Two quick notes, on how we participate in foiling political solutions:
Keith Humphreys on Politics and The Messenger is The Message
Keith Humphreys, who recently spent a year in the Obama Administration in the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) as the Senior Policy Advisor to the Deputy Directory, talked to Stanford's 1:2:1 program about his experience and about the California Propositions to legalize marijuana. Humphreys talked about who really uses medical marijuana, dispelled the idea that taxes would benefit state programs, and explained who would most likely control the market (tobacco). You can listen here, all very interesting.
At the end of his interview, when asked if anything surprised him about Washington DC, he said that one thing that struck him was how impossible bi-partisanship had become (transcribed by me, not exactly, from his interview):
"...At the moment at least, it's the messenger is the message entirely. What I mean by that is, for example, on the health care reform bill, we have health exchanges, where you aggregate a bunch of small buyers up and you get a big risk pool and you get a better price. That had been a Republican mainstay for decades, that suggestion could have been an applause line for you if you were giving a talk on health care at the American Enterprise Institute. But now for some reason it's become "socialism", because the president was for it. But it's the same proposal."[Another example] "...We had a proposal in the drug strategy to give vouchers to people who were in addiction treatment, so that they buy things like a pair of workboots to go back to their job, or a babysitting so they could go to their AA meeting...That had been something the Bush administration had proposed, and we gave it the largest budget increase it had had.
When Bush administration proposed it, it was derided by people on the left as this is voucherization, it's the end of the public sector, how typical of those awful Republicans. And then when we did it was wonderful, giving poor people a choice, it's about time someone stood up for the poor. And it wasn't a similar policy, it was the same policy. It almost doesn't matter what you're for, it's who you are that controls all the perception. And that's what makes it really hard to have a bi-partisan proposal. Because almost by definition, if the other guy is for it, it can't be any good..."
Stanley Fish on our Perceptions and Crime
We deceive ourselves about culpability. Stanley Fish describes how people shift their rhetoric seamlessly as the facts of a crime emerge:
"If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile, interests and agendas are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the malefactor from everything that is going on or is in the air (he came from nowhere) and characterize him as a one-off, non-generalizable, sui generis phenomenon."
