Matthew Yglesias says that the Sanders campaign won’t care about the warnings from top Democratic economists that its numbers are nonsense, and that it doesn’t need to care. That may or may not be true — my guess is that making growth claims that are even more outlandish than those of the Republicans, and having made it impossible for progressive policy experts to offer a full-throated defense of your position, would do more harm in a general election than he imagines.
But leave the political gaming on one side for a moment: I just want to say how much of a shame it will be if a good piece of the Democratic party’s left wing decides that progressive wonks are the enemy. And yes, I have a vested interest in this business — not because I’m a Hillary shill, not because I’m a corporate stooge, but because wonkdom is a key part of who I am and why I think I can play any positive role.
So, about wonks and progressive values: the reason the joke about facts having a liberal bias rings so true is that this really has become a defining difference between the two sides of our political chasm. On the right, allegiance to voodoo has become obligatory — leading Republican economists fell right in line when Jeb! announced his 4-percent solution. On the left, real policy research and political positions have marched hand in hand. The push for higher minimum wages, to take a not at all arbitrary example, has been mightily helped by the research literature showing that higher minimums don’t cost jobs, a line of research pioneered by Alan Krueger, one of the signatories of that open letter.
And in general, progressivism in America has valued intellectual integrity and openness to evidence, while conservatism increasingly rejects all of that — which is why scientists overwhelmingly lean Democratic.
But what if the political left starts behaving like the political right, making support for implausible claims a litmus test of loyalty, declaring that anyone raising hard questions is ipso facto corrupt? That would become very uncomfortable, to say the least.
It’s also, almost surely, a losing game in the end. If it comes down to gut feelings that reject hard thinking, the right is always going to have an advantage.
So I hope that the Sanders campaign doesn’t just brush off this criticism as the “establishment” doing its corrupt thing, and realizes that it really is in danger of losing not just an election but an important part of what it should be standing for.