Henry over at Crooked Timber directs us to Alex Tabarrok’s explanation of why foreign policy “experts” who supported the Iraq war still dominate the public discourse despite being demonstrable failures at predicting its outcome:
The answer is media incentives. It wasn’t just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq and housing wrong. The war was popular in the beginning and people continued to buy houses even as prices rose ever higher. So what does the American public want to hear now? The public wants to hear why they weren’t idiots. And who better to explain to the public why they weren’t idiots than experts who also got it wrong?
Alex Tabarrok’s main error here is that he forgets to take into account the stratification scheme of which opinions are prioritized in the media. The “public” in general really matters little, the media appeals to the largely self-selected, educated and affluent segment of the population that considers itself “political”. This weekend intelligentsia did, indeed, swallow the Iraq adventure hook, line and sinker. This is to be expected given the atmosphere of conformity in the gated community of American political opinion, where questioning the central dogmas of American imperialism condemns one to a tormented existence of “non-seriousness”. (Sure, we can quibble over abstract questions of unilateralism versus multilateralism, but doubting America’s self-evident, inherent right to bomb XYZ-istan in and of itself goes too far.) The followers of this political orthodoxy have an unquenchable thirst for having their preconceived notions shored-up, no matter how badly, and they take solace in any attempt to rationalize their failure. Bill Kristol has a borderline inverse-clairvoyance when it comes to effects of foreign war, but he is still a columnist at one of America’s largest newspapers because he tells the rag’s target demographic that those non-serious Chomskyan fagwads can be safely ignored, no matter how prescient they may look in retrospect.
And the rationalizations themselves are off the wall. Witness this vapid dreck from one Megan McArdle, dutifully eviscerated by His Eloquence here. According to Megan, there are “right” and “wrong” reasons for having been opposed to the invasion and occupation beforehand. And wouldn’t you know, those wrong reasons all seem to involve dissent from the ambient militarism of the American foreign policy zeitgeist. Someone like me, who is opposed to militarism in either its classical “liberal internationalist” variety or its more recent neo-Trotskyist reformulation in neoconservatism, is immediately disqualified. The message follows thusly: even if non-serious thinkers were right, they are really ultimately wrong, because their views on military intervention stand in direct contravention of consensus opinion. And you wonder why someone like Bush gets elected twice in this country?
