Running through most, though not all, of the articles in this issue of
Perspectives on Politics is the theme of competing
interpretations of the same event or activity—a subject all too
familiar to those of us with partners, children, or political convictions.
Some articles directly address alternative readings; in other cases,
competing interpretations appear across articles or between author and
commentator(s). There are also surprising substantive resonances among
articles in this issue, especially about Louis Hartz's thesis of the
liberal tradition in America.
Suzanne Rudolph, in her revised 2004 APSA presidential address,
“The Imperialism of Categories,” contrasts the methodology and
underlying epistemology of comparative politics and area studies. The
former she defines as the search for empirical regularities across
political units such as states, often though not necessarily through
behavioral studies or formal analysis. The latter is the search for
distinctively important features of particular political units or regions.
It is more concerned with interpretation of meaning than with causal
explanation for outcomes. There are deep moral and political implications,
Rudolph argues, in these choices of research design. Much work in
comparative politics has involved a mission, intentional or not, of
modernizing “backward” nations or ensuring that American
values and outlooks are universally accepted. Area studies research, in
contrast, seeks to express and ensure the dignity of local, particularized
political knowledge, which contains a wisdom about which Western political
scientists are often clueless. This exercise in interpretation concludes
with a plea for more attention to interpretation.
The next two articles assert different, even contradictory,
explanations for the same surprising political event. Thinkers from
Aristotle through at least John Adams have worried that in a democracy the
many poor would outvote the few rich, thereby legally confiscating their
property. That has mostly not happened. In fact, a spectacular reversal of
that prediction occurred recently in the United States, when Congress
approved and President George W. Bush signed two major tax cuts that
hugely and directly benefited the wealthiest Americans. Whether they will
eventually help the rest of the population remains to be seen, but
Aristotle and Adams would have been astonished. So were Larry Bartels, and
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. In “Homer Gets a Tax Cut,”
Bartels seeks to explain the tax cut by showing that the public indeed
supported it—even people who knew that income inequality would
increase as a consequence and who thought that increased income inequality
was a bad idea. He introduces the concept of “unenlightened
self-interest” to explain this outcome, and takes us through a
fascinating discussion of citizens' reasoning (or lack thereof). If
Bartels is right, American democracy is working at least in a procedural
sense; lawmakers were in accord with citizens' preferences in voting
for upwardly redistributive tax cuts.
In “Abandoning the Middle,” however, Hacker and Pierson
reject the claim that the public endorsed this tax cut, mistakenly or not.
Instead, they argue, citizens of the United States preferred many policies
over a tax cut, and they were simply snookered, twice. Hacker and Pierson
analyze an array of tricks that legislators and the president used to
ensure passage of the bills, ranging from what they describe as outright
lying about their long-term consequences to methods of ensuring that the
extent of benefits and narrow range of beneficiaries were hidden. Even
liberal Democrats went along, thus ensuring that in this case at least,
Congress did not respond to the preferences of the median voter or
legislator.
These two articles speak directly to each other and together provide a
wonderful example of how political science deepens and enriches our
understanding of important political events—as well as why political
scientists will continue to squabble over just what those events really
indicate.
Henry Hale, in “The Makeup and Breakup of Ethnofederal
States,” takes us out of the realm of competing interpretations and
into the realm of competition over the very survival and configuration of
states. He seeks to explain why some states with many distinctive ethnic
groups survive (e.g., Russia), while others disintegrate under the
pressure of dominant, “core” groups (e.g., the USSR). His
answer is political—the design of a state, and in particular the
location of its subnational boundaries in relationship to the location of
its ethnic groups, makes all the difference. If a state can disperse the
members of a dominant ethnic group into many small subnational units with
considerable autonomy, rather than allowing them to congregate in one or
several large units, it stands a fighting chance of survival. Hale shows
how this simple, elegant formulation explains the demise of the Soviet
Union and the rise and survival (so far) of Russia better than other
possible explanations do, and he suggests how its lessons might be
applicable elsewhere.
Jonathan Isacoff takes us back to the realm of competing
interpretations in “Writing the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” Even
setting aside Arab explanations for the actions of Israel since the 1950s,
Isacoff finds plenty of grounds for dispute over why the state of Israel
has been bellicose when it might have been diplomatic. The older, Zionist
historians see Israel as a fragile, deeply threatened polity surrounded by
actual or potential enemies. It must show its strength and determination
lest it risk another holocaust for its Jewish citizens. The new historians
are also attuned to the ongoing threats to the state of Israel, but insist
that Israel itself is partly at fault for the hostility it encounters. For
domestic political reasons, in this view, militarists won out over
diplomats in the 1950s and since then Israel has been blind to
opportunities for compromise or has even fostered war itself. Isacoff
obviously cares deeply about the fate of Israel and the Palestinians, but
his central purpose in this article is to draw our attention to a
philosophy of history rather than to a messy conflict. He argues that a
pragmatic or pragmatist stance toward historical facts—which
interpretation will help us to solve current political or analytic
problems?—gives political science the best leverage for providing
good answers to important questions, regardless of whether they are
“true” answers.
Sari Nusseibeh, a philosopher appointed president in 1995 of al-Quds
University, the Arab university of Jerusalem, refrains from disputing the
real villain in Middle Eastern politics. Instead, in “A Formula for
Narrative Selection,” he engages with the virtues and defects of a
pragmatist stance toward conflicting historical interpretations. Nusseibeh
analyzes whether pragmatism can avoid the Scylla of meaningless relativism
as well as the Charybdis of objectivism, the assertion that if some facts
(and interpretations?) are true, others must necessarily be false. He
concludes with a cautious endorsement of Isacoff's approach, while
insisting that one must not “despair of a true account.”
