Is There Political Correctness on the Right?

I can think of at least three occasions in recent years when someone prominent made a statement inconsistent with left wing orthodoxy, was fiercely attacked for it, and forced in one sense or another to back down. In each case the statement was, as best I can tell, a defensible one. One involved a Nobel Prize winning scientist, one the president of a top university, the most recent a best selling author.

Are there any similar cases involving right wing political correctness? The question isn't whether there are any beliefs that are orthodoxy on the right—surely there are. It is whether there are cases of someone prominent making a defensible statement that violates such an orthodoxy and being attacked for it so fiercely that he was forced to publicly retract it, resign from a prominent position, or both. I'm not counting cases of conservative politicians backing down from statements that offended their supporters, since that's a different pattern and one that occurs across the political spectrum.

Red Tribe, Blue Tribe

I've just been reading an interesting and persuasive post about the way in which people's beliefs and attitudes tie into their ideology. Each side has a view of the world covering a variety of issues. When something happens that makes a good fit with one side's view, that side pays a lot of attention to it, the other side does its best to pretend it never happened. When something more ambiguous happens, each side tries to interpret it in a way that fits their narrative. The result is that someone's attitudes on issues ranging from global warming to Ebola can, to a considerable extent, be predicted by whether he self-identifies as conservative or liberal. It's more or less the same point I discussed in an earlier post on Dan Kahan's studies of why people believe things, generalized and spiced up. 

Some of my favorite bits:

The Red Tribe and Blue Tribe have different narratives, which they use to tie together everything that happens into reasons why their tribe is good and the other tribe is bad.

And, after giving an imaginative account of how global warming should have been presented if the objective was to play into the conservative narrative instead of the liberal:

If this were the narrative conservatives were seeing on TV and in the papers, I think we’d have action on the climate pretty quickly. I mean, that action might be nuking China. But it would be action.

 And finally:

I blame the media, I really do. Remember, from within a system no one necessarily has an incentive to do what the system as a whole is supposed to do. Daily Kos or someone has a little label saying “supports liberal ideas”, but actually their incentive is to make liberals want to click on their pages and ads. If the quickest way to do that is by writing story after satisfying story of how dumb Republicans are, and what wonderful taste they have for being members of the Blue Tribe instead of evil mutants, then they’ll do that even if the effect on the entire system is to make Republicans hate them and by extension everything they stand for.

Which demonstrates that the author understands the logic of situations where individual rationality fails to produce group rationality.

 

Assuming Your Conclusion

Health officials have said there was a breach in protocol that led to the infections, but they don't know where the breakdown occurred.

Officials have said they also don't know how the first health worker, a nurse, became infected.

 Both quotes are from the same article.

I was struck earlier by headlines asserting that a breech of the protocol, the rules for preventing contagion, had occurred. The basis for that claim was and is the fact that a nurse got Ebola, not any evidence of how it happened. The obvious alternative is that the existing protocols are in one way or another inadequate, possibly because the beliefs about the disease on which they are based are in part mistaken. It is only if you assume that the protocol is correct that you can conclude it was not followed.

Weather is not Climate

An observation popular with one side of the climate controversy when the weather is unusually hot, with the other side when it is unusually cold.

My Record as a Prophet

A claim I usually deny. But consider:

1973: My chapter on Uber

1973: My chapter on China's transition to capitalism

1973:  My chapter on SpaceX and Virgin Galactic

1989: My chapter on our interventions in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan

(Link goes to the relevant part of the chapter).

Concerning Politics

Somewhere in Robert Heinlein's Double Star, one of the better novels of one of the best SF authors of the Twentieth century, appears the following comment on the subject of politics:

"It's rough and sometimes it's dirty and it's always hard work and tedious details. But it's the only sport for grownups. All other games are for kids. All of 'em."

I was reminded of it reading something written a little earlier by Finley Peter Donne, an author Heinlein may well have read, a journalist who became prominent in the 1890's through his creation of Mr. Dooley, a fictional Irish barkeep in Chicago. 

Reading through a book of the Mr. Dooley pieces, I found at the end of it some written by Dunne in his own voice. Part of one of them deals with politics in general and the events surrounding the nomination of Grover Cleveland in particular. It is too long for me to be willing to retype it, but I found it in Google Books and here it is. The passage begins with  "But are you convulsed" and ends with a quote from Lord Palmerston.

A commenter offers a link to a more readable version of the piece.

Adam Smith on the Subject of Laptops in the Classroom

There has been a good deal of discussion of late of the question of whether students should be permitted to have laptops in the classroom, with professors concerned that the students might be reading email, checking Facebook, even looking at porn instead of paying attention to the lecturer. The underlying issue is not a new one.

     The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him, as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. It seems to presume perfect wisdom and virtue in the one order, and the greatest weakness and folly in the other. Where the masters, however, really perform their duty, there are no examples, I believe, that the greater part of the students ever neglect theirs. No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given. Force and restraint may, no doubt, be in some degree requisite in order to oblige children, or very young boys, to attend to those parts of education which it is thought necessary for them to acquire during that early period of life; but after twelve or thirteen years of age, provided the master does his duty, force or restraint can scarce ever be necessary to carry on any part of education.

(Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Bk V Ch 1)