Tag: Ludwig Wittgenstein

What Is the Game?

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

I listened some weeks ago to a terrific discussion between Ezra Klein and Fareed Zakaria. And it really was terrific. They were both at the top of their game, doing a certain thing at a very high level. Still, I have a slight bias against both these guys, and complicated feelings about what they do so well. My pleasure in their intelligence was tinged with frustration that they aren’t better, and with a slight melancholy about the path not taken. Critique mixed with autobiography. I was supposed to be them.

I knew early on that my father did not aspire for me to be president, like other boys’ fathers did, but rather to be the president’s closest adviser. I was supposed to grow up to be McGeorge Bundy—to pick a name from when I was first imbibing this career plan—I was supposed to become Jake Sullivan, to pick someone recent. And if I did not make it quite that close to the seat of power, well, I was still supposed to be Ezra Klein or Fareed Zakaria or some other talented policy analyst, saving the world through the practice of intellectual excellence.

What Klein and Zakaria practice are “the critical and analytical skills so prized in America’s professional class,” to use a phrase from an article of a couple decades ago unearthed by Heather Cox Richardson—another excellent practitioner—about the Bush administration’s replacement of critical and analytical skills with faith and gut instinct. Richardson recalls a passage from that article strikingly suggestive of Donald Trump’s current administration:

These days, I keep coming back to the quotation recorded by journalist Ron Suskind in a New York Times Magazine article in 2004. A senior advisor to President George W. Bush told Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

In our era of conspiracy theories, fake news, and relentless lies, this rejection of the “reality-based community” sounds like a conservative confession of contempt for truth. It is easy to mock, and both Suskind and Richardson don’t hold back.

And yet, beneath the Bush official’s unfortunate phrasing is a point that is basically right. Read more »

Sunday, November 10, 2024

Out of the Frying Pan: Chevron in Context

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

Kritzolina, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On June 28 this year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Chevron U.S.A v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984). This was big, since that Chevron decision was the heart of the administrative state’s legal authority. Chevron formalized the executive civil service’s authority over complex decisions of practical governance, such as how to interpret and enforce tax law, ensure food safety, regulate trains and airlines, fund and oversee education, manage elections, and everything else we fight about nowadays. The nice view is that Chevron empowered expertise.

The cynical view (widely held) is that, through Chevron, a conservative Supreme Court gave the Reagan Administration power to ignore Congress’s laws by letting executive agencies twist their meaning at will; now, as those agencies have become more liberal and courts more conservative, a conservative Court has overturned Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), taking that same authority to twist the law’s meaning and transferring it from executive agencies onto courts. As Justice Elena Kagan says flat out, in her Loper Bright dissent, “The major­ity disdains restraint, and grasps for power.” I would not contradict the cynical view, on pain of appearing naïve. But I argue that there is a much bigger story here, one about how we as a society became threatened by authoritarianism and confused about truth.

That 1984 Chevron legal decision had an intriguing feature: it was considered, by its author Justice John Paul Stevens and his colleagues, to be nothing special, an uncontroversial repetition of common sense and long-standing precedent. How can that be? How could unanimous Supreme Court justices not know they were making history and remaking the law? We once wondered how the Earth could be spinning and circling the sun, yet we couldn’t feel the motion. The same puzzlement applies to the vast movements of history as to planetary movement: situated inside them, we don’t feel them directly; we have to figure out what is going on.

As Chevron evolved from its modest birth, it became a growing problem and its overturning an inevitability. There are familiar ways to tell this story (technocrats brought down by hubris; a pendulum swinging back to common sense), but a more illuminating, less familiar way situates it in intellectual history. The initial invisibility of Chevron’s Earth-shaking importance hints that Chevron shook the Earth by rejecting a century of intellectual development. Much more is going on than garden-variety power struggle. Read more »