9. Run, Forrest, run!

The rise of common sense conservatism

Nineteen eighty was a bad year for the cause of reason in politics. That year saw two major events: first, the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States and, second, the launch of CNN, the world’s first twenty-four-hour news channel. Both were instrumental in ushering in a new era of irrationalism in politics.

While serving his two terms as U.S. president, Reagan had a number of affectionate nicknames: Dutch, the Gipper, the Great Communicator … But to his critics and opponents, he was widely known as the Great Liar. Long before he began to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, or even before he was elected president, Reagan had a way of blurring the line between acting and politics and between Hollywood and real life. He was famous for peppering his political speeches with lines from movies, some of which were spoken by characters that he had played. He once regaled a meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society with a story of the commander of a Second World War bomber who went down with his crewmen instead of bailing out. As far as anyone could tell, he got the story from a 1944 propaganda film called Wing and a Prayer.

As these example show, the “lying” accusation was actually a bit wide of the mark. Reagan was not so much a liar as he was a confabulator. The difference is important: confabulators believe what they are saying as they say it, whereas liars know that they are being untruthful. Because of this, confabulation is sometimes described as “honest” or “innocent” lying: confabulators are perfectly sincere in what they are saying, even though they have no reason to believe it.1 Throughout his political career, Reagan simply invented things whenever it seemed convenient to do so, blending fact and fiction into an undifferentiated haze. By the end of his second term, an entire book had been published documenting his confabulations.2 Perhaps his most famous began during his campaign for the presidency in 1976, when he started telling the story of the Chicago “welfare queen”—a woman who allegedly had eighty aliases, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards, and four husbands, and who had defrauded taxpayers of over $150,000. The story wasn’t remotely true, but no matter how often it was debunked by the media, Reagan would just keep telling it.

Now of course, Reagan was hardly the first politician to tell a lie to get elected. The difference was that he didn’t seem to be worried about getting caught, and when he did get caught, it didn’t seem to affect his behavior. Richard Nixon had been a notorious liar, but he was also notorious for trying to hide his deceptions. And when he did get caught, he looked guilty. Reagan, by contrast, radiated sincerity—mainly because he was being sincere, in his own mind—even when telling a lie that he had been called out on many times. This caused a great deal of consternation in the press. What were journalists supposed to do? Keep calling out the lie every time it was told? It seemed impossible to do so without being seen as partisan. And yet how was the press supposed to perform its traditional role—that of holding power to account—if those in power simply smiled, nodded, and carried on with business as usual? Not only did Reagan continue to lie about the Chicago welfare queen long after being called out, but even worse, Americans didn’t seem to care. How could this be?

The short answer is that America was on the cusp of its long-standing love affair with truthiness. Sure, Reagan’s story was completely false. But for a great many people, it felt true. And because of that, he was able to get away with it. Reagan’s lies attained the status of contemporary fables, little morality plays that, while fictional, spoke of deeper truths about American life. What matters is not how things are but how they seem to be, and how that seeming resonates with our most emotional and gut-level responses. David Gergen, who in 1982 worked on Reagan’s communications staff, defended his boss in exactly these terms. “Presidential storytelling is a time-honored sort of folk art in American politics,” he said. “These stories tend to have a parable-like quality to them; he’s trying to tell us how society works.”3

So perhaps it was not true, as Reagan once claimed, that all the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant could be stored under a desk. But wasn’t it true that environmentalists were greatly exaggerating the threat of nuclear power? So there was no Chicago welfare queen. Wasn’t it still the case that America’s expanding welfare rolls had created a culture of dependency, irresponsibility, and entitlement among the poor? Or consider Reagan’s story about the guy who went up to the cashier in a grocery store with an orange in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other, paid for the orange with food stamps, then used the change to buy the vodka. Couldn’t have happened, but that doesn’t mean alcoholics aren’t abusing the food stamp system.

This is what led to the great discovery, with such fateful consequences for American political culture, that if you found a message that “resonated” and then just kept repeating it over and over again, many people would come to believe it regardless of whether it was true. What Reagan was ultimately able to show is that, even in the political realm, repetition can overpower reality. Of course, this is something that advertisers had known for decades—just by hearing a product name, again and again, people become convinced of its quality—so it was probably just a matter of time before someone applied these lessons to the political realm. Still, it took some nerve to tell bald-faced lies again and again, even after having been publicly corrected.

