a progressive income tax.
2. Campaign contributions. In his first run for president, in 1904, Teddy Roosevelt and the Republicans were caught taking enormous corporate campaign contributions. The most radical of the era’s famous progressive journalists argued privately that he should give them back. Roosevelt refused and argued that it was “entirely legitimate to accept contributions, no matter how large,” provided they were freely given. Finally, under mounting political pressure, he signed a bill, written by his archenemy, “Pitchfork Ben,” limiting contributions—but lacking an enforcement mechanism.
I was prepared for Reich to overplay the bully-pulpit myth, but I was totally unprepared to discover that Reich had misled me about which side of an issue Roosevelt was on.
As I describe in Chapter 26, Reich’s last two points are also misfires. Food and drug regulations were largely spurred by Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, and public sentiment for trust-busting was whipped up by Ida Tarbell’s book, The History of Standard Oil. These books were so powerful that both are still in print today.
Sadly, Roosevelt’s most well-known “accomplishment” preaching from his bully pulpit had the unwanted consequence that his favorite progressive investigative journalists (especially Ida Tarbell) were ridiculed as “muckrakers,” severely damaging their credibility.
Yes, just as On Deaf Ears had alerted me, using the bully pulpit is unreliable at best—even when used by Teddy Roosevelt himself. Fortunately, Roosevelt was an excellent dealmaker-in-chief (and proud of it), and he really does deserve his place on Mount Rushmore.
Don’t Blame Robert Reich
Everything that I checked turned out to be backward or at least sideways. Yes, the developments cited by Reich did happen but not because of Teddy’s preaching, and sometimes against his will or when he was no longer president. How could an advisor to four presidents and a renowned professor at the nation’s top two policy schools possibly be so completely wrong about the political topic he cared most about? I was flummoxed.
It seemed impossible that he could be that wrong, and I was just as sure he wasn’t lying. Then I remembered Oliver Sacks. Reich probably didn’t check any source because his memory was so vivid that he would not, as Sacks put it, “hesitate to swear on it in a court of law.”
Exactly what he “remembered” I cannot say, but I myself had “remembered” enough about Roosevelt that I did not doubt Reich’s four mistaken “facts” about what Roosevelt deserved credit for; I only doubted that Teddy’s bully pulpit was the force behind these accomplishments. The bully pulpit myth is, however, so well established that most people still believe it. Before George Edwards wrote On Deaf Ears, pretty much the whole political-science community believed it, as well as most presidents.
I feel certain that Reich had heard many things over many years so, as Sacks put it, this could have led to “subsequently constructing a ‘memory’ that became more and more firmly fixed by repetition.”
Why it Matters
Both sides, Republicans and Democrats, believe they have personal qualities that protect them from political delusions. To some extent, that’s true. We don’t fall for most of the nonsense that surrounds us. But what we do fall for can do us great harm. Because I’m interested in protecting and strengthening the liberal side, I pay more attention to our myths and delusions than to conservative ones.
That’s why I’ve chosen the bully pulpit example. It shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the characteristics we all assume will protect us—concern for the public good, intelligence, education, and political experience—are insufficient, even if we possess them in abundance, as does Robert Reich. So we should not be surprised to find that political myths and delusions are the main drivers of politics, even on our side.
Delusions are common, but are they so damaging? Consider the bully-pulpit myth, which has long been widespread. Reich tells us that Obama failed to use his bully pulpit, and so he “allowed powerful interests to cash in” to the tune of “about $16 billion a year” paid to the drug industry. This turns what seems to be the harmless, feel-good bully-pulpit myth into the beginnings of polarization.
No one can know that using his bully pulpit would have worked, and Edward’s research shows it’s quite likely Obama could not have done what Reich assumes would have been a sure bet. Taking Reich’s advice could have even made things worse. Of all people, shouldn’t Obama have been considered innocent until proven guilty? Especially when the only evidence against him was baseless speculation.
Convicting Obama. In fact, Obama was not just convicted of making a mistake. The radicals convicted him of intentional harm with malice aforethought. This transforms a discussion of issues into moralistic judgments, which are the basis of “emotional polarization.” That’s the kind ripping us apart.
At a MoveOn meeting that I attended after the Democrats “took a shellacking” in his first midterm elections, two radicals who had worked hard for him in 2008 said they hadn’t worked at all on the midterms—they had only come to the meeting to carp about how Obama had deceived us about who he really was.
Their view was common among radicals, and it had set in early. To mark his first 100 days in office, Katrina Heuvel, the radical editor of The Nation, had warned that if Obama did not win the public healthcare option, that would show that he had not been making “necessary compromises” but had instead been unnecessarily “watering down policies to appease for-profit special interests.”
Heuvel, a fan of the bully-pulpit myth, was sure that Obama could win the public option if he really wanted to. She was so sure Obama knew this—that if he didn’t use his bully pulpit and succeed, then he must be corrupt, an appeaser of “for-profit special interests.” Most of the radical left agreed.
She too was led toward emotional polarization by the bully-pulpit myth. Such polarization weakened Obama and the Democrats for eight years. Then the bully-pulpit myth was used to damage Clinton in the primaries, and that had a lingering effect when she ran against Trump.
Ripped Apart
