Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Political Robotics

(with apologies to Dr. Asimov)

I've seen some liberals, online and off, acting with incredulity at the ongoing tax-cut fetish afflicting conservatives today. "Surely," the liberals will say, "they remember the explosive deficits after the 1981 Reagan tax cuts. Surely they know that the tax cuts will not increase revenue and that the budget will not balance by virtue of taxes having been cut."

I was considering such a question the other day - - I can't recall which blog or news article I read it in; it doesn't really matter because it's quite common - - and I recall some nameless conservative I saw once on Bill Maher's old show. This person was railing against Bill Clinton, claiming that in eight years Clinton did not accomplish a single positive thing. Not one. Maher, of course, pointed out the balanced budget and the long economic boom, and asked, "If it wasn't Clinton, then who got those things done?"

The response? Ronald Reagan. This conservative (who I only saw on the show once, because I was a sporadic viewer, and have never seen again) actually claimed that it was Reagan's tax cuts in 1981 that eventually led to the economy of the 1990s and the budget surpluses and all the rest of it.

This led me to formulate the following calculus to which all conservatives seem to adhere:

One: Anything that has happened since 1981, that we like, is to be credited to President Reagan.
Two: Anything that has happened since 1993, that we dislike, is to be blamed on President Clinton.
Three: If necessary, we must define what we like and what we dislike so as to conform to the first two Rules.

The left has its share of robotic shibboleths too. We saw this during the recent blackout in the northeast. When I turned on my computer the next morning and started checking the news and blogs (even though I had not lost power at any point, I had turned the computer off), it didn't take long to see deregulation blamed for the blackout, even though the authorities still aren't entirely clear on why the blackout happened, as of this writing. Now, I'm pretty firm in my liberal beliefs; I've long since abandoned the idea that the free market is the solution to all problems (or, failing that, preferable even to solving any particular problem). But it seemed to me that perhaps we might, you know, wait a while before we started judging to what degree deregulation played a part in the blackout.

Clearly, I haven't spent nearly as much time identifying the "Liberal Laws of Robotics" as I have the conservatives, because, you know, who wants to sit around identifying the faults of those with whom he agrees? Not me! But one that I have seen is this:

Anything good that has transpired since January, 2001 is the result of Clinton policies that President Bush hasn't mucked with yet.

This, of course, is pretty similar to the "Three Laws" as formulated above.

The existence of these shibboleths, on both sides, is probably unavoidable. But it also tends to facilitate the reduction of political discourse to a kind of shorthand where ideas are never exchanged or evaluated. Be careful about such things.