Recall Goebbels’s observation that success will go to “the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals.” Reagan was that man. In his case, however, it didn’t seem to require much courage; it was mainly a matter of temperament. As Frank Luntz recalls, “When it comes to repetition, politicians are seemingly addicted to communication variation. Ronald Reagan was the only politician I ever saw who seemed to enjoy saying the same words over and over again as though it was the first time he had ever spoken them.”4

But Reagan also benefited from some lucky timing. Republicans had realized early on that their candidate could take fairly significant liberties with the truth while on television. Being corrected on-air is extremely unlikely, and so if it does happen, it will probably be in print, a medium with much less reach. (As Peter Teeley, press secretary to Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, explained, back in 1984, “You can say anything you want during a debate and 80 million people hear it.” If a fact-check appears in the newspaper the next day, “maybe 200 people read it or 2,000 or 20,000.”5)

Televised debates, however, tend to attract unusually large audiences, and occur rather infrequently. On an average newsday, lying for political advantage was less attractive. But the entire landscape of broadcast television was about to change as Reagan took office, in a way that made disregard for the truth an effective political strategy 365 days a year.

The key event was the launch of CNN, only six months after Reagan’s inauguration in 1980. More than any other media outlet, the cable news channel founded by Ted Turner can be credited (or blamed) with the invention of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. The unintended consequence of this was a massive increase in the power of repetition in forming public political opinion. It used to be that a lie, once told, might be repeated only once or twice before being corrected. With a dedicated news channel, however, a lie might be repeated every fifteen minutes, for hours and hours, before even being called into question.

The twenty-four-hour news cycle has had a profound influence on how politics functions, thanks to three major developments. The first was speed. Cable news stations, especially networks such as CNN that have stringers, affiliates, and other contacts around the world, are able to cover breaking news in something close to real time. As the news cycle speeds up, the message inevitably becomes compressed. This is the second major development. Television news has always been the “flattest” of the major news media. Compared to print and radio, television works in relatively short video clips, soundbites, and attenuated explanations. And oddly enough, the advent of round-the-clock news only made the situation worse. One might have expected that having every minute of every day to fill, stations would have responded by deepening their coverage, offering more sophisticated reporting with a broader mix of perspectives. But that has not happened. One of the more surprising features of cable news is how few stories get covered on a given day. Typically, fewer than a half-dozen stories get anything resembling substantial coverage, with the lion’s share of news being relegated to the text “crawl” that scrolls along the bottom of the screen. What we call “twenty-four-hour news” mostly consists of fifteen minutes of news played on a never-ending loop, with slight variations from cycle to cycle. That is why, even more than speed and compression, the most influential aspect of the twenty-four-hour news cycle is repetition, with the same clips, the same quotes, and the same news copy being read over and over again during the course of a day.

Combined, these factors have had a transformative effect on our political culture. “Pervasiveness and repetition,” as George Monbiot has put it, work like a “battering ram” against the rational mind.6 Once something gets into the news cycle, one can count on it being repeated many, many times. Each time it is repeated, it builds up an association in the viewer’s mind. For politicians, this combination of speed, compression, and repetition means that no attack or criticism can go unanswered for any significant length of time. The longer an attack or a lie is left to itself without being disrupted by a response, the more it gets repeated and the sooner it becomes lodged in the public’s brain as a fact.

Consider, for example, the strange case of Fox News and ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a loose confederation of nonprofit organizations in the United States committed to providing community services in low-income neighborhoods—including voter registration. Fox became convinced that ACORN was stacking the electoral rolls in support of Barack Obama, and so in the two months before the 2008 presidential election, the station aired no fewer than fifty reports associating ACORN with voter fraud (reaching a fever pitch during one three-day period, in which Fox News ran fifteen different reports).7 Things got even crazier after the election, with Fox commentators accusing ACORN of being a vast criminal conspiracy, of suborning prostitution and murder, of receiving trillions of dollars of government funding, and a variety of other literally crazy accusations. The organization was disbanded in 2010. Nevertheless, the association between ACORN and voter fraud in the popular mind was sufficiently strong that after Obama’s re-election in 2012 one poll showed that 49 percent of Republicans believed ACORN had stolen the election for him (despite the fact that the organization no longer existed).8

ACORN, of course, was not well equipped to defend itself against this onslaught from the conservative press. Politicians, however, have learned how to prepare themselves. One consequence has been the often-described acceleration of politics in our society. It is not enough anymore for a politician to have a council of advisers who can determine how to respond to an attack. It has become necessary to have a permanent “war room,” ready to go into a state of high alert at the slightest alarm. Furthermore, the objective can no longer be to establish the truth; what matters is simply “getting the message out.” And when there is barely time to react, there is, needless to say, no time to think, much less time to develop a complex response.

