Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Now this sort of rot does make me mad. Someone named Andrew Ferguson, who is clearly an establishment journalist (“Andy Ferguson's ideas were, as usual, very subtle and secretly forceful” — Davd Brooks) and writes regularly for Bloomberg and is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, has written a column with the provocative title, Will the Dixie Chicks Ruin U.S. Democracy?.

Unfortunately, the title is the best part, as the article's thesis is that young people should be discouraged from voting, and that the Rock the Vote campaign, and the Two Million More in 2004 young voter registration campaign are—get this!—dangerous [sic] to democracy because they will bring out the yahoos. Mr. Ferguson, whose photo suggests he may have reached a certain age, is apparently all aflutter at the “specter of two million more children in turned-around baseball caps queuing up for the voting booth, as they nod drowsily to the thumps drilling through the earplugs of their portable MP3 players.”

“Young Americans,” Mr. Ferguson quotes the National Conference of State Legislators as concluding on the basis of a survey, “don't understand the ideals of citizenship; are disengaged from the political process; lack the knowledge necessary for effective self-government; and have limited appreciation of American democracy.'' Of course, without some comparison to other age groups we have very little idea of what to make of this fact, but never mind. (I tried to find the actual survey online, but failed. The http://www.ncsl.org/ web site was not responding.) In the end, if you really believe in democracy, that number matters when considering how much to increase the state education budget, not when deciding if you should encourage people to vote.

There are an enormous number of ways in which our democracy could be improved. Disenfranchising younger voters, or even discouraging their exercise of the franchise, is not remotely among them. If they're old enough to fight our wars, they're plenty old enough to vote.

Based on Mr. Ferguson's essay, though, I'd have say he's a pretty poor poster child for his age group's supposedly superior comprehension of democratic principles.

Update: The National Conference of State Legislators website woke up, and I found the survey. It seems voting participation rates and the belief that civic participation matters are noticeably lower for younger citizens than for older ones. Rather than blaming young people for their civic disenchantment, the National Conference blames…Mr. Ferguson and his age cohort:

The findings of this public opinion survey leave little doubt that Baby Boomers and the World War II generation have failed to successfully pass on the ideals of citizenship to the DotNet generation that is now coming of age. They have botched President Bush’s challenge “to teach what it means to be citizens.”

I was going to avoid blogging anything about David Brooks's phenomenally wrongheaded op-ed, The Presidency Wars, in today's New York Times on the grounds that its deficiencies were obvious. But then ABC's influential and often sensible The Note (link updated 10/2/03) praised it, saying, “If you care even a whit about America having a civil national public discourse (during this time and forever), read every word of David Brooks' brilliant New York Times column, and thank Arthur for hiring him.” In light of that maybe there is some need to point out just how unreasonable and anti-intellectual David Brook's column really is.

It's hard to summarize an argument that isn't an argument so much as a mood. Echoing years of 'The Breaking of the President' rhetoric (a meme that I think started with David Broder), the column moans that there are players in the Presidency wars who treat disagreements about policies as fundamental issues of values, and argue that their opponents are illegitimate. The anti-Clinton crowd did this and they were wrong, Brooks argues somewhat belatedly, and the anti-Bush crowd is doing it now and they are wrong too:

To the warrior, politics is no longer a clash of value systems, each of which is in some way valid. It's not a competition between basically well-intentioned people who see the world differently. It's not even a conflict of interests. Instead, it's the Florida post-election fight over and over, a brutal struggle for office in which each side believes the other is behaving despicably. The culture wars produced some intellectually serious books because there were principles involved. The presidency wars produce mostly terrible ones because the hatreds have left the animating ideas far behind and now romp about on their own.

The warriors have one other feature: ignorance. They have as much firsthand knowledge of their enemies as members of the K.K.K. had of the N.A.A.C.P. In fact, most people in the last two administrations were well-intentioned patriots doing the best they could. The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves.

I agree that people who focus on their hatred for a person as opposed to hatred for a policy are not generally helpful. But Brooks' main point, that the Administration's fiercest critics are a bigger threat to our liberties than the Administration itself is seems offered as a matter of faith rather than something based on evidence. Can it seriously be argued that a writer for the New Republic is a “core threat” to our liberties, one greater than the lawyers who are arguing that the US Government has the power to seize any citizen anywhere and hold them indefinitely without trial?

More fundamentally, Brooks's view depends on a rejection of the idea that there is any truth out there that can be ascertained. If one believes in truth, in even an approximate way, then it is simply wrong to dismiss arguments that 'X is a liar' or 'Y is a danger to our liberties' out of hand as illegitimate, even if you go to nice dinner parties with nice people who don't seem the least bit like monsters and probably are not in fact at all monstrous in their daily life. It is theoretically possible, after all, that some of those claims of systematic mendacity and fundamentally anti-Constitutional policies are accurate. Or, they are falsifiable, in which case we should educate (or, in some cases, condemn) those who advance them. In either case, journalists owe it to their readers to provide facts. These are mostly absent from Brooks's column.

OK. Somewhat shorter David Brooks:

The core threat to democracy is never the people who are in power, it's their critics. There is no need to consider the actual facts about the current Administration's veracity in making the case for war (which if proved might substantiate claims that the Administration undermined the democratic process), nor the consequences of its economic policies for the next generation (which if substantiated might show that future generation's democratic options are being intentionally constrained for the benefit of a few today), nor the civil liberties consequences of CAPS2 and other tracking systems, nor the civil liberties implications of the Padilla case because the Administration's critics are too shrill and don't know all the nice people in Washington as well as I do.
[reformatted for clarity]

Am I the only who thinks it is odd to find that the so-called conservative position today is grounded in relativism?

Update: Just in case it wasn't clear from the above: part of what I am taking issue with Brooks's assertion of automatic equivalence. Equivalence is certainly possible, but it should not be a substitute for thinking things through first. Just because some–but not all–of Clinton's critics were absolutely loopy, and fulminated for eons about a bunch of crimes that clearly never happened (Vincent Foster was murdered, Clinton raped various people, the Clintons did something illegal in the Whitewater matter), it does not follow that people who say the current administration, or parts of it, is mendacious, evil, or dangerous must therefore be ignored without first weighing the sometimes extensive evidence they have offer.