The Torch Magazine

Optional Reality and American Democracy

by Roland F. Moy

The second inaugural address by Barack Obama presented a case for reality based governmental policy to meet current challenges that confront traditional values of equality and liberty for all. (SOTU) It called for continued incremental change in federal government policies, in accordance with historical patterns of national collective action that eliminated slavery, provided an improved pattern of civil and voting rights, built a national system of railroad and highway transportation, and supported a network of programs to reduce the risks of sickness and old age, or the likelihood of poverty. This perspective presented a challenge to the political extremes of both the left and the right, who are likelier to pursue political gain by rejecting the nuances of policy options while engaging in blanket opposition to federal policies or legislative proposals, or to posit conspiratorial motivations rather than analyze the facts and undertake the negotiation that stable democracy requires within the constitutional framework of the United States (Gutting; Mann).

The predispositions of our personalities, psychological research tells us, can affect our political preferences.

These predispositions can be measured with psychologically oriented survey items, with cognitive tests that do not rely on self-reports, with brain imaging, or with traditional physiological and endocrinological indicators. Due to perceptual, psychological, processing, and physiological differences, liberals and conservatives, for all intents and purposes, perceive and thus experience different worlds. (Hibbing 24, 25)

Conservatives are more comfortable with authority and established rules in an ordered society. They have strong in-group and loyalty ties which foster suspicion of the other, and they prefer traditional patterns with settled questions, leaving little ambiguity. Liberals are more open to new experiences and contacts, more trusting and willing to experiment in social and political policy, and more likely to tolerate ambiguity and challenges to existing information and arrangements (Hibbing 249-252; Edsall, "Genes"). Both patterns are needed; in successful societies, they are mutually reinforcing. When the arguments generated by these political orientations are not reality based, however, they can hinder the successful functioning of our current American democracy. Because there is always a significant minority in the middle of these continua, there is the possibility that a majority coalition can emerge as challenges arise and issues are perceived and discussed with reality-based argument.

The examples that follow explore some of the missing context and nuance that might facilitate such a coalition building process within the American political system.

National Security Administration

    The public perception that the NSA is listening to phone conversations and watching every on-line activity has fueled calls by libertarians and the American Civil Liberties Union to end or to severely curtail these seemingly unchecked surveillance programs.

    The data mining that does occur has been of two types. One is telephone metadata that includes phone numbers called, calling card numbers, plus time and duration of calls. Searches require the periodic approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and they do not include actual conversations, which would require a separate specific court order. The second type is the PRISM program of internet data mining of stored data, file transfers, e-mail, chat services, and video conferencing data from nine Internet companies. (Clayton) This was authorized by acts of Congress in 2007 and 2008.

    Both data mining programs permit the linking of communication patterns for persons of interest here and abroad that might pose a threat to American security and allow backtracking after an incident has occurred to determine whether a broader threat might be uncovered. In both cases, all three branches of government have been involved in oversight, as President Obama has noted, so the claim that these programs are unchecked is inaccurate. Finding the balance between privacy and security needs discussion and perhaps further adjustment, especially regarding new encryption technology, but whatever new policy initiatives emerge ought to be founded on accurate information.

    The NSA has also been involved in buying or searching for "zero day" flaws in computer programs, which the United States and Israel have used for cyber attacks on Iran to slow their nuclear program (Sanger). The technique has not been used domestically, so it is unclear how this revelation bears on constitutional rights of privacy or how it might negatively impact the future of American security. Perhaps the liberal and libertarian push for more transparency is not always of obvious benefit.

    Ironically for conservatives concerned about security, budget cutbacks due to sequestration, welcomed by Republican Party fiscal hawks, led to the termination of the Edward Snowden's first security job, leading him to seek employment at the NSA, where he gained access to the classified documents he later released. (Lavender) Ironically for liberals concerned about transparency and democratic participation, the attention given to potential abuses by NSA data mining tends to lessen scrutiny of the private sector, in which data mining is monopolized by the few firms large enough to control the massive computing power needed for effective data manipulation, thereby augmenting existing trends toward plutocracy afforded by the recent legitimization of dark money flowing into the political system.