The impact on political discourse has been similar to the effects of the “creative revolution” in advertising. Just as advertisers realized that it’s not about the product, it’s about the feeling that you get when you think about the product, so campaign strategists and speechwriters decided that political communication is not about what you say, but rather about how you make people feel.9 The new mantra of political strategy became the idea that elections are a battle for hearts, not heads. And the most effective way to get to people’s hearts usually involves bypassing their heads. You need to get their attention, you need to get them to feel something, and you need to give them something that they will remember. The most effective way of doing this is to appeal directly to their intuitions, by saying things that resonate emotionally, that sound right or feel right, and then just repeat them again and again or, better yet, plant them and let the media do the repetition for you. (Luntz includes “consistency” as one of his cardinal rules of effective communication. But by “consistency,” he doesn’t mean anything like logical consistency—that is, making it so that the various things you say hang together in a coherent way. What he means by “consistency” is just saying exactly the same thing, again and again, day after day. Or as he puts it, “Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.”)10

Along with this has come the discovery that effective communication through the media often involves breaking many of the rules that govern everyday conversation and debate. The big discovery, of course, is that if you have the “courage” to persevere (and to ignore “the objections of the intellectuals”), you don’t have to tell the truth. But there have been a number of lesser discoveries as well. One of the most significant is that you don’t really have to answer questions. Interviews used to consist of a person who asked questions and another who answered them (or at least made some attempt to answer them). Over the past thirty years or so, interviews have become just another opportunity for the person being interviewed to repeat a set of pre-established talking points.

The basic idea behind the talking-point strategy is rather simple. Before being interviewed, politicians will work out (or be given) a set of points that they are supposed to make (or even just phrases that they are to repeat). When asked a question, their job is basically to free-associate around something that the interviewer has said, in order to find a connection to one of these talking points. Instead of answering the question, the question is simply used as a pretext for saying something else that the person is already intending to say. (As those in the business advise, “Don’t answer the question—respond to the question.”11)

Some politicians are extremely good at this: they can “pivot” to the talking point without it being obvious what they’re doing (“Well, I think there’s a more fundamental issue, which you’re not addressing, which is …” or “While my opponent would have you believe that these are important questions, we’re trying to focus on the issues that are of genuine concern to Americans, such as …”). It will only be afterward, when you think about it, that you’ll realize that he or she didn’t answer any of the questions. In order to see the underlying machinery at work, you need only listen to someone who is not very good at it. Or listen to what athletes say during “interviews.” For at least twenty years now, professional athletes, particularly in team sports, have been effectively prohibited from answering journalists’ questions, so all they do is repeat the same dozen talking points (“There’s some tough competition out there, they definitely came out swinging, but ultimately this is a team sport, and I think if the guys all pull together, we can still win this one …,” etc.). This is a little bit different, in that the script athletes are given is a series of platitudinous nonanswers, but the basic principle is the same.

The talking-point strategy puts the journalist in the same tight spot that relentless lying does. There is always the option of calling out the person on their nonresponse, just by saying “You haven’t answered the question.” But it’s very difficult to do this more than once or twice without seeming partisan or making things awkward, so very few journalists will dare to. The people being interviewed know this, and figure that if they just keep responding with more talking points, they can effectively ignore any attempt to get an answer to any question. Every once in a blue moon this turns into a game of chicken, but for the most part journalists tolerate it, and the talking point has thus become the dominant mode of public discussion. This has, in turn, led to a severe degradation of political discourse, because it gives politicians the chance to turn back any demand for reasons.

These are, of course, all generic tactics, which could in principle be used by anyone of any political persuasion. They have, however, been taken up much more enthusiastically by the right than by the left. Indeed, one way of understanding contemporary right-wing ideology is to see it as a wholehearted embrace of the new media environment. Conservatives have become the party of all intuition, all the time. This is a political ideology that is perfectly adapted to an environment in which you have ten seconds to make your point, most of the audience is not paying attention, and whatever you say may wind up being repeated hundreds of times.

The core feature of “common sense” conservatism is its hostility to expertise (or what Luntz calls “fancy theories”). This draws upon traditional conservative antirationalism and the critique of liberal “hubris,” but also taps into a deep well of anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism, which remain powerful forces, particularly in the United States.12 The sentiment is perhaps best captured by William F. Buckley’s famous line that he would “rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” Or one can see it on display in the movie Forrest Gump, a favorite of American conservatives. The hero of that particular story is a borderline-retarded Southerner who learns a few simple, common sense truths as a child in the 1950s, which then carry him through the tumult of the 1960s—including the Vietnam War—unscathed. Throughout the movie, it is made quite clear that the blame for all of the chaos in American society lies with intellectuals, who are constantly overthinking things and trying to be clever, and thereby lose touch with the simple truths, including the simple moral truths that can guide us all to a good life.13

In the early days, there were a few classes of “ivory tower” experts who were still taken seriously. Economists, for instance, were regarded as palatable on the whole, since at least they understood the value of free enterprise. Over time, however, this distinction between “good intellectuals” and “bad intellectuals” broke down, to be replaced by blanket hostility toward any type of theory. One of the most striking things about modern conservatism is the extent to which even right-wing economists have been marginalized within the movement. This was a hard blow for many of them, who for a long time had entertained the expectation that they would be listened to.

