Brooks: ‘Americans are Being Held Hostage and Terrorized by the Fringes’

Think tanks, university-based institutes, and research centers must guard against letting their ideological preferences blind them to disagreement. The problem with any ideologically-based organizations is that their loyalties to donors and political parties often lead to biases research and slanted papers.

Individual thinkers in economics change their positions based on the party in power, something identified by the paradoxically politically aligned Econ Journal Watch in 2010 in a paper by Brett Barkley. If respected and honored economists working alone shift their views, probably unconsciously in some instances, imagine the pressure to follow along within a group of economists and political scientists.

But, the American Enterprise Institute has resisted groupthink better than similar organizations, especially the Heritage Foundation — which has shifted positions to align with whatever the dominant views of “conservatives” might be. As a result, the Heritage Foundation is no longer conservative in the economic sense.

Brooks even dared to call out events and organizations that once welcomed him when they embraced Donald Trump. Many conservative groups proved they are only reactionary and tribal, not centers of thought.

AEI has remained a true center for thought and disagreement, a place for debate and discussion. I credit Arthur Brooks for this vibrant community of scholars. Sadly, Brooks is leaving and with his departure, I am apprehensive about the future of AEI. Brook has advocated classical liberalism and tolerance, while the Republican Party and Libertarian Party have both demonstrated incoherence on core values.

Today, Politico published an interview with Brooks. Below are some excerpts, but I encourage people to read about Brooks and his personal journey as a genuine Renaissance-inspired traveler and Enlightenment scholar.

First, Brooks fears that a fringe of 30 percent of voters, left and right, are too dominant. These are the passionate primary voters, and therefore the people dictating the conservations at a national level.

From Politico…

‘Americans are Being Held Hostage and Terrorized by the Fringes’
An exit interview with the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks.

By TIM ALBERTA

May 13, 2018

Arthur Brooks: For me, unity is a really big deal. By that I don’t mean agreement. The founding model in this place was super old school—a competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society, which was so subversive in the ’30s and ’40s because there was no competition of ideas. Disagreement is the essence of how we can unify as a people. We have a moral consensus about pushing opportunity out to people who need it most. Then we actually have to become a constellation of disagreement around that so that we can find the best way to do it. In the same way that you need a competition within the economy so that you can serve consumers best. Competition is hugely important in all areas. It’s a moral good. When you basically see a culture that’s not trying to win competition vigorously and civilly and respectfully, but rather trying to shut down competition by any means necessary, that’s like an economy that’s going from free enterprise to mercantilism. That’s basically what’s happened. We’ve gone from free enterprise of ideas to mercantilism of ideas. That’s what’s happening on both right and left today. That’s really disappointing.

Now, I’m sanguine still. Why? Because that happens periodically and competition also always wins out. There are basically two kinds of people in life: people who want to win competition and people who want to shut it down. People who don’t understand competition actually are the ones who want to shut it down because they don’t understand that competition requires rules. It requires moral precepts. Pepsi doesn’t want to go blow up the Coca-Cola bottling factory. It wants to take their customers fair and square for the better product and better pricing. The same thing should be true in American politics and policy.

PM: So you see intellectual sabotage?

Brooks: Yeah, and it’s not just unfair, it’s stupid because it leads to mediocrity. It leads to a flaccid set of political parties and not very creative ideas. When you’re shutting down the competition like this you don’t solve problems. You perpetuate problems, and you simply build up power structures. So all politics becomes a rent-seeking mechanism: my tribe, your tribe. I’m going to get power, I’m going to deny you power as opposed to colluding within the kind of the noble cause of solving ideas by competing at the head. What’s always disappointing to me is when we’re moving in the wrong direction and right now we’re moving in the wrong direction on that by moving to intellectual mercantilism. I want to move to intellectual free enterprise. That’s what I want.

PM: And the folks who want to suppress competition of ideas now have tools at their disposal the likes of which they’ve never had before, to do just that.

