NO PLACE TO LEARN ON THE JOB:

The Importance of Being Experienced (Peter Berkowitz, 10/21/11, RCP)

Obama's inflation of speech and depreciation of experience reflect two dominant theories in the legal academy in which he spent fifteen years, three as a student at Harvard Law School and twelve as a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School.

One theory, deliberative democracy, purports to expand and improve conversation among citizens. In practice, however, it appropriates the term "democratic" and reserves it, regardless of where majorities stand, for public policies and laws that are derived from a complex system of abstract ideas. The operation of this system is comprehensible only to a small circle of professors and students, and its results are consistently progressive.

The other theory, pragmatism, takes pride in the open-minded and experimental search for workable political solutions. But it tends to display flexibility only in regard to means. Academic pragmatism holds tight, with dogmatic certainty, to progressive ends.

Both deliberative democracy and pragmatism are forms of progressivism masquerading as imperatives of reason. Both place a premium on vindicating policy theoretically and marketing it rhetorically. Both depend on the devotion of partisan intellectuals. And both downplay the knowledge gained from working in the field.

The American constitutional tradition provides a corrective. The Federalist lauds experience as "the least fallible guide of human opinions" (No. 6); "the oracle of truth" (No. 20); and "the guide that ought always to be followed whenever it can be found" (No. 52). Experience is "nowhere more desirable or more essential," according to Federalist 72, "than in the first magistrate of the nation."

To be sure, our leaders can't reasonably be expected to acquire experience in all relevant areas. But we can expect them to become students of history, which, Federalist 5 observes, provides the opportunity to learn from others' "experience without paying the price which it cost them."

The Founders, political men and soldier-citizens steeped in history, shared their contemporary Edmund Burke's view that prudence, the knowledge nurtured by experience and the virtue of reasoning about concrete circumstances, is "the god of this lower world" and the "supreme guide" in politics.

The problem for Democrats is that the experience of governing tends to demonstrate that their politics are too far to the Left of the American people.

Posted by oj at October 22, 2011 9:01 AM
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