In Canada, for instance, many economists were genuinely shocked when the federal Conservative Party made cutting the country’s value-added tax (called the GST) the centerpiece of its 2006 electoral campaign, contrary to the advice of almost every economist and tax expert in the country. The GST is a particularly hated tax, simply because it is added on at the cash register for most purchases, and so is highly visible. The Liberal Party of Canada had previously campaigned on a promise to eliminate it, but only the most gullible thought that they were serious. Once in office, the Liberals did the right thing and reneged on the promise. The Conservatives, however, actually carried through (and then, to add insult to injury, repeated the exercise in the following election). This policy was particularly perverse, in that implementing the GST had been the centerpiece of a series of pro-market tax reforms introduced by the Conservatives during their previous period of electoral hegemony. Indeed, back in 1991, then prime minister Brian Mulroney suffered an enormous blow to his personal popularity by introducing the GST. His reasons for insisting on it was that value-added taxes are the most economically efficient—far superior to income or sales taxes. In other words, experts agree that it is the best form of tax if the goal is to minimize distortions and maximize wealth. Unfortunately, the only way to explain this is with an argument involving several steps and an appeal to at least one hypothetical. It is, in other words, not common sense, but rather a product of rational reflection.

In explaining the decision to cut the tax, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff, Ian Brodie, shocked economists again—and provided a terrifying glimpse into the sausage factory of modern politics—by mentioning, almost as an aside, that this important change in tax policy had been adopted without regard for its economic consequences. Their objective at the time, he explained, was to make cutting taxes part of the party’s brand, so that voters would associate “Conservative Party” with “cutting taxes.” After studying the question, they found that voters had difficulty remembering when their income taxes had been cut, or which party had done the cutting. And so they looked at all the different taxes and chose the one that was most likely to be remembered by voters. They settled on the GST simply because it was the most visible tax. “Despite economic evidence to the contrary, in my view the GST cut worked,” Brodie said. “It worked in the sense that by the end of the ’05—’06 campaign, voters identified the Conservative party as the party of lower taxes. It worked in the sense that it helped us to win.”14

In this way, the Conservative Party set about happily undermining one of its own hardest-fought achievements.

After winning that election, the Conservative government went on to pursue a more subtle, indirect strategy for reducing the role of “fancy theories” in politics. One of the difficulties encountered when trying to reduce the size of government is that most of what government does serves a purpose. This is true even in jurisdictions like the United States, where the much-vaunted “checks and balances” in the political system encourage extremely inefficient public spending. If you bring in experts to tell you what “useless expenditures” can be cut, they tend not to be very good at finding any. For example, after U.S. president Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address, the Republican selected to provide the rebuttal (Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal) complained about a variety of “useless” spending projects included in the government’s economic stimulus package. He singled out for special ridicule the money spent on “something called ‘volcano monitoring.’” Commentators at the time jumped on this as a perfect example of truthy politics—Jindal had chosen to criticize volcano monitoring simply because it sounded funny, not because it was useless. The point was reinforced a short year later when the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted unexpectedly in Iceland, causing massive disruption to commercial aviation throughout Europe and damaging a number of military aircraft. This reinforced the point that volcano monitoring is not only important, but is a perfect example of a public good—precisely the sort of activity that governments should be engaged in because private markets will not. As a result, if you bring in a bunch of experts and ask them where to cut “useless” government spending, they will almost certainly conclude that volcano monitoring is a useful public function—thereby contradicting the “common sense” view.

In order to operate, however, there are certain things that experts need, and one of them is information. The current vogue in public administration is for so-called evidence-based public policy. Many civil servants are committed to avoiding the administrative overreach that led Western governments of the 1960s and ’70s to get involved in a variety of businesses and activities where the state had no comparative advantage (such as intercity busing or coal mining or airline ownership). In the future, it was decided, all major state initiatives would have to be backed up by sound data, proving that the government would actually be able to improve public welfare through a particular initiative. Now, if this is the prevailing attitude, then the best way to “starve the beast” is to deprive it of data. Without a source of quality information, it would be impossible to operate on anything other than common sense.

This realization has led to a clear evolution of strategy within the “common sense” movement. You can get only so far by appointing uneducated nonexperts to positions of political power. You still have the problem that the civil service is staffed by highly educated experts, who are never completely under the control of the minister. So the Conservative government in Canada set about attacking the state’s internal policy-making apparatus. The first salvo was the decision to make the mandatory long-form census purely voluntary—contrary to the advice of almost all experts, both right and left. Making a census voluntary means that those who fill it out will be a self-selecting group, not a random sample of the population. This essentially corrupts the data, ensuring that it cannot be used as a basis for generalizing about the population.

