Matt has a cheeky post pointing out that Ben Bernanke’s behavior is quite explicable if you assume he’s a conservative Republican, in response to bloggers who keep suggesting that Bernanke’s behavior is irrational.
I think a lot of apparently mysterious things about Ben Bernanke’s career can be solved if you just assume that Ben Bernanke is doing things that a conservative Republican would do because he is a conservative Republican…...
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. As Paul Krugman says Bernanke “is a great economist” and he’s acting just how you would expect a great economist to act, were he a conservative Republican.
Matt’s point is clearly to shame the Obama administration for their continued investment in Bernanke, so you should read his post for more of that important message. But I want to address what Matt says here:
I note that liberals, in their condescension toward conservatives, sometimes wind up tying themselves into knots about guys like Bernanke. Bernanke is very smart and incredibly accomplished. Many smart liberals think conservatives are dumb. So if Bernanke is so smart, it must be that he’s not really a conservative! But no. Smart conservatives are a very real phenomenon.
It’s the “stupid/evil” debate that continues to rage to explain conservative positions. Regular readers know that I fall deep into the “evil” camp—-I think conservatives, especially the leadership, know what they want and how to get it. In fact, I’d say that their choices are often more effective than liberal choices, for various complicated reasons that belong in another post. I think part of the reason that liberals tend to condescendingly lean towards the “stupid” explanation is perversely due to liberals having a tendency to want to think the best of people. It’s so unfathomable that conservatives might actually want a stifled society with great economic insecurity and widespread poverty that we want to believe that they’re just dumb instead of mean-spirited and selfish.
But part of the reason that this happens is because conservatives don’t argue straightforwardly for what they want, instead choosing to pay lip service to the liberal values that define America while seeking to undermine those very values. Over and over again, conservatives claim to share the goals of liberals—-a happy, prosperous, healthy society—-and front like the disagreement is over tactics. Since their tactics are obviously ineffective at reaching the stated goals, it’s easy to conclude they’re idiots. But I maintain that conservative leadership, and much of the conservative followers, aren’t stupid. They’re just dishonest and argue in bad faith. I made a table to show some of the common conservative arguments, and how they’re demonstrably made in bad faith and are not a result of idiocy.