Affordable Care Act

    The rollout of the ACA on October 1, 2013, with its largely inoperable web site, was and still is widely criticized by conservative opponents as an example of government incompetence. This incompetence was purchased with well over $300 million of contracts to several dozen private sector companies operating in our capitalist system that presumably signed contracts to deliver a workable web site (Isidore).   The largest of these was CGI Federal Inc., the U.S. unit of Canadian firm CGA Group, which received a $93.7 million contract.

    Part of the problem resulted from the political compromise of building the system using private insurers (the conservative principle that in the 1990s had guided the establishment of Romneycare in Massachusetts), rather than simply expanding Medicare for all. Secondly, it was designed to use state level insurance exchanges, but Republican governors in half the states refused to comply (some not deciding to opt out until January of 2013), thereby multiplying the time pressure problem and, ironically, helping to create a larger than necessary national bureaucracy along with its malfunctioning web site (Orlando). The website fix in December of 2013 has since permitted more than 12 million people to sign on at the healthcare.gov, a private-public partnership success story. A related success for a government-run program has been the operation and expansion of Medicaid for millions, at least in those more progressive states that adopted the expansion for those in need.

    It is only fair to remember that the private sector too has had its share of tech fiascoes: the glitches after the merger of United and Continental airlines; the problematic launches of Grand Theft Auto, Apple Maps, Microsoft Vista and Windows 8; the complications at NASDAQ with the Facebook IPO in 2012; and the 2014 bug in iOS 8 that deleted iWork documents (Callaway; Flynn).

    It should also be noted that there have been no complaints about inefficient or incompetent government bureaucrats running technical operations at the NSA. Reasoned debate between conservatives and liberals about the ACA can benefit from a wider range of factual data, unencumbered by ideologically exacerbated predispositional bias.

Internal Revenue Service

    The IRS has been under fire from congressional investigations since mid-2013. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee brought to light that the Exempt Organization Division of the IRS had placed groups with "Tea Party" or "patriot" in their names on a "Be On The Lookout" (BOLO) list for extra scrutiny regarding their eligibility for 501(c)(4) tax exempt status as "primarily non-political" organizations. The chair of this congressional committee, Republican Darrell Issa of California, has been quoted as saying that "this was the targeting of the president's political enemies effectively." (Edsall , "I.R.S.") The congressional committee has attempted to link the activities of the Exempt Organization Division, headquartered in Cincinnati, with conspiratorial direction from the White House but has found no documented "smoking gun" link after more than a year of investigation. (Edsall, "I.R.S.")

    A May 2013 report conducted by the Inspector General of the Treasury Department confirmed the localized nature of the BOLO categorizing and agreed that inappropriate criteria were used for vetting groups applying for tax-exempt status (Kroll, "Five Things"). Groups focusing on government spending, debt, taxes, and how well government was being run had also come in for extra scrutiny.

    The report examined some 300 applications in the BOLO category and found that 91, or 31 percent, had little evidence of significant political activity. That means, of course, that 69 percent of the scrutinized organizations applying for tax exemption under a category designed for non-profit "social welfare" groups did indeed have significant political activity.

    The context in which these issues developed was shaped by at least four factors.

    Determining how political a group is takes time, and the IRS these days is perpetually short-staffed; conservative antipathy toward the IRS is reflected in the budget appropriations from FY 2002 through FY 2010, which were always below the amount of the agency request, and sometimes below the president's budget request (IRS).

    Second, the Citizens United court case and the rise of the Tea Party movement in 2010 produced groups that registered as non-profit "social welfare" groups, such as Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, whose tax-exempt status immediately became questionable as they outspent the more publicized super-PACS by a 3-to-2 margin in the elections that fall (Kroll, "How Congress"; Editorial Board).

