My knowledge of the pseudoscience of economics is limited to my grasp of the relationship between cash in my pocket and the cost of my lunch in a diner. Even in this area, my expertise is shaky, as I'm constantly thrown off course by the physics of crumpled bills and gravity, and the challenge of picking coins off the floor when they've rolled under the tables of leggy ingenues, protein-craving construction workers, oatmeal-inhaling octogenarians, and so forth. Economics is pretty complicated, I can tell you that much.
So when I mention that I've been reading an article in Foreign Affairs, a periodical whose provocative title, I've discovered, is somewhat misleading to the uninitiated, what I'm really saying is that I've waded into a jungle without bringing the requisite grommets, carabiners, snake bite antidote, native bearers, compass, map, backup compass in case of swamp-adjacent droppage, backup map in case the first one gets covered with my blood, backup native bearers in case of Kong-related desertion, and the countless other accessories that make the screen so crowded in Tarzan films.
In short, I've gone where the weather doesn't suit my clothes.
But writers will do that from time to time, as it's part of the job. If you're seated at the breakfast table, lingering over your corn flakes while your offspring are successfully neutralized by their narcoleptic handheld literacy-eroders, you don't want to read an article about a guy or gal sitting there eating breakfast and reading an article. Where's the excitement in that? You want to read about thrilling adventure, overheated shipboard romance, frontier justice, barrelchested swashbuckling enthusiasts, werewolves, and the like.
And you don't give a damn what hoops the inkstained wretch had to jump through to tell the tale. Did the author just barely make it back alive from these fracases and imbroglios? What of it? Dazzle me, Shakespeare! Make your characters more "relatable," Cervantes! Punch up your grim cast of wage slaves, Raymond Carver; make them stub out their unfiltered cigarettes and pick fights with the jaded romantics that populate John Cheever's stories!
Thus, my quixotic foray into a Foreign Affairs article written by a Trump-approved financial expert. Some of you are saying, ah, now we're getting somewhere; Trump may be handicapped when it comes to the flowery rhetoric of statesmen, but his vast mysterious holdings are unblinking evidence of his vast mysterious knowledge of money making. Liberals, alternatively, are generally foppish weasels, obsessed with the ugly hamstringing of bankers and job creators, and never too focused on self-regard to take a short break for the purpose of tearing a dollar out of a heroic tycoon's wallet and handing it to a junkie rapist.
As I hack through the great man's verbal undergrowth, I become gradually aware that he is patiently laying out a solution to our economic woes that couldn't be simpler. In his helpful framing, the liberal predilection for unfettered regulation of corporations and commerce is the rankest of idiocies. Under Obama, regulation has been applied with a psychotic glee, as if businessmen can thrive no matter what toxic sludge they're asked to control, or how many humans they're asked to avoid murdering. Just as comic books rarely mention how Batman takes his coffee, or Spiderman's decision to cut out gluten, there are large and small items left out of the conservative case for economic policy.
The implication, naturally, is that deregulation will only make things better for all Americans. Deregulation is discussed as if the impulse to regulate business is wholly illogical, and even bizarre, like an impulse to wear ass-revealing chaps to a PTA meeting.
I'll avoid mentioning the many ways American lives have been enriched by rotten meat, poisonous water, radioactive waste, airborne toxins, disease-ridden rodents, etc., as liberals all know this story like they know the sound of their children laughing.
But we now come to the part of the essay where I pull off my mask and reveal my cleverly disguised lizardlike intention.
I will never be able to mock the left the way I do the right. This is, perhaps, a failing, and will keep many readers from getting my point, but I'm going to feign sincerity about this anyway.
Here it is: regardless of my emotional connection to the liberal side of things, by which I mean my dopamine-reinforced disdain for fat cats and my affection for the disadvantaged and the various salts of this earth, I don't literally believe that every conservative economic is inherently farcical. The left wing tendency is to dismiss all ideas from the right, especially from the wealthy right, as fork-tongued subterfuge. Can any of it be fairly tarred with this allegation? Sure. Maybe even most of it. I do believe (embarrassing as it is for me to admit that I believe anything at all) that our society, and societies in general, is and are weighted to protect the marble countertops and hedge animals of the rich from scuffing and blight. But does this mean every liberal attempt to take the oligarchical thumb off the scale is a net win for all the little guys? Or little gals? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.
I very much want to believe that policies dressed up as lifelines for the poor and the middle class are as advertised. But are they always the right thing for us to do? As sickening as it is to hear some pampered witch grumbling about how poor people's motivation has been destroyed by Democratic policies, it seems reasonable to me to see Democrats as subject to human frailty and not as immune to overreach. And as much as I can't stand to hear a billionaire grousing about the crippling costs of his tax bill, is it literally impossible that lower taxes for pricks will help convince them to keep a factory in the States?
Here's another, starker way to put it. Are assholes always wrong? And are smiling puppy-holders always right?
Some (my relatives among them) will chuckle that I am becoming more conservative as I age, shedding the youthful naïveté and idealism that once fueled my left wing idiocy. I don't think I am becoming more conservative at all, actually, though this could just be denial. Rather, I've begun to accept the abstract notion that just because a policy nauseates me, it doesn't mean it's wrongheaded. I don't see my gut feelings as some sort of gold standard for which policies work and which don't, and I suspect the gut feelings of others on both sides are also less than magically reliable. Gut feelings, in fact, are given an outsized portion of credit in our culture. Americans don't read books, for the most part, but if a book trumpets the dangers of overthinking, our countrymen and countrywomen will trample babies and cross moats and picket lines to buy it. From the crow's nest where I do most of my observin', underthinking appears to be the real silent killer.
I'll slip in parenthetically that despite appearances, I'm not trying to deny the epic documentation of fiscal piracy that takes place. Among other things, I'm aware that obscene levels of defense spending are traditionally the favored justification for slapping the gruel out of a welfare queen's toddler's bowl, and years of reading the Nation have apprised me irreversibly of the mammoth shell game that represents our hallowed budget process.
But none of this emotional positioning on my part changes my fear that emotional positioning must be balanced with some occasional brain use. When we position ourselves emotionally, as we all do, it has a dangerous tendency to harden into unswerving assumptions about everything, including the things that we know virtually nothing about. Especially those things.
So, while it's tempting to believe that Obama, a smart and magnetic man (unless your emotional positioning paints him as a self-regarding dilettante and habitual liar), made all the right moves during his time at the tiller, and even more tempting to believe that a Trump appointee or advisor can only be a nefarious merchant of brimstone, I'm not so sure. I'm not going to claim that my emotion-based convictions are melting like a G.I. Joe in a microwave. They are not. I'm just explaining that doubt has crept in. And that is not because my emotions are any different today than they were at any other time. Believe me when I say that I see Donald Trump as perhaps the most awful human being to whom we've ever handed the keys.
But if I have doubts about the long-nurtured orthodoxies of the left, that's not because my faith in left wing philosophy has wavered. It's because my faith in orthodoxies has eroded, as it must for anyone who reads books with the idea of learning. If your goal is to read in order to strengthen what you already believe, I'd say you're reading for the worst reason. I love reading too much to cheapen the experience by demanding that it teach me nothing. If you're going to be lazy, don't be half-assed about it. Stop reading entirely. I don't see the sense of reading to confirm your emotion-based assumptions, any more than I would understand a person sitting down in a barber's chair and saying, don't change a thing. Anyone whose wig is screwed on that tight should be charged the rube rate, and denied a lollipop.
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