This was followed by a series of decisions targeting Statistics Canada, the bureau responsible for collecting the data required to make effective policy. When the first big round of public-sector layoffs were announced following the formation of a majority Conservative government in 2011, Statistics Canada was hardest hit, despite no suggestion that the agency was overstaffed.15 Combined with severe cuts to government science and research institutes, this “amounted to an attempt to eliminate anyone who might use science, facts and evidence to challenge government policies.”16 If, as Stephen Colbert put it, “reality has a well-known liberal bias,” then the less anyone knows about reality, the less chance there will be anyone contradicting the homespun wisdom of “common sense” conservative ideology.

If there is one area where the irrationalism of the right is most clearly on display, it is in the area of crime and punishment. Back in the 1980s, the rate of incarceration in the United States was already raising eyebrows. At 200 or so per 100,000, it was twice as high as in most other developed nations. Since then it has skyrocketed to almost 750 per 100,000 (or approximately 1 out of every 100 adults).17 The United States holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, despite having less than 5 percent of the world’s population. It is also unique in spending more on prisons than it does on police. The situation is completely crazy—so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that people will undoubtedly look back on the situation in a hundred years and ask “What were they thinking?”, trying desperately to understand what kind of collective neurosis could have brought about this state of affairs.

The superficial explanation is to blame it on the American “war on drugs.” This of course has something to do with it, but is far from a complete explanation (by one estimate, it accounts for only 20 percent of the prison population).18 Most of it is due to the length of sentences that are handed out and the unusually broad range of crimes that are punished by imprisonment in the United States. Both are a direct consequence of the attitudes toward punishment that have come to prevail within the conservative movement, and the policies that are based on those attitudes. Some of these reflect heightened retributiveness toward the perpetrators of crime. Others reflect a conscious attempt to diminish the role of experts in the punishment process, by eliminating discretion at all levels. The two most important policies are mandatory minimum sentencing, which prevents judges from exercising any discretion in how offenders are sentenced, and the elimination of parole, which prevents officials from within the prison system from exercising discretion.

The reason for this insistence by right-wing legislatures that experts be cut out of the decision-making process is that criminal justice is one area where there tends to be an unusually large disconnect between our common sense ideas and the verdicts of those who actually look at the data and study the question. For example, criminologists know that threatening potential criminals with longer sentences has at best a weak deterrent effect.19 People who commit crimes typically don’t think they will get caught, and so are not thinking about the length of the sentence they might receive. And even if they are, they tend to be more impulsive than the average person, and so they ignore these future considerations. Thus judges, charged with sentencing, tend to have a somewhat different perspective on the matter than does the average person, and are more likely to be aware of the pointlessness of handing out extremely harsh sentences.

In 2012, the United States Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders were unconstitutional. Just to be clear: What these laws had required was that children as young as fourteen involved in serious crimes, often merely as accessories, had to be sentenced to prison for the rest of their natural lives, without possibility of parole. Furthermore, judges were prohibited by law from taking into consideration any extenuating circumstances in handing down these sentences. Given the severity of this punishment, it is extraordinary to think that any legislature should have wanted to eliminate the possibility of judicial discretion. What is more surprising is that at the time that the Supreme Court struck these laws down, a majority of American states (twenty-eight in total) had them on the books. This reflects a widespread impression that judges were being too lenient.

The core problem is that the average person on the street persistently overestimates the effectiveness of punishment. This is a cognitive illusion that is not particularly well known but that causes an enormous amount of mischief, not to mention unnecessary suffering. I happened to learn about it from reading a dog-training manual.20 The authors were trying to explain why so many owners wind up beating their dogs, even though positive reinforcement—such as giving the dog treats for good behavior—is actually a more effective training strategy. The problem is that the owner’s perception of what is working and what isn’t working is usually false.

When a dog is trying to perform some new trick, what you typically see will be a series of fairly average performances, along with occasional deviation—every so often you will see a particularly good performance or else a particularly bad one. It is, however, a statistical fact that uncommon events are uncommon, and so an uncommon event is more likely to be followed by a common event than by another uncommon event. This is called regression to the mean. As a result of it, an exceptionally bad performance, because it is uncommon, is likely to be followed by an average one, just as exceptionally good performance, because it is uncommon, is likely to be followed by an average one—regardless of whether the bad performance is punished or the good performance rewarded. But if you do start punishing and rewarding, a casual observer is likely to be fooled into thinking that the punishment worked, because performance improved after it was applied, while the reward not only failed, but actually had the perverse effect of encouraging bad performance. The result is an extraordinarily common bias that leads people to overestimate the effectiveness of punishment.21 Unfortunately, this regression fallacy can be dispelled only by looking at the long-term trend. This is why there is so much disagreement, when it comes to questions of punishment, between the views of experts, who actual study the long-term trends, and the verdicts of common sense.