    Third, the election campaign made obvious the partisanship of the Tea Party and Patriot groups, given to spreading misinformation about the citizenship and religion of President Obama, "death panels," and other aspects of the Affordable Care Act.

    Fourth, the Exempt Organization Division (where, at this time, a Bush appointee was still commissioner) saw application numbers increase from 1591 in 2010 to 3398 by 2012 (Kroll, "How Congress"), making it more understandable why an underfunded and overworked IRS division would devise a triage-like shorthand system to help identify which applicants might need more scrutiny and documentation to verify the truthfulness of their "social welfare" claims. Continued budget cuts in recent years have prompted the IRS to develop on-line form 1023-EZ for groups raising less than $50,000 a year, thereby dropping the requirement to supply underlying documentation about social welfare status while hoping that truthfulness prevails (Calabresi).

    Anyone who has itemized expenditures for his or her federal income tax and included a deduction for a home office knows what to expect about documentation. The tax return will be on a BOLO list and targeted for scrutiny. This should be the expectation from diligent IRS agents doing their job. Those applying for a preferential tax-exempt status should expect no less scrutiny to confirm their claims.

Optional Alternative Reality Checks

    Political science literature makes us aware that at least one aspect of reality is often hidden during popular discussion of issues: the "mobilization of bias" that benefits powerful interests by providing non-decision (optional reality) zones in which some issues are organized into politics and others are organized out (Bachrach).

    One recent example arose during the 2012 Republican primary season. Fellow Republicans accused candidate Romney's former business, Bain Capital, of using "vulture capitalism" as a business plan, but the charge gained little political traction and created no impetus to change enabling governmental policies.

    On the matter of tax fairness, the rich, who have many options to reduce their tax burden, reject complaints by stating that they pay every dollar owed, leaving unexplored how the tax code has been rigged over the decades to facilitate massive tax avoidance.

    And then there are the giant financial firms that deal in under-regulated derivatives and credit default swaps valued in trillions of dollars. Since the economic crash of 2008, there has been no broad scale effort to establish what, if any, enduring value these activities add to the economy to justify the associated society wide risks and periodic economic damage, or the government subsidy of money loaned to them at near zero interest.

Challenges For Democracy

    The preceding sections offer context and factual nuance that is often missing from public debate in the United States. We always hope that greater understanding of factual data will foster a greater likelihood that opposing sides can modify positions or reach a compromise that enables reality based government policy. Unfortunately, there are at least four problems with this scenario.

    First, although both conservatives and liberals are predisposed to view issues from a different perspective, the conservative side has been strongly influenced by religious conservatives whose literal reading of selected portions of scripture leads them to reject the science supporting evolution, to attempt to "pray away the gay" of homosexuals and lesbians, and to reject abortion in all cases without consideration of rape, incest, or the life of the mother.

    At the Conservapedia.com web site, creationism is factually documented with an alternative reality, formulas are presented that debunk the theory of relativity, and literalism is promoted in understanding scripture as science (Conservapedia).

    Christian dominionists believe it is their obligation to control business, government and education with biblically based laws of civil society (Meacham).

    The epistemology these movements share—that strong belief equals fact and anecdote equals data—is congenial to the conservative predisposed need for authority and closure on ambiguous issues. It appears to have worked its way, for example, into conservative media coverage of winter cold snaps, which (conflating weather and climate) are presented as refutations of global warming.

    A second factor blocking modification of views is that factual counterarguments to strongly held beliefs may backfire. Evidence suggests that conservatives tend to defend their beliefs more strongly than liberals, at least in the political realm, with the better educated even less persuadable (Mooney). The single-minded dogmatism exhibited by the libertarian wing of conservatism, for instance, does not interact well with the multiplicity of American values, which is more compatible with pragmatism than with dogmatic judgments about rightness or wrongness (Lilla; Sunstein). When confronting conservatives, therefore, describing an alternative reality with a story or parable may be a more effective approach than citing facts.

