Liberal Bullshit

For progressives, the success of government programs takes a backseat to their own moral grandstanding.

‘Bullshit” is American English’s assertion, maximally succinct and vigorous, that a contention is factually preposterous or logically absurd. According to philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, however, the “essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.” His slender volume devoted to the subject, On Bullshit, invites us to think of a Fourth of July orator “who goes on bombastically about ‘our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.’” The speaker’s point is not “to deceive anyone concerning American history.” Rather, what he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.It’s difficult to banish the glum suspicion that life in the 21st century, for all its economic and technological benefits, necessitates putting up withmuch more bullshit than our ancestors had to.

Frankfurt limits his discussion of bullshit to descriptive statements, analyzing and regretting our departure from the standard of truth. He does not take up the question of prescriptive statements, the mainstay of politics. Criticizing Republican proposals to cut spending on Head Start and other educational programs, for example, President Obama said, “We know that three- and four-year-olds who go to high-quality preschools, including our best Head Start programs, are less likely to repeat a grade, they’re less likely to need special education, they’re more likely to graduate from high school than the peers who did not get these services.” The first part of Obama’s statement is not bullshit, because it does nothing worse than employ the politician’s constant companion, the selectively revealed half-truth. Children who attend the best Head Start programs show positive results but, as we have seen, Head Start attendees overall are no better off than peers not enrolled in the program. Obama invokes the sunny side of the law of averages without acknowledging its grim side: If children who attend the best Head Start programs do better than their peers, children who attend the worst programs must, necessarily, have developmental problems even more severe than those afflicting children in a control group who never enrolled in the program at all.

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