One can see the same problem with the way that parents deal with their children. Most parents, over time, develop a system for punishing their children, but often have no comparable system of reward. Even more damaging is the fact that many refrain from offering rewards in the mistaken belief that they undermine intrinsic motivation (or that they “spoil” the children). Furthermore, even fairly sensible “child training manuals,” such as the popular 1-2-3 Magic, are heavily biased toward punishment, leading to a system that is all sticks, no carrots.22

What makes this regression fallacy especially insidious is the fact that not only is the world organized in such a way as to generate the impression that punishment is more effective, it actually rewards us for thinking that it is. This is something that I know well from my line of work. Like many teachers, I want students to do well. Thus I am disappointed when performance declines, and I am happy when students improve. As a result, giving out low grades tends to be followed by personal satisfaction as students improve, while giving out high grades generates disappointment as students regress to the mean. Daniel Kahneman summed up the situation perfectly when he wrote that “because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”23 In other words, the world conditions us to prefer punishing people over rewarding them.

This is why “life means life” sentences, or any other legislative restriction that eliminates discretion in the granting of parole, tend to run contrary to the interests and experience of those who work in the criminal justice system. People who have to deal with inmates on a day-to-day basis are more likely to understand the limitations of punishment as a tool for controlling behavior. Being able to offer early parole in return for good behavior is one of the most important carrots that they have at their disposal (the effectiveness of which is amplified by optimism bias, which leads inmates to overestimate their chances of being released). By giving only sticks and taking away all the carrots, common sense conservatism makes it much more difficult for prison wardens to do their jobs.

So we are already biased in the direction of an overreliance on punishment. Compounding the problem is the retaliatory impulse, part of our tribal social instincts, which gives us satisfaction from punishing those who violate social norms. This is, no doubt, a biologically deep-seated phenomenon. One of the features that distinguishes humans from other primates is that we are the only species in which uninvolved third parties will routinely intervene in order to “correct” the behavior of others or punish wrongdoing. In contrast, chimpanzees will often sneak around and do things they’re not supposed to do when their superiors in the dominance hierarchy aren’t looking; if the individual whose prerogatives are being violated doesn’t notice, then the sneaky ones can easily get away with misbehavior—because no one else is going to intervene to stop them.24

This is, ironically, one of the traits that is thought to underlie human cooperativeness. Because of the possibility of being punished by a bystander, the opportunities to take advantage of others are significantly reduced. This means that you’re also much less likely to be taken advantage of if you do go out on a limb to help someone. Thus punishment plays a central role in making cooperation—or moral behavior in general—possible. Furthermore, there is good reason to think that the basic structure of punishment is not cultural, but rather is part of the structure that makes culture possible. It’s like one of the beams that supports the stage on which the drama of our culture is played out. And if it’s an innate disposition, there’s good reason to think that it will vary in intensity from one individual to another. In the same way that some people are naturally more sympathetic toward others, there will be some people who have, by inclination, a much stronger retaliatory urge than others.

For people who do have a particularly keen interest in retribution, living in a civilized society imposes much greater hardship than it does for others. This is because of the bedrock principle of the modern state, which is that individuals abandon the right to the private use of force and, in particular, abandon the right to avenge themselves in cases where they are wronged. This authority is instead handed over to the state (the police, the courts, the prison system), which exercises it in a way that seeks to avoid creating the endless cycles of violence and retribution that limit the organizational capacity of tribal societies.

Initially, the frustration created by the abolition of private vengeance was at least partially offset by the transformation of punishment into a public spectacle. The people’s thirst for vengeance could be mollified through the public torture and execution of criminals. Until 150 years ago, it was considered normal in European societies to take children to watch hangings, and, before that, to even more gruesome public executions. And Europeans were not particularly bloodthirsty in this regard. For most people, throughout most of human history, violent punishment, torture, and death were regarded as the natural consequence of willful wrongdoing. There’s absolutely no doubt that this feels intuitively right to most people. For example, throughout thousands of years of Christian reflection on crime and punishment, there was never any debate about the death penalty, because no one ever seriously considered the possiblity that there was anything wrong with it. It was only with the rise of social contract theory and the idea that the power of the state came from the consent of the governed that people began to wonder why anyone would consent to be ruled by a state with the power to kill its own subjects. Yet even then, it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that anyone took the issue seriously enough to begin pressing for abolition.

Thus the current state of affairs with regard to punishment is highly artificial and involves a huge amount of what Freud called “instinctual renunciation”—in other words, it forces people to override their natural inclinations. Because of this, many people, at a gut level, simply find modern societies to be insufficiently punitive. The abolition of corporeal punishment—flogging and so on—is a large part of this. Much of the endorsement of torture in the United States after the September 11, 2001, attacks was clearly driven by a retaliatory impulse, even among high officials. No one can seriously believe that any intelligence purpose was served by waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times. The purpose was obviously to make him suffer. One can see a similar impulse in the quasi-official tolerance of widespread prison rape in the United States (combined with its thinly veiled celebration in popular culture), along with the legalization of certain types of murder (under the rubric of “stand your ground” laws) directed against those who present an intimidating or suspicious aspect.

