Ross Douthat wrote a column last week in praise of Sen. Tom Coburn and specifically in praise of his ideological dogmatism. There's an argument you don't hear very often. It is an argument that makes a good deal of sense to a political psychologist and I'd like to say why but first I want to share an Oregon politics story.
When I started my apprenticeship with the Oregon House of Representatives (I was Rep. Bruce Hugo's legislative assistant), Rep. Glenn Otto was widely known for one particular quirk. He strongly disliked having an "emergency clause" tacked onto a bill unless there was actually an emergency. He did not consider the eagerness of the sponsors to see the bill take effect quickly as an emergency. He would not, he said, vote for a bill with an emergency clause unless there was some reason it deserved to have an emergency clause. He was adamant.
There aren't too many principled politicians (I am not disparaging them; they are elected, in most cases, to be pragmatists) and even fewer who are adamantly unwilling to compromise their principles. Many of his colleagues wished Rep. Otto would be adamant about principles that were more ennobling and broadly applicable and even more lobbyists wished it. I saw Rep. Otto vote against his own bill after an emergency clause had been added to it unnecessarily.
And what was the effect of this monomania? If the vote was going to be close and they needed Rep. Otto's vote, the managers of the bill were forced to consider whether they would have to remove the emergency clause. No one considered trying to convince Rep. Otto that the emergency clause was as bad as he thought it was. They knew he wasn't going to change, so they had to consider how they, themselves, might change. That was the effect. It amazed me, as a novice to politics, to see how it played out.
Sen. Coburn's principles are a good deal broader according to Douthat, citing Coburn's influence on the healthcare debate, the financial reform debate, and "the White House's deficit commission." That final entity is "The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform." You can see why Douthat called it "the White House's" plan and called the plan "the deficit commission."
Here's the point Douthat made that set me to thinking. "Again, his ideological rigor was a spur to creativity: it enabled him to consider the possibility that what was branded as a left-wing idea might actually be better for free markets than [the more traditional conservative alternative]." To someone with my training, that sounded like "category accessibility," and I found myself really appreciation Douthat's point that the categories accessible to ideologues are genuinely different from those available to pragmatists and that the difference might be a vital asset.
Now we need to consider "category accessibility." Consider this passage from cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruner, from his article "On Perceptual Readiness." I was twenty years old, by the way, when this article was published and I have been giving it pretty hard use for the last 35 or so years.
Conceive of a person who is perceptually ready to encounter a certain object, an apple let us say. How he happens to be in this state we shall consider later. We measure the accessibility of the category “apples” by the amount of stimulus input of a certain pattern necessary to evoke the perceptual response “there is an apple,” or some other standardized response. We can state the “minimum” input required for such categorization by having our observer operate with two response categories, “yes” and “no,” with the likelihood of occurrence of apples and non- apples at 50:50, or by using any other definition of “maximum readiness” that one wishes to employ. The greater the accessibility of a category, (a) the less the input necessary for categorization to occur in terms of this category, (b) the wider the range of input characteristics that will be “accepted” as fitting the category in question, (c) the more likely that categories that provide a better or equally good fit for the input will be masked. To put it in more ordinary language: apples will be more easily and swiftly recognized, a wider range of things will be identified or misidentified as apples, and in consequence the correct or best fitting identity of these other inputs will be masked. This is what is intended by accessibility.
The "apple" Sen. Coburn is looking for "small government." To see what that means, simple substitute "small government" for "apple" in the sentence above: "Policies leading to reducing the size of government" will be more easily and swiftly recognized..." Or consider this sentence: We measure the accessibility of the category "policies leading to a reduction in the size of government" by the amount of stimulus input...is necessary to evoke the perceptual response, "Say, this policy might work!"
In healthcare, in deficit reduction, and in financial reform, the amount of input necessary to attract Sen. Coburn's attention is extremely low. He will see possibilities where others will see nothing at all. Many of his colleagues will walk right past the "apple" that so excites Coburn.
Of course, everyone has an "apple" and for every other member of the Senate, there is something he or she cares about so much that the necessary stimulus threshhold is made so low that nearly anything will cross it. Douthat writes about Coburn's "apple" because he likes Coburn's "apple." I like Rep. Blumenauer's (East Portland) "apple" better, myself, but it's politics and as the great Walt Kelley said, "One man's [apple] is another man's cold broccoli."
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