blatham wrote: First of all, would you please forward for the rest of us what your definition of 'political analysis' might be.
A text pertaining to politics, whose conclusions are characterized by refutable conjectures and reproducible evidence. The text in question does pertain to politics, but it mostly asserts its conclusions, and its evidence, where relevant to the conclusions, rarely rises above the level of gossip. Where I see relevant evidence and conclusions in the same paragraph, the logical chain linking them is inconclusive, as for example in the following paragraph.
Quote: An opinion poll taken in 1964 showed 62 percent of the respondents trusting the government to do the right thing; by 1994 the number had dwindled to 19 percent. The measure can be taken as a tribute to the success of the Republican propaganda mill.
This inference -- arguably the soundest I found in the whole article -- does not begin to consider alternative explanations, such as the obvious one that the respondents had simply learned from experience that the government expansion of from 30s to the 60s had not kept the promises with which it had been justified. Not to dwell on the substance of the point, but this does go to show just how gaping the holes in Mr. Lapham's logic are.
Blatham wrote:Secondly, you could go back and re-read Krugman's talk at the London School of Economics (where he addressed some of the same history and it's consequences) and clarify whether that talk involves 'political analysis' and how it might be different from Lapham's piece.
Do you mean
this article? Yes, it does contain political analysis. Unlike Lapham, Krugman starts with relevant evidence, which I am in a position to fact check myself, and he connects them to his conclusions with logically sound arguments. Unlike Lapham, Krugman does consider alternative explanations for his evidence and usually gives a good reason why he rejected them. The consequence is that Krugman could persuade me, and has indeed persuaded me, that something is
very fishy at the top of the Republican party. Lapham, by contrast, is doomed to keep preaching to the converted. (Sorry about my religious terminology there
)
blatham wrote:As to how this movement might be 'wrong', I doubt very much that you and I can make much headway. You are, if I may be so bold, a numbers guy. Ideologies don't seem to register for you as real things, thus neither the consequences of them.
I don't follow you here. Liberals and conservatives both predict that their way of doing things will produce more desirable outcomes than the other side's way of doing things. We may disagree about what consequences are desirable, and this disagreement may indeed involve unresolvable ideological differences. But whether the consequences
are what their proponents expected them to be can be tested with empirical evidence, and thus accessible even to a numbers guy like me. For example, when Mr. Lapham treats the quagmire in Iraq as evidence against the conservative ideology that produced it, he should be asking why the last war started by a liberal president looks so remarkably similar to it. He doesn't -- and I am suspecting that the reason he doesn't is that making the comparison would refute implicit assumptions he is making, and which he is unwilling to reconsider.