Phillip Abbott, in “Still Louis Hartz after All These
Years,” brings us back to the safer terrain of interpretive disputes
in American political discourse. Hartz asserted in 1955 that the United
States was, for better or worse, an entirely liberal state—and
scholars of American political thought and practice have been debating the
claim ever since. If the United States is entirely liberal, does that mean
it is a unique “city on the hill,” a beacon of light and
reason to the rest of the world? Or does the liberal society thesis simply
mean that Americans can never mount a serious opposition to their own
nation's evildoing in realms such as enslavement, international
imperialism, or gratification of the rich at the expense of the poor? Most
historians have sought simply to move beyond Hartz, to insist that the
United States does in fact have a rich tradition of opposition to dominant
liberalism or that it is no different from other nations in having a
dominant but contested philosophy. Abbott revises these revisionists by
arguing that Hartz is still just as relevant to analyzing American
political thought and practice as he ever was. Using the difficult case
study of the 1960s, Abbott argues that Hartz's concepts of liberal
reform, the American democrat, liberal enlightenment, and Thermidor still
explain what does, and does not, happen over the course of American
political disputes.
Richard Iton, in “The Sound of Silence,” and Sean Wilentz,
in “Uses of The Liberal Tradition,” take polite but
firm exception to Abbott, and therefore to Hartz. Iton points out that we
cannot understand the absence of an American left-wing party to contest
the liberal consensus without more attention to the roles of racial
difference and racism. Hartz's argument was notoriously weak when he
discussed the antebellum American South, and Abbott, according to Iton,
has still not taken into sufficient account the enormous impact of the
American civil rights movement and reactions against it that sought to
retain racial hierarchy. The historian, Wilentz, wants to relegate Hartz
to the dustbin of history, and instead to engage Abbott himself on the
1960s and contemporary politics. In his view, the past was less simple
than Abbott can illuminate with Hartz's categories, and the present
may also be more complex; the old tropes insufficiently reveal “the
depth of the political change that may now be at hand.”
In February 2003, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury cartoon
featured Michael's teen-aged daughter, who had been developing flash
mobs for Howard Dean. If he loses in the primaries, she assured her
father, his young supporters would support the Democratic candidate by
“hook[ing] him up with a full linking meet-up, download
blog and flash mob capability asap.” Asked if the hapless candidate
would understand any of that, she confessed, “Probably not.
We're still explaining it to Dean.” Dean may not have
understood adolescent computer-speak, but he did use the Internet to
change the nature of American political campaigning, according to Matthew
Hindman in “The Real Lessons of Howard Dean.” This
“Perspectives” essay shows how Web-based politics galvanizes
partisans unequally, may change the nature of seeking and attaining
campaign contributions, and may introduce radically new forms of campaign
activity. Dean lost, but his legacy to partisan politics may be much
deeper than “the scream.”
Luisa Angrisani shows us the recent history and inside workings of
“Regional Markets in Latin America.” Should nations south of
the United States seek economic ties with their giant to the north, with
each other instead, or in some complex network that includes but is not
limited to the United States? Angrisani, an editor for the Economist
Intelligence Unit, shows how this question, so crucial to Latin American
economies, has been variously answered by different states at different
times. She concludes by expressing her optimism that regional trade
agreements will, finally, really take hold because they seem the best
avenue to more trade, increased production, higher employment, and
ultimately greater equality within Latin American nations. It is an
ambitious goal for a policy choice that has been only fitfully successful,
but one can only hope that she is right.
Finally, in a return to issues of competing interpretations of the
same phenomenon Mark Graber, in “Constitutionalism and Political
Science,” uses the occasion of a syllabi review essay to castigate
his fellow political scientists for not paying enough attention to their
own discipline when they teach constitutional law. He points to exciting
and illuminating books, articles, and research programs in the political
analysis of law, and then to their absence in most syllabi about law in
political science departments. Why do we choose to act like relatively
inept constitutional lawyers rather than like expert and creative
political scientists when we stand in front of undergraduate classes, he
asks? Regardless of one's answer to that question, Graber's call
for a more political and less legalistic interpretation of courts and
judicial decisions will, we hope, stir some salutary controversy.
This issue of Perspectives has the usual complement of
exciting and informative book reviews. Sholem Asch once pointed out that
“writing is a lot easier if you have something to say.” The
continuing quantity of books deserving review and the quality of the
reviews demonstrate that political scientists have a lot to say, to which
all of us ought to attend.
The next issue of Perspectives will include articles on power
and political institutions, on the uneasy alliance between feminist
critics of marriage and proponents of gay marriage, and on a different way
of seeking a stable state in a circumstance of ethnic division. As I
write, it is the seventh day of Hanukkah; it will sound anachronistic when
you read these words, but happy holidays, nonetheless!
We'd like your opinion! Perspectives on
Politics has now published two full volumes of articles,
commentaries, symposia, “Perspectives” essays, book and
syllabi review essays, and book reviews. Time has come for some critical
assessment from our readers. As we look ahead to future issues, we want to
know where we've been the most (and least) successful in meeting our
goal of being “engaging, illuminating, provocative, and
broad-based.”
Has the quality met your expectations? Are the articles too
short, or too long? Sufficiently or overly “academic”?
Provocative? How do you use the journal? What kinds of contributions would
you like to see that we don't currently publish?
Your perspective matters. Please send your remarks by April
30, 2005, to [email protected]. All communications
will be treated confidentially.
