Snyder petition

If I had it in my mind to write a counter petition to this — not that such a thing would ever occur to me – it might look something like the following:

Whereas Rick Snyder was elected Governor of the state of Michigan in November of 2010, winning 58.1% of the popular vote, 

Whereas Rick Snyder has a deep and longstanding tie to the University of Michigan, holding three earned degrees and having served on the university faculty, 

Whereas Rick Snyder and his family are long time residents of Ann Arbor, 

Whereas the university community benefits from the open expression of diverse points of view, 

Whereas University President Mary Sue Coleman, on Nov. 8th, 2006 stated that diversity “is what makes us the great university we are,” 

Whereas former Governor Jennifer Granholm, in her 2003 University of Michigan commencement address beseeched students to “triumph in complexity,” noting that the memorable moments of college are the ones where students are “amazed by people whose backgrounds and views are emblematic of the differences that make this campus life — and life outside this campus — so rich” 

Whereas President Barack Obama, in his 2010 University of Michigan commencement address, spoke of the importance of civil discourse, encouraged students to seek challenging perspectives, and reminded that “we cannot expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down. You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it,” 

Be it resolved that we applaud the University’s decision to invite Governor Snyder to deliver remarks at commencement activities in April.

Symbolic politics

I started off liking this post because I think that many of the disagreements between classical liberals — at least liberals of a certain stripe — and progressive do boil down to empirically testable things. (One reason for the unintended consequences buzzer — we want the same things, but have a different view of whether rational design can bring them about.) He mucks it up, though. The whole post is about the absence of moral disagreements, but then he finishes:

for whatever is [sic] worth, I find symbolic behavior morally objectionable, because the speaker cares about the values he expresses more than about those persons he says he wants to help.

So our differences are “exclusively empirical,” but I’m going to morally condemn your behavior. Maybe not the best persuasion strategy.

This slightly older post from the same blog is thematically similar: how much would your political views change if you learned that the policies you like had different consequences than you expect? It gets at whether you support policies on principle (e.g. natural rights) or for instrumental reasons (e.g. they lead to prosperity). Some would use the answer to that question to draw the line between libertarians and classical liberals, with the former caring more about natural rights. Speaking for myself, if I found out I was wrong about consequences, my views would change a lot.

Of course it’s only fair to flip the question around and put it to progressives.

In other news, a friend of mine likes this post saying that the Wisconsin situation and others scapegoats public workers. Sure, certainly plenty of that rhetoric has been flying around. I’d say the dumb commentators scapegoat public workers. The smart ones scapegoat tragic incentives on both sides that lead to perverse long-run outcomes.

How to fail at persuasion

A friend directed my attention to this video, in which congressman Anthony Weiner of New York bangs on about abortion. Specifically, he says that a commitment to small government is inconsistent with a proposal that would make it harder to use federal money for abortions. (Currently, you are allowed to use federal money only if there was rape or incest. Some Republicans want to make the rule narrower, so it becomes forcible rape or incest. Not really sure what they mean by “forcible,” but anyway.)

I’m an instructor for a political psychology class on persuasion, and Weiner’s diatribe strikes me as a textbook example of doing just about everything wrong.

The big mistake is he utterly fails to understand his audience’s perspective and start from that point. Here is a thought experiment. Gather up whatever you believe about abortion and put it aside for a minute. Now, let’s take a moment and posit, just for the sake of argument, that a fetus is a human life. (This is what the people Weiner is speaking to believe, as well as roughly half the country. And there are thoughtful, if contested, reasons to believe it.)

If we do that, the issue is not at all about health care or regulation in the sense that Weiner means these terms. It’s a matter of natural rights. It a deeply moral issue about the protection of life and his whole line of reasoning becomes irrelevant. In the minds of the people he’s speaking to, he probably sounds aggressive, mean, and incoherent.

His approach is an effective strategy to fire up people who already share his beliefs (in truth, probably his intention), but from a practitioner’s perspective if he wants to be in the business of changing minds, he probably did more harm to his cause than good!

Wisconsin phone tap

In the class I TA, the professor shows the students a picture of a brilliantly red wagon and then asks them what color it is. Once they respond, “red,” he darkens the image lighting to twilight level, and the wagon becomes gray. The point is that the same wagon can be experienced as any number of colors, depending on conditions. The broader point is that we all experience a given stimulus through the lens of our own motivations and biases. (Other pertinent metaphors include Lipset’s “pictures in our heads” and Plato’s cave allegory.)

The write-up of a recent phone tapping incident in Wisconsin, as well as some of the hysterics I have observed in the blogosphere, nicely illustrate this problem. It seems someone from an organization called Buffalo Beast got Scott Walker in the phone by presenting himself as David Koch, a billionaire who donated to Walker’s campaign.

To read the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, you’d think somebody really caught the governor with his pants down. For instance, by covering Walker’s mention of Ronald Reagan in the *second sentence* of the article, it insinuates that he (Walker) had done something to really make a fool of himself. The rest of the article is full of insinuations that this is big news. (Or so I read it.)

To listen to the conversation, though, as I did, is to find that it falls somewhat differently on the ears of someone with a bit of sympathy for what the governor is doing. I thought Walker came across as fairly reasonable. Reports to the contrary, it does not seem like he proposes to lure Democrats back to Wisconsin under false pretenses. (Rather, in the exchange people are talking about, he proposes to lure them back under true pretenses.) He sort of chuckles at the caller’s objectionable jokes, but it’s not at all clear that he’s doing anything more than adhering to standard conversational norms. The most objectionable thing I can find is that, when the caller proposes to plant “troublemakers” in the crowd, Walker rejects the possibility more weakly than he might have. (He refers to something as the “only” problem, not one problem among many.) Again, this struck me as easily falling under the umbrella of conversational norms.

At the end of the conversation, Walker says, “We’re doing the just and right thing for the right reasons and it’s all about getting our freedoms back.” Agree or disagree with him, I take that to mean he genuinely believes what he’s doing is right. If we allow that he really does believe this, his detractors are left with two options: either he’s stupid, or there exist at least some thoughtful reasons one might support his policies.

If there is a psychology lesson here, I think it has to do with the caller. He caricatures David Koch as a unprincipled, mean-spirited, swearing, aristocrat. I can see how it would be easier to impugn your opponents if you thought of them that way.

Finally, a point of order about the MJS article. They refer to the phone tapping as a “prank call.” But this wasn’t a prank. A prank is something funny you do for a laugh. It was an attempt at a sort of entrapment. And I’m almost certain it’s illegal to tape someone on the phone without his or her knowledge — especially under false pretenses.