The common sense conservative desire to get “tough on crime” is therefore driven by a powerful sense of dissatisfaction with the way the criminal justice system operates. Crime in our society is for the most part treated as a social problem—a nuisance—and our policies are aimed at reducing it to the lowest level possible. Because of this, there are several unintuitive features about the way that our justice system works. First of all, the punishments are not as punitive as our “gut” tells us they should be, because experts know that punishment is not nearly as effective as we are naturally inclined to believe. And second, the system is not as retaliatory, simply because retaliation beyond a certain level is incompatible with the civil condition. Thus the objective of “tough on crime” policies is not to reduce the crime rate, it is really just to make the criminal justice system more viscerally satisfying to a certain segment of the population.

This has become fairly obvious in the past few decades, as the crime rate has been declining. In the United States, many of the “tough on crime” measures were taken before the decline, and so it could be argued that they should be continued on the grounds that they are effective. In Canada, however, most of the decline occurred without any particular toughening of the criminal justice system. Thus when in 2011 the Conservative government introduced a series of measures intended to toughen that system further—imposing mandatory minimum sentences, building more facilities in order to accommodate a planned expansion of the prison population—the plan was impossible to justify through reference to its effects, because the crime rate was already at its lowest point in decades and was continuing its steady decline without any such measures in place. From a public policy standpoint, the changes seemed to be punishment for the sake of punishment.

As if to confirm this impression, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews repeatedly emphasized that the government was not going to allow policy to be determined by “statistics” (although on some occasions, he opted for the “alternate reality” approach of simply asserting that crime was increasing, when all the evidence pointed in the opposite direction).25 He made it clear that the crime rate as such does not matter: “A dangerous person who threatens the safety and security of individuals … should not be on the streets regardless of what the crime rate is. That’s our focus: to ensure that dangerous people are not on the street.”26 Understood literally, this is crazy talk—Toews is claiming that as long as any crime goes unpunished, then the justice system is too lenient. If one follows through on the reasoning, then penalties should be stiffened until the crime rate drops to zero. But of course the point is not to follow through on the reasoning. The point is to say that criminal justice policy is going to be based on our visceral reaction to the contemplation of particular criminal acts, not on the “public policy” objective of reducing the number of crimes that occur.

This is why the “debate” over crime is not really a debate: it is occurring outside the framework of rational deliberation. One can see this very clearly in the way that Prime Minister Harper framed the issue. The vast majority of Canadians, he argued, accept the principle of peace, order, and good government, “but there is a minority who don’t get it”:

It’s one thing that they, the criminals do not get it, but if you don’t mind me saying, another part of the problem for the past generation has been those, also a small part of our society, who are not criminals themselves, but who are always making excuses for them, and when they aren’t making excuses, they are denying that crime is even a problem: the ivory tower experts, the tut-tutting commentators, the out-of-touch politicians. “Your personal experiences and impressions are wrong,” they say. “Crime is not really a problem.” I don’t know how you tell that to the families of the victims we saw … These men, women and children are not statistics. They had families, friends, hopes and dreams, until their lives were taken from them.27

Thus the type of people who refer to statistics when debating the issue of crime are actually a part of the crime problem. Although they haven’t broken the law, they share with the criminals the essential characteristic of “not getting it.” Is it any wonder then that sociologists and criminologists who complained about the ineffectiveness of the government’s proposed policies didn’t get a very serious hearing? The problem was not what they were saying, but simply who they were—ivory-tower intellectuals. As Harper’s ever-helpful chief of staff Ian Brodie explained, the criminologists and sociologists did the government a big favor by attacking their policies: “Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition, so we never really had to engage in the question of what the evidence actually shows about various approaches to crime.”28

What a perfect double dividend. Start by proposing an overly punitive criminal sentencing policy that will do nothing to reduce crime but will pander to the “law and order” constituency, who remain perpetually convinced that system is soft on crime. Then, when the people who do know something about law and order start complaining about the ineffectiveness of the policy, attack them as well, label them a part of the crime problem, and present their opposition as evidence that the system is too soft. Rinse and repeat.

More generally, one can see here how the “post-truth” ethos has expanded beyond the realm of electoral campaigning and public relations to become a governing philosophy and a basis for policy. It’s no longer about what the law will do, it’s about how the law makes us feel.

