By way of background: Obama says that Republicans favor dirtier air and water. Paul Ryan calls that a petty characterization of an honest policy disagreement. Paul Krugman says that some Republican policies would lead to dirtier air and water (presumably in exchange for some offsetting benefits) and Ryan ought to be man enough to say so.
This is a fair point, I think. There is nothing dishonorable about believing that under current regulations we overclean our air and water, and if that’s Ryan’s view he should own it. Though perhaps Ryan would prefer to respond — also fairly — that he and/or the GOP favors different kinds of regulation that might not leave the air and water dirtier after all.
In any event, Krugman can never be fair for long. Here he is complaining about Ryan’s rhetorical style and defending his own:
If I say that Paul Ryan’s mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries, that’s ad hominem. If I say that his plan would hurt millions of people and that he’s not being honest about the numbers, that’s harsh, but not ad hominem.
And you really have to be somewhat awed when people who routinely accuse Obama of being a socialist get all weepy over him saying that eliminating protections against pollution would lead to more pollution.
Except that, you see, at least as far as I can tell (and do correct me if I’m wrong) Paul Ryan (whose “weepiness” is the primary subject of Krugman’s blogpost) has never accused Obama of being a socialist. So (unless I’m mistaken) what Krugman’s engaging in here is best characterized as neither harsh nor ad hominem but, well, lying.
Two points:
1) Typically for Krugman, he’s left himself just a tiny bit of wiggle room. His entire post is a complaint that Paul Ryan won’t admit that the GOP favors less environmental regulation and hence a fortiori dirtier air and water. Then Krugman tacks on a closing about “people” who accuse Obama of being a socialist while getting all weepy, etc., etc. —- without explicitly saying that Ryan is one of those “people”. This leaves him just enough room to deny, if necessary, that he had Paul Ryan in mind when he wrote this summary paragraph to his post about Paul Ryan.
2) I’m sure Krugman doesn’t think he’s lying, because Krugman proceeds always and everywhere from the axiom that anybody who disagrees with Paul Krugman is responsible for anything said by anybody else who disagrees with Paul Krugman, so that if anybody anywhere has ever called Obama a socialist, then Paul Ryan owns that accusation. This seems to be Krugman’s favorite rhetorical device. How many times has he told us that “The Right” or “The Republicans” or “The Usual Suspects” are being inconsistent because some of them prioritize deficit reduction while others prioritize tax cuts?
So now I’m wondering: Suppose I were to observe that persistently seeing all of one’s adversaries as avatars of a monolithic conspiracy strikes this layman as a classic symptom of paranoia. Would that be ad hominem? Or would it be harsh but fair?
Maybe Paul Ryan has never, in so many words, accused Obama of being a socialist. But his recent speech to the Heritage Foundation comes pretty close:
“Given that the President’s policies have moved us closer to the European model, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that his class-based rhetoric has followed suit.”
Are we meant to think of “the European model” as capitalism? I don’t really think of European economies as scocialist, but surely that’s what Ryan is suggesting here.
Soon after comes this: “he has launched his second campaign by preying on the emotions of fear, envy, and resentment.
“This has the potential to be just as damaging as his misguided policies. Sowing social unrest and class resentment makes America weaker, not stronger. Pitting one group against another only distracts us from the true sources of inequity in this country – corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless.”
This is somewhat off topic, but even Krugman’s example isn’t really ad hominem. See http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html
”
A: “All rodents are mammals, but a weasel isn’t a rodent, so it can’t be a mammal.”
B: “This does not logically follow. And you’re an asshole.”
B is abusive, but his argument is still not ad hominem.
“
classic
President Obama and Paul Krugman support policies that make the air and water cleaner, and provide more people with health insurance. Surely there are some people who support policies that make the air and water even cleaner, and provide even more people with health insurance. So, I would like someone to ask Professor Krugman if it would be ‘petty’ to say that he and President Obama are in favor of dirtier air, dirtier water, and less people with health insurance? Wouldn’t this be a literal description of their policies? If they responded at all, POTUS and POTNYT would probably say that their preferred policies are adequate, and they would characterize the charge that they want dirty air and uninsured people as a petty way to describe the disagreement. Just like Ryan has done.
Once again, Krugman has abandoned his role as public intellectual to be a popular political shill.
POTNYT = “professor of the New York Times”, and should be pronounced ‘pot-nit’
Thomas Bayes: In Krugman’s defense (on this limited point), I think it is fair to interpret “dirtier” and “more” as meaning “dirtier than at present” and “more than at present”, in which case it MIGHT be fair to say that Ryan prefers dirtier air and fewer insured people, while Krugman prefers the opposite.
@Kevin Donoghue: Let me see if I have this right. The European model isn’t socialist, but criticizing someone for moving towards it amounts to calling him a socialist?
Is the European model more dirigiste? More protectionist? More highly taxed? More regulated? I ask because I think the answer to all those is yes, and that is also not the same as being socialist. It is true of Italian fascism of the 20s and 30s as well.
Just out of curiosity, does Krugman ever respond to your rebuttals of his flawed logic? Or is this rivalry only felt on one side, like the Utah Jazz and the LA Lakers…
Having done a bit of Googling, I don’t see any instance where Paul Ryan pinned the “socialist” label on President Obama.
Krugman should instead have written: “you really have to be somewhat awed when people who routinely accuse Obama of class warfare get all weepy over him saying that eliminating protections against pollution would lead to more pollution.”
That’s easily documented and the point wouldn’t be much affected: Paul Ryan can dish it out, but evidently he can’t take it.
