Why the Facts Have a Liberal Bias

Matt Yglesias has a post about how people on the left always like to think that liberalism is, can be, or should be presented as wholly pragmatic or non-ideological. I think I know why liberals tend to conclude that the facts have a liberal bias, and it has to do with our view of our own ideology. In previous posts I've explained that I think all policy positions consist of a goal/value/fundamental step and an empirical, what-will-get-it-done? step. The reason why I think liberals tend to think that our policy positions involve only the empirical step, or at least that we can and should present them as such, is that our goal is a very simple one, and it's one that we think ought to be really, really uncontroversial: making people's lives better. I think most liberals would tell you that making people's lives better is just about the sole criterion on which policies both public and private ought to be judged, or if not quite the only criterion certainly the most important. And I think we tend to think that this ought to be a given: what the hell else would you do with public policy other than make people's lives better? But I think a lot of conservatives don't believe that this is a legitimate or important goal of public policy. Some might simply deny that kindness has any place in public policy; some might believe in kindness but only applied to a very narrow, exclusive group, like straight white Protestant rich men, or, for many rich people, themselves and their rich friends. Some might think kindness is all very well and good but things like "security" or "maintaining (/restoring) traditional society" or "preserving American greatness," or something like that, are more important. But liberals tend to give these people what I think we would see as the benefit of the doubt, and assume that like us they agree that making people's lives better ought to be the #1 goal of public policy; the result is that we also think that they adopt policy positions which are, then, just plain empirically wrong. Well, very few policy positions advance no goals, it just happens that conservative policies do a very bad job of advancing this goal of kindness, in ways that can be demonstrated empirically.

I also think that there was a lot more of a kindness consensus a few decades ago. Well, okay, there was a kindness consensus in the sense of people agreeing that making people's lives better was one of the most important goals of public policy. Lots of people weren't okay with extending that kindness to blacks, or women, or gays, or whatever, but I think the proportion of the population, and especially of the politicians, who would deny that within some circle of "people who count" the government ought to be making people's lives better. Personally I blame Reagan, and especially what he represented, namely that the conservative movement has now decided that rather than accept general kindness and fight specifically to have an exclusionary application of kindness, they were just going to fight against kindness at all. In fact, this might even be an ironic unintended consequence of the triumph of the civil rights movement and inclusionary liberalism: because we've been so successful at making it not okay to have explicitly discriminatory policies, i.e. policies that help only white people, or only Christians, or only straight people, the people opposed to helping blacks and Jews and gays decided to simply oppose helping anybody. We created a consensus that the sphere of kindness must be rather broad indeed, but in doing so may have destroyed the consensus that within the sphere of kindness public policy should be used to promote people's wellbeing. So I think a lot of liberals long for the day when people looked at the nation's health care system, and saw that it wasn't working very well, and the left had one idea for how to fix the problem and the right had another idea and they were both ideas that were genuinely aimed at solving that problem. But the right isn't really interested in problem-solving anymore: they've decided to simply accept a world in which the well-off stay well-off and the less fortunate stay less fortunate.

So now the liberals have managed to back the conservatives into a corner where the only policies left to them simply do not make sense if you assume policies are supposed to improve people's lives. But that doesn't mean our policies are non-ideological: rather, it means the right has gotten a more extreme ideology. And we should fight them on that, and quit trying to pretend we're so apolitical in our politics.