There is one respect in which right-wing antirationalism can be self-limiting. In order to be effective, it must be pursued with at least of modicum of cynicism. The central attraction of common sense conservatism is that it generates successful electoral campaign strategies. But of course, you can’t actually run a campaign using nothing but intuition and common sense. Conservatives may pride themselves on their opposition to experts making policy on the basis of statistics, but they typically want their election campaigns to be run by experts on the basis of statistics. So behind all the people praising the wisdom of the common folk and demonizing elites and intellectuals, there has traditionally been a core group of very intelligent, well-educated members of the elite. Hence the cynicism: the “assault on reason” has been carried out largely as a ploy, based on a rational calculation that it was a good way of advancing certain political interests.

There is always the possibility, however, that the snake will begin to eat its own tail. It’s one thing to glorify the uneducated but then choose highly educated candidates who are good at pretending to be poorly educated. It’s something else entirely to put forward candidates who are genuinely uneducated—as the Republicans found out with Sarah Palin (or Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party—backed candidate for a Senate seat in Delaware, who attracted widespread ridicule by challenging her opponent to specify “where in the constitution is the separation of church and state?”29). Similarly, the truthiness that is being served up is intended only for the consumption of prospective voters; it is important that the strategists within the party know where the actual truth lies.

In the wake of the 2012 American election, some evidence began to surface suggesting that the Republican strategists under Mitt Romney’s leadership had actually begun to lose touch with reality, to the point where it hindered the effectiveness of their own campaign. In general, Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan stuck quite closely to the “post-truth” playbook, campaigning on a set of positions that bore almost no relationship to their actual views (for example, criticizing Obama for supposedly cutting Medicare, despite themselves wanting to actually eliminate the program). On several occasions, Romney got himself into trouble by picking up talking points from the conservative media, based on “facts” that were demonstrably false. But these were fairly minor bumps on the road.

The real problem that arose was over polling. Campaigns rely very heavily on accurate polls in order to target their efforts, particularly in the United States, where the electoral college system rewards targeted strategies. At some point, Republicans convinced themselves that the mainstream media was involved in a conspiracy to skew public opinion polls in order to overstate support for Obama, based on the vague suspicion that this conferred some kind of advantage on his campaign. And so conservatives developed their own set of parallel “unskewed” polls, which they then tried to push on the media. What surprised many observers was the revelation that insiders in the Romney campaign had begun to take these fantasy polls seriously—that they had begun, in effect, to drink their own Kool-Aid. This led the campaign to make a number of strategic decisions—about where to send the candidate, in particular—that made no sense to an unbiased observer. The reason they were doing this, it turned out, was that the campaign strategists actually had fantastical beliefs about where the candidate’s intervention was likely to be most effective.30

Romney apparently went into election night fully expecting to win, and was not just posturing when he told reporters that he had no concession speech prepared. Based on his impression of the rallies late in the campaign, so well attended, so full of enthusiastic supporters, he was convinced that he had momentum that would carry him to victory. (This is all reminiscent of the joke about the Manhattan socialite who complained about George Bush’s election victory: “How it is possible that he won? I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”) People sometimes fail to realize that their own social network is not a representative sample of the population. It’s even more essential that candidates realize this, when it comes to the people who attend their rallies. Our intuitions in this area, based on our personal experience, are worth literally nothing. The only thing able to correct these inevitably misleading impressions are the cold, hard numbers that objective polling and statistical analysis have historically provided.

One can see here how the more extreme forms of craziness can become self-limiting in the area of political strategy, insofar as they undermine the basis for rational planning and decision. Because of this, the more troubling forms of common sense conservatism are the more cynical or demagogic ones, where a group of very cunning, intelligent people find ways to manipulate the electorate by appealing to their base urges, then adopt a governing philosophy that is essentially a glorified ratification of the strategies adopted for reasons of political expediency. Consistent antirationalism, by contrast, does have certain inherent limitations, because it tends to undermine its own efficacy.

As a result of the Romney campaign debacle, there have been some calls for a “return to reason” on the right. It is not obvious how far this will go. After all, the central challenge faced by right-wing political parties everywhere—the biggest nut they have to crack—is figuring out how to get a large segment of the population to vote against its own economic interests. Reason is not a particularly reliable ally in this endeavor. Nevertheless, it is possible that the fever of antirationalism has begun to break, in much the same way that it has on the left. What remains in place, however, is the evolutionary dynamic, discussed earlier, whereby “memes” that are able to exploit our cognitive biases survive and prosper. It is easy to see that commercial advertising is inherently biased against rationality, for precisely this reason. Various features of our political system, and of electoral competition in particular, exhibit this same bias. No matter what lessons are learned, antirationalism remains a constant temptation, simply because it is incredibly powerful and, when used carefully, incredibly effective. It’s also not obvious that criticizing these tendencies is going to have any effect—indeed, there is a huge amount of evidence to suggest that mere criticism accomplishes nothing. If we do really want to change things, we may need to adopt a set of more subtle, more indirect strategies.