[NOTE: Both an ADDENDUM and an UPDATE have been added to this post — 18 Feb.]
Watching the Democrats debating whether or not to follow their own “rules” is like watching post-modernists trying to have a principled argument.
Listen, for example, to Harold Ickes,
a top adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign who voted for Democratic Party rules that stripped Michigan and Florida of their delegates, now is arguing against the very penalty he helped pass.
…. Ickes explained that his different position essentially is due to the different hats he wears as both a DNC member and a Clinton adviser in charge of delegate counting. Clinton won the primary vote in Michigan and Florida, and now she wants those votes to count.
“There’s been no change,” Ickes said. “I was not acting as an agent of Mrs. Clinton. We had promulgated rules and those rules said the timing provision … provides for certain sanctions, automatic sanctions as a matter of fact, if a state such as Michigan or Florida violates those timing provisions.”
“With respect to the stripping, I voted as a member of the Democratic National Committee. Those were our rules and I felt I had an obligation to enforce them,” he said.
Now, wearing his Clinton hat, he feels he has an obligation to argue that the rule he helped pass is unfair, and he feels no obligation to see that it is enforced.
By now long-time readers of DISCRIMINATIONS will have recognized Ickes’ argument for what it is: Fish-y. Yes, there is no better philosopher of the modern (make that post-modern) Democratic Party than that prophet of post-modernism, Stanley Fish (discussed, among other places, here, here, here, here, here, and here).
For those of you who are not-long time DISCRIMINATIONS readers or who are but have short memories, allow me to repeat what I said here:
in his trademark bad boy manner Fish shamelessly admits, even proclaims, that he proudly will say anything to win an argument, and its opposite to win another argument. Consistency, apparently, is only for those pre-postmodernists who believe in formal universalisms, like honesty.
Re-read Ickes’ two-hats argument above, and then note the following examples (quoted here), chosen from many possibilities, where I would say Stanley Fish defends talking through both sides of his hat as a matter of principle … except that he disdains principle as a matter of principle:
The passion I display when debunking the normative claims of neutral principle ideologues is unrelated to the passion I might display when arguing for affirmative action or minority-enhancing redistricting. To be sure, there might be a contingent relation in a given instance if the outcome I dislike was brought about in part by neutral-principle rhetoric; I might then attack the rhetoric as part of my attack on what it was used to do. But I might turn around tomorrow and use the same rhetoric in the service of a cause I believed in. Nor would there be anything inconsistent or hypocritical about such behavior. The grounding consideration in both instances . . . would be my convictions and commitments; the means used to advance them would be secondary, and it would be no part of my morality to be consistent in my handling of those means. [Fish, The Trouble With Principle (Harvard, 1999), p. 8]
“Free Speech” is just the name we give to verbal behavior that serves the substantive agendas we wish to advance…. Free speech, in short, is not an independent value but a political prize, and if that prize has been captured by a politics opposed to yours, it can no longer be invoked in ways that further your purposes, for it is now an obstacle to those purposes…. [S]o long as so-called free speech principles have been fashioned by your enemy . . . , contest their relevance to the issue at hand; but if you manage to refashion them in line with your purposes, urge them with a vengeance. [Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech…and it’s a good thing, too (Oxford, 1994), pp. 102, 114.]
When Fish says that his “grounding consideration” is his “convictions and commitments,” he is really saying the same thing that Ickes is saying with his two-hats approach to rules: in both cases their arguments are wholly owned subsidiaries of their interests.
As I have noted before, it’s a waste of time to take these talking through your hat arguments seriously, since the people making them don’t. But now that this post-modernist approach to argumentation has permeated the upper reaches of the Democratic Party, the implications become a bit more ominous. For example, consider: If you were a foreign country, how would you feel about signing a treaty with a country governed by a president and party with this Clintonian attitude toward rules and obligations?
ADDENDUM [18 Feb.]
Roger Clegg asks, “Is your equation of Ickes with Fish-y a deliberate pun (cf. ichthyology)?”
Well, now it is. Sort of retroactively deliberate.
ich•thy•ol•o•gy |ˌikθēˈäləjē|
noun
the branch of zoology that deals with fishes.
UPDATE [18 Feb.]
It comes as no surprise that Stanley Fish defends identity politics. (HatTip to reader Jian Li)
Nor is it surprising that Fish’s piece contains a piously pompous paragraph that is at odds with most (but, of course, being Fish-y, not all) that he’s written elsewhere:
Identity politics is illiberal. That is, it is particularist whereas liberalism is universalist. The history of liberalism is a history of extending the franchise to those who were once excluded from it by their race, gender or national origin. Although these marks of identification were retained (by the census and other forms of governmental classification) and could still be celebrated in private associations like the church and the social club, they were not supposed to be the basis of decisions one might make “as a citizen,” decisions about who might best lead the country or what laws should be enacted or voted down. Deciding as a citizen means deciding not as a man or a woman or a Jew or an African American or a Caucasian or a heterosexual, but as a human being.
If race, ethnicity, and gender are “not supposed to be the basis of decisions one might make as ‘as a citizen,’” they presumably are also “not supposed to be the basis of decisions” the state makes about its citizens, a consistency that has never prevented Fish from defending every racial preference he’s ever encountered or discussed.
Having been a trial lawyer for over 40 years, far be it from me to argue there is something wrong with paid advocacy.
Fish is essentially arguing that the trial lawyer ethic (I will argue anything within the bounds of my professional responsibility to secure a win for my client) into all arenas of endeavor, e.g. politics, economics, policy, ethics, etc.
But in some of those fields, consistency may be more important for credibility than others.
I am not sure Fish adequately takes that problem into account.
vnjagvet – what a thoughtful post. Advocacy is vital to a court proceeding. Courts exist to resolve specific cases or controversies – and the advocacy system challenges identified parties with judicial standing to bring their claims to make their best arguments.
But this paradigm has little to do with questions of what course we should take when it comes to economics, public policy and the like. The data, and reasonable conclusions that one can draw therefrom, ought to govern and control. So in the end Fish seems to be engaging in activity that contributes to the ever increasing lawyerization of society, a phenomena in my view that is harmful.
This is from Fish: “this means is that the ritual deprecation of “special interests” makes no sense. All interests are special interests – proceed from some contestable point of view – and none is “generally human.” And that is why identity interests, as long as they are ideological and not merely tribal, constitute a perfectly respectable reason for awarding your vote.”
If you accept the general thrust here, then the obvious question is: “What is wrong with TRIBAL special interests?”
My complaint is not with Ickes (who from now on will always [thanks to Roger Clegg — see ADDENDUM above] be Ichthes to me). He is merely the mouthpiece (if you’ll pardon this insult to lawyers, whom I actually admire). Like a lawyer, he is paid to argue his client’s case. The cavalier, self-interested, instrumental approach to rules rests clearly at the Clintons’ door.
More Fishy stuff from the NYT article:
“Yet every African American – conservative or liberal, rich or poor, barely educated or highly educated – meets with obstacles to his or success and mobility that are all the more frustrating because they are structural (built into the culture’s ways of perceiving) rather than official. To the non- African American these obstacles will be more or less invisible, especially in a country where access to opportunity is guaranteed by law.”
I’m always amazed when someone pulls this cr*p out of the catbox. Of course it’s invisible!! That way it’s not debatable; we simply take the word of lumineries like Fish and demand redress. Bunk.
Sounds like “the ends justifies the means” to me.
“Yet every African American – conservative or liberal, rich or poor, barely educated or highly educated – meets with obstacles to his or success and mobility”
Drop the “African” prefix and this is still true. Life is full of obstacles to success and mobility.