How Not To Write About Policy (a response to Dylan Matthews)

Dylan Matthews* has a post up on his blog called “How Not To Write About Policy” — it’s a takedown of an essay by Mark Greif entitled Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution, and a sort of mini-lecture on how to write like a wonk. It’s a pretty entertaining post. But it’s also, in my estimate, pretty far off the mark — not just in mischaracterizing what Greif is trying to do (if it were only that, I probably wouldn’t comment) but also in suggesting, censoriously, that’s there’s only one right way to “write about policy,” and that is to write about it as a wonky, prodigiously intelligent liberal blogger, which is to say, to write about it just like Dylan does.
Now, admittedly, Grief’s proposal is in fact rather absurd: he writes in his essay that the U.S. should, “Add a tax bracket of 100 percent to cut off individual income at a fixed ceiling, allowing any individual to bring home a maximum of $100,000 a year from all sources and no more.” Why that’s absurd should be apparent to anyone. You can’t blame Dylan for pouncing. He writes: “A tax bracket of 100 percent placed on income above $100,000 would effectively set that as a maximum wage. No business would pay a worker a dime over $100,000 knowing that it would all go to the government. Consequently, the bracket would raise no revenue, as it would have no tax base after businesses cut their top salaries to $100,000 in response….”
The germane question, however, is not “Why is this policy wrong?” as Dylan asks, it’s “Why would Greif propose such a thing?” Dylan jumps to the conclusion that it’s because Greif has failed to “do [his] homework,” read the “relevant literature,” and consult the “relevant experts” — that he’s proposed this absurd proposal because he failed to “talk to Emmanuel Saez,” “call David Romer,” “contact to the Tax Policy Center,” and to run the appropriate microsimulation models.
Maybe not. Maybe Greif knows that the proposal is absurd. Maybe in proposing it he wants to underscore the fact that the rightness/wrongness of policy is not all that’s at stake when we legislate; that all policy is moral theory in disguise; that ethical rationales matter as much as potential material results? Maybe. Maybe writing for N+1, a small, leftist, lit journal, Greif is not playing the wonk game at all?
Luckily, we don’t have to guess. Incredibly enough, Greif explains exactly why he made the proposal he did…at the very beginning of his essay:

One of the lessons of starting a magazine today is that if you pay any attention to politics you will collect a class of detractors, who demand immediately to know What and Wherefore and Whether and How. Are you to be filed next to Mother Jones and Z and American Spectator in the back row, or with the Nation and Weekly Standard and the American Prospect up front? Is it possible you have not endorsed a candidate, or adopted a party? Within the party, a position? If not a position, an issue? The notion that politics could be served by thinking about problems and principles, rather than rehearsing strategy, leaves them not so much bemused as furious…

To shoot back indignantly, as Dylan does, that “He’s not doing what the American Prospect is doing!” is thus to merely repeat what Greif himself has stipulated. N+1 is not the American Prospect! Which it’s not. Which Greif tells us. In fact, he even has an explanation:

These commentators who have no access to a legislative agenda and really no more exalted basis for political action than that of their ordinary citizenship (but they do not believe they are ordinary citizens) bleat and growl and put themselves on record for various initiatives of Congress over which they have no influence and upon which they will have no effect.

By pretending to have influence in the game of political strategy, these writers, Greif says, hold onto a “fiction of power,” giving up, in turn, the real power they have: the power to present ethical arguments in favor of one better society over another.

“What do you stand for! What will you do!” Legislatively? Are you kidding? Well, there is something one can do, without succumbing to the pundits: for the day when the Congress rolls up to our doorsteps and asks for our legislative initiatives, maybe it is up to every citizen to know what is in his heart and have his true bills and resolutions ready. Call it “political surrealism”—the practice of asking for what is at present impossible, in order to get at last, by indirection or implausible directness, the principles that would underlie the world we’d want rather than the one we have.

Perhaps this “political surrealism” mode of writing, this “practice of asking for what is at present impossible” in order to get at “the principles that would underlie the world we’d want,” is a bad thing. Perhaps Dylan thinks it’s a bad thing — I do not. The case for diversity of opinions and of dialect is too strong. Not everything significant about policy can be captured by graphs and rigorous “microsimulation models.” Indeed, if all we talk about is the numbers, as Dylan seems to want, we risk reducing the domain of politics to the narrowest questions of economics. And in doing that we lose a lot. As Tony Judt once wrote: “Is it fair? Is it just? Is it Right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn to once again pose them.”

Daring to pose these questions, then, is the meta-polemic of Greif’s piece. He’s attempting to demonstrate another way of talking about taxes: by talking about the nature of freedom (“The essence of individualism is morally relevant inequality.”); the nature of wealth (“true property is that which is proper to you: what you mix your hands into (Locke)”); and what people should be doing with their time (“If there is anyone working a job who would stop doing that job should his income—and all his richest compatriots’ incomes—drop to $100,000 a year, he should not be doing that job.”).
Being an intellectual means asking these sorts of questions. It means helping us ordinary people figure out what, in a morally heterodox world, is worth fighting for. This service is rendered in different ways, of course, but we always sorta know it when we see it. Lionel Trilling, Richard Rorty, Arthur Schlesinger, Maya Angelou, Eleanor Roosevelt, Fredric Jameson, Yochai Benkler — all of these folks are part of our varied leftist discursive tradition; they all write and speak about “policy” in the broadest sense, in the sense of “what society ought to be doing”; and they all sound very much different from Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein. To say that we can’t talk about policy without making our rounds to the think tankers of our day is to forget, among other things, that leftism wasn’t invented by the blogosphere in 2002. It’s to ignore something very profound about that American leftist tradition.
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* For those of you who don’t know, Dylan Matthews is a the editor-in-chief of The Perspective and writes one of the most badass features of Ezra Klein’s blog, the “Research Desk:” It’s pretty rare that I disagree with Dylan.