Politicians and Intellectuals

For the most part, what we intellectuals ‘consume’ from policy is confirmation of our own belief system. We have all taken a big lifetime pay-cut to seek after truth. But truth very quickly and inevitable becomes ‘our truth,’ a set of propositions we are committed to proving. Moreover, the propositions we are proving are ones that are not easily disconfirmable—if they were, they would not be the provenance of intellectuals but of professionals and technocrats. For most policies, the consumer gets something tangible and measurable. They get a bridge or an education or an unemployment benefit or farm subsidy. For the intellectual he gets the satisfaction of seeing his belief system defended. Notice, that the great thing about the intellectual as client in politics is that you can pay him off even better when you loose the vote than when you win it.

If you are trying to please a constituent interested in having the highway in front of his store improved you do little for yourself by sending him a reproduction of your impassioned floor speech denouncing the rival politician that got the money to go to improve a different highway in a different district (or extreme environmentalist that got the funds diverted to a different concern altogether—though in that case there may be some ideological satisfaction involved from being about to explain one’s hardships on the basis of actions by ideological opponents—loosing to a politician with the same desire to distribute tangible goods to his constituents is just admitting you aren’t as good at is as he is, rather than being the victim of an evil ideology). Since politicians never have to compromise with other politicians to deliver for their intellectual constituents they are free to make unreasonable demands and vilify their opponents. Indeed, vilifying their opponents may be part of the ‘good’ they are delivering.

This is why foreign policy is the ultimate fountain of ‘distributive politics’ for politicians hoping to cater to intellectuals. They are able to deliver an endless supply of self-righteous condemnations of opposing believe systems with even less concern than in arenas like education, where something might actually have to be done at the end of the day. In foreign policy one can moralize, escape responsibility for the policies chosen by the national government (since, after all, in this case the people doing the choosing aren’t even other legislators but the President), and not even have to worry about your constituents suffering for your decisions. the only people hurt are usually people that can’t vote in the first place.