Brooks: I have a book coming out next year called The Culture of Contempt. We’ve created a culture of not anger, not disagreement, it’s contempt. And we need to strike back. We’re the majority. We don’t want this. Americans are being held hostage and terrorized by the fringes. That’s what’s going on here. It’s not like 50 percent of Americans thinks one thing and 50 percent thinks another thing. No, 15 percent on each side are effectively controlling the conversation and 70 percent of us don’t hate each other. I can ask any audience, “How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?” Every hand goes up. And yet, you’re willing to have somebody, some fringe person on your side of the debate, say that your brother-in-law or your mother or your aunt is evil and stupid.

Next, we have to ask how the two fringes, the Occupy and Tea Party movements, gained influence. The answer is simple: the financial system and the general economy failed most people. The voters wanted someone held accountable and nobody was. Both movements, in the end, were more about their tribes than clear solutions.

The Tea Party isn’t protesting in the streets over the horrendous Republican spending. Occupy has given way to an anti-Trump movement that has some conflicting values. All the anger lacked focus, other than a unified distrust of government and business.

Economic insecurity leads to political insecurity and populism on the left and right, unified by the message that somebody oppressed you and that is why you aren’t doing better. Trump blames global trade and immigrants, while Bernie Sanders blames global trade and the wealthy. Either way, populism thrives on fear of external threats.

PM: How do you think we got to this point?

Brooks: The two things to read are Reinhart and Rogoff’s book, This Time Is Different. It came out in 2010—the single best book ever on financial cycles and financial crisis. The second is an article that was written in the European Economic Review in early 2017 by three German economists that looks at the knock-on political effect of financial crises—not a regular recession, but a big overhang of assets that becomes a bubble and then pops, which typically happens a couple times a century. So it’s silver and the railroads in 1894 and 1896, or it’s the stock market in 1929, or it’s the real estate market in ’08. The most interesting thing for me is that in the decade after a financial crisis, the knock-on effect over 10 years is not low growth, it’s uneven growth. The big thing that happens for 10 years is that you have asymmetric economic growth where 80 percent of the income distribution gets none of the rewards of the growth after the recession. Of course you get populism after that. It’s natural. It’s just the way it works.

PM: But populism is not inherently a bad thing.

Brooks: Bernie Sanders is a populist. Bernie Sanders’ populism is all about scapegoating. It’s rich people, it’s bankers, it’s Republicans—it’s all these people who got your stuff. That’s the kind of populism that we frequently see as opposed to a kind of ethical populism, which basically says we have good values, let’s go share. Let’s make sure that our values are ascendant to save our country. Right? Wouldn’t that be great? But it turns out it’s easier in the political process when people are suffering a lot to say somebody came and got your stuff. Whether it’s immigrants or whether it’s trading partners or whether it’s bankers or whatever.

Conservatives have failed to stop populism from within, too. They even used that populism, in the form of the Tea Party, to win elections based on fear. The current GOP is rudderless and dangerous. Brooks seems to understand this.

PM: What about conservatism? In your nine years at AEI, what’s been the single most important, most fundamental change you have seen in conservatism itself?

Brooks: Well for sure it’s the rise to Trump.

PM: But what was the change that facilitated that?

Brooks: It was that effect of the Great Recession. There were a bunch of things that happened during that time. One was an unwillingness or inability of mainstream Republicanism to deal with a lot of misery that was going on. To talk openly about the despair, and the despair was really real when there’s been a 323 percent increase in drug overdose deaths for men my age, typically in rural areas. Those numbers were easy to chart. Politicians just didn’t know what to do. They had nothing to do and nothing to say about it.

I do not and cannot support a Republican Party that has no idea how to deal with Donald Trump. I don’t want to support a party that has too many people embracing “freedom” as a cover for racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on. The Republican Party only had the support of classical liberals and libertarians because the other choice, the Democratic Party, can be openly hostile to business and markets. One party pretends to support markets but manipulates them for their wealthy supporters, and the other party dislikes markets and manipulates them for their wealthy supporters.

Brooks offers a clear-eyed analysis of how the Republican Party lost any moral standing and shed the veneer of economic coherence. The GOP needs critics like Arthur Brooks. Unfortunately, it turns out that most voters aren’t ideologically pure. They are tribal first, ideological second.

I hope that the AEI doesn’t prove to be tribal after Brooks.

Photo by Gage Skidmore