@Steve Landsburg: That interpretation is not so much in Krugman’s defense as it is a restatement of a point the author made. Yes, Ryan’s policies may lead to dirtier air and water, but this is not a matter of cleaning up the air and water as much as humanly possible. As the author pointed out, using Krugman’s own reasoning, if we cleaned up the air and water as much as Krugman would prefer, you could just as easily condemn Krugman for not wanting the air and water even cleaner.
There are real economic costs to preserving our environment. A blind pursuit of preservation of the environment while ignoring the associated costs leads to the logical conclusion that society should not progress at all, but rather should regress to a state of no technology and no energy production since they necessarily impose a cost on the environment. Limiting our impact on the environment as an end in itself is the antithesis of human progress. Show me someone who is willing to give up their car, their heated/cooled home, their refrigerated milk, their digital communication media, and I’ll show you how a consistent environmentalist would live.
Well I thought I at least knew what “ad hominem” meant…I agree with Sam that a jab about elderberries is more of a gratuitious insult that would seem to have little bearing on Ryan’s grasp of environmental policy. However, why isn’t calling someone dishonest (rather than, say, actually showing us why their numbers are incorrect) precisely a personal attack designed to discredit their argument by questioning their character?
PK definitely likes the straw man tactic of diluting a specific argument by linking its proponent with some broader, amorphous and irrational group. (Isn’t this pretty much ad hominem too?) But I thought the main reason his post was disingenuous was the claim that it’s “wholly accurate” to describe someone as being “in favor of” only the negative aspect of a trade-off.
Isn’t “in a nutshell” exactly where you would expect to find a nut?
The title alone is ad hominem or, if you accept the premise, ad nucem.
“Given that the President’s policies have moved us closer to the European model”
Even if the European model were socialists, this is not the same calling Obama one.
Sam Hardwick makes a good point. Krugman’s example isn’t ad hominem unless until he uses those points as arguments against Ryan’s position. It’s a simple personal attack. And a weird one at that.
@Kevin Donoghue
I did a little googling too. It looks like Ryan is one of the very few Republicans who has NOT called Obama a socialist.
HE DID IT AGAIN!!! Holy s%*# he did it again. Like, just now.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/denial-in-depth/
He writes:
“Think about climate change. You have various right-wingers simultaneously (a) denying that global warming is happening (b) denying that anyone denies that global warming is happening, but denying that humans are responsible (c) denying that anyone denies that humans are causing global warming, insisting that the real argument is about the appropriate response.”
Those views are indeed impossible to hold simultaneously in one person. But PK doesn’t identify one person. In fact, he ascribes these views to “various right-wingers.” You mean “various” people have different opinions? Thanks Paul!
Kevin Donoghue already hit the nail on the head with his quotes from Heritage:
I was seriously debating getting a Ph.D. in Linguistics and politics. What Ryan did at Heritage is known as the ‘dog whistle’, which, like a literal dog whistle, is something that can only be heard by a select few. In this case, ‘European Model’ is a dog whistle for socialism, where the people listening get the queu, ‘socialism’ while those not attuned hear ‘European model’. The whole point of such PRACTICE AND RESEARCH IS perfectly encapsulated by Mr. Landsburg’s notion that ‘he didn’t say it’. If you mean the exact string of connected phonemes such as /Obama is a socialist/ (sorry don’t have phonetic inscription on my keyboard) then you are right. However, the field of linguistics is more concerned about the function of language then then literal words used.
EG: If I said, ‘death and doom await behind yonder door’, you could argue that I didn’t say, ‘Don’t go in there’. Would you feel no warning had been made?
Now, it is true that the word might not have literally come from his mouth, and I’m not interested enough to exhaustively google it, but it should be noted that this discussion i taking place in highly American context of literalism.
Having lived in Japan and other countries for roughly 13 years, it is definitely outside the linguistic norm, this American idea that if the exact would didn’t come from your mouth, you didn’t ‘say’ it.
For a follow up to my post. Why don’t you google research the context of other Republican leaders and their take on Europe as socialist as opposed to and in contrast with capitalism. See if you find any of those :-)
@Kevin D: Is truth relevant? Saying, “well if Kruggers had said something true instead …” hardly refutes the claim Kruggers lied. Plus of course, Ryan never accused Obama of being a socialist and Obama is not a socialist. He may have accused Obama of class warfare but Obama is guilty of class warfare. In one scenario Kruggers is falsely calling out an alleged false claim by Ryan, and in yours he would be truthfully reporting a true claim.
@Tony Cohen: “My opponent didn’t beat his wife and cheat on his taxes but other people with his initials did so the charge is fair.”
We want dirty water. We want accidents to happen. We want cancer.
Why? Because the costs of avoiding them are too great for us to bear. Furthermore, in the case of water, “clean” is relative. We don’t want clean water in our toilets. Indeed, we don’t really want clean water in our garden hoses or in rivers used for effluent. Not even in our swimming pools.
Why are we condemned to listen to math and science idiots like Krugman?
I must admit, I’ve never understood why someone like President Obama or his ilk disclaim being socialists. I was involved in politics over 30 years ago in Chicago (working for various Democrats) and back then you would occasionally run into someone on the Left who wanted something more radical in a politician — something more socialist (not what the Democratic party was all about, at least back in Chicago). They never shied from the moniker.
Obama is of a piece with them. But why is it bad to say so? In fact, I’d love to have Obama or one of his ardent, mainstream media supporters provide three things (just three) wrong about socialism. That would be a long, painful series of “ums.”
They run from the title for one reason: it is not popular in the U.S. It is disingenuous to disown it. But that is the only reason.