Yes, the Democratic Party Has a Real Ideology: Equality

It's become common, among intelligent, political-science-literate types, to say that the Democratic and Republican Parties are organized in qualitatively different ways. The Republican Party is highly ideological, the thinking goes: it's defined by a monolithic commitment to conservative principles. The Democrats, on the other hand, are commonly described as a coalition, maybe even a loose one, of different interest groups. Paul Krugman's latest blog post is largely in this same tradition, with one major variation; it repeats the "coalition of interest groups" description of the Democrats verbatim, but Krugman describes the Republicans as "an engine designed to harness white resentment on behalf of higher incomes for the donor class"--and, as he notes, "the base never cared about the ideology." It's not very hard to diagnose this particular fault-line in the party right now, since Trump basically represents a rebellion on behalf of the white-resentment-y voters against the donor class-favoring party elites.

But I've always thought that this description of the two parties is wrong. Certainly I think it's wrong as to the Democrats, and it might even be totally backwards. Certainly the common wisdom accurately captures the way the parties seem to behave in practice. But if you look deeper, I'm not sure it's so true. The Democrats do have an ideology. You could call it liberalism if you wanted, but egalitarianism is probably a better name. Liberal egalitarianism is better still, if not so pithy. I like that formulation, though, because I'm using the word "liberal" in its technical or political-theory sense, meaning generally a commitment to expansive individual freedom. I also demote liberalism, in this sense, to the position of modifier, with egalitarianism remaining the noun.

And I like that, because I do think that egalitarianism is the central organizing concept of the Democratic Party.

Why the Left has Criticized the New Data Journalism

Jonathan Chait has an excellent column arguing that the "data journalism" currently in vogue at sites like Vox.com, the new FiveThirtyEight, and some new site the New York Times is shortly going to open up is in fact an ideological/partisan endeavor, because commitment to empiricism as the basis for public policy is an ideological issue. It is, roughly speaking, the foundation of the original progressive movement of approximately a century ago, and it continues in the progressive movement of today. Now, it shouldn't be a partisan issue, because it seems kind of, y'know, obvious that we should base our public policy in an accurate understanding of what the world is like, but it is. This fact became blindingly obvious during the Bush Administration, with the whole "reality-based community" line and all. The modern conservative party is deeply against government use of empiricism to guide its decision-making. I might argue, analogously to how I did in this post, that this disregard for facts is another consequence of the Republican Party's commitment to an agenda which is deeply, deeply unpopular; in order to promote policies which will achieve their actual agenda without revealing what that agenda is, they need to get people to stop focusing so much on the empirical issues about the causal mechanisms. But one way or another, Chait is right: data journalism is inherently a left-wing enterprise in today's world.

This, however, leaves open a question: why has there been a substantial amount of criticism from the left, too? From, say, Paul Krugman, most famously, in his brief feud with Nate Silver over the new FiveThirtyEight. One reason is the oft-mentioned "hack gap": conservative pundits are a lot more hackish than liberal ones, and therefore one can expect them to toe the party line much better. But another, I think, is that data journalism really, really, really wants to pretend that Chait isn't right, or at least that they don't know Chait is right. The ideals of empiricism and neutrality are very deeply tied to each other in our society. If one party's ideas systemically fail all empirical testing, well, there's a limit to how much you can do about that, but you certainly, certainly can't let yourself act on the presumption that, because the Republicans have a long history of anti-empiricism, their ideas will continue to be empirically wrong going forward. So a data journalist like Nate Silver or Ezra Klein is going to have to try to frame what their doing as being completely non-partisan and non-ideological.

This, in turn, is aggravating for someone like Krugman, who occupies a position from which he can and does observe just how deeply anti-empirical the Republican Party has become. That fact is an incredibly important one about American politics, and forms a very high item on the indictment of the Republicans as being unfit to govern. It is also deeply underappreciated by the American public. To those of us within the partisan struggle, it feels remiss of anyone ever to miss an opportunity to point it out. And I think this probably explains a lot of the backlash to Vox and FiveThirtyEight. Even if all their actual analysis is completely sound, and therefore comes repeatedly to the conclusion that Republicans are wrong yet again, they feel compelled to at least pay lip service to the kind of Very Serious People-ish ideas Krugman rightly despises about how no party has a monopoly on the truth, blah blah blah. So what Krugman objects to isn't mainly the content of their analysis, although of course the whole global warming controversy at 538 was substantive. It's about the framing.

I don't say this to take a stand on whether the data journalists' framing decisions were correct; I can see the arguments both ways. If it really does enhance their credibility, and if they use that credibility to accurately portray the facts (which will reliably be detrimental to Republicans), then it would seem like a good idea. Merely an observation that I think this is what's going on, rather than (by and large) an actual substantive disagreement.