    A third factor aiding conservative resistance to change in recent years has been the reinforcement provided by conservative media, which allows easy selective exposure to information that is especially comforting to conservatives feeling defensive about core values, or those avoiding the cognitive dissonance associated with new information, or those who dislike ambiguity in the absence of authoritative conclusions (Mooney).

    Both liberals and conservative use confirmation bias and selective perception to support their views, but a particularly startling instance occurred in the presidential election campaign of 2012, when the conservative media proclaimed a Romney victory based upon their own surveys. Then late on election night, a stunned Karl Rove appeared on FOX News, muttering his continuing disbelief that Romney had lost Ohio and the election. These episodes, as well as research results, have supported the conclusion that FOX News viewers are the least informed when compared to other broadcast outlets (Beaulon; Fallows). It is likely that among those viewers were the 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans surveyed in 2013 who responded that Obama was responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina…in 2005 (Milbank).

    The preceding sections have raised issues for democratic decision-making that would require both liberal and conservative positions to be modified as new evidence and context emerges. The burden, however, is not equal. The detailed analysis in Thomas Mann's It's Even Worse Than It Looks, cited above, agrees with the preceding analysis that conservatives have the greater responsibility to modify back toward a reasonable center, and the larger task besides, there being no liberal bloc of elected officials equivalent to the Tea Party members on the conservative side who would shut down the government rather than compromise.

    Given the liberal-conservative differences regarding the processing of actual facts and new information, the gerrymandering of congressional districts that locks in Tea Party victories across the country, and the greater convergence between Republican ideology/dogma and the policy interests of big money campaign backers, there is reason to be concerned about the harm done to American democracy by opting for an alternative reality when considering policy. The country is confronted with real issues that might prove to be remediable by fact-based analysis and timely government attention that seeks to approximate the constitutional goal of a more perfect union.

    Let the parable telling begin.

Works Cited

Bachrach, Peter. et.al. "Two Faces Of Power," American Political Science Review, 56:947-952, December, 1962.

Beaulon, Andrew. "Survey: NPR's listeners best-informed, Fox viewers worst-informed," Poynter, May 23, 2012. Accessed at www.poynter.org

Calabresi, Massimo. "In Charities We Trust: The IRS takes non-profits at their word," Time, July 28, 2014.

Callaway, David. "Obama's Y2K Moment," USA Today, October 25, 2013.

Clayton, Mark. "NSA data-mining 101: two 'top secret' programs and what they do," The Christian Science Monitor, June 7, 2013.

Conservapedia. Accessed at www.conservapedia.com.

Editorial Board. "Senator Rubio's Stealthy Donors," The New York Times, November 23, 2015.

Edsall, Thomas. "How Much Do Our Genes Influence Our Political Beliefs?" The New York Times, July 8, 2014.

_____. "Why the I.R.S. Scandal Won't Go Away," The New York Times, February 25, 2014.

Fallows, James. "How Fox News Is (Still) Hurting Republicans," The Atlantic, May 17, 2015.

Flynn, Kerry. "Apple Fanboys Discover Another iOS 8 Glitch," October 1, 2014, accessed at www.huffingtonpost.com.

Gutting, Gary. "You Say You Want a Revolution," The New York Times, July 2, 2013.

Hibbing, John R. et.al. Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, And The Biology Of Political Differences. NY: Routledge, 2014, 24, 25.

IRS Funding History, FY2002-2014 from IRS Oversight Board FY2014 IRS Budget Recommendation Special Report, May 2013.

Isidore, Chris. "Obamacare website: 6 biggest contractors," October 22, 2013. Accessed at www.money.cnn.com.

Kroll, Andy. "Five Things You Need to Know in the Inspector General's IRS Tea Party Scandal Report," Mother Jones, May 15, 2013.

Kroll, Andy. "How Congress Helped Create the IRS-Tea Party Mess," Mother Jones, May 17, 2013.

Lavender, Paige. "Edward Snowden Took Job With Access To NSA Information Because Of Sequestration, Father Says," July 31, 2013. Accessed at www.huffingtonpost.com.

Lilla, Mark. "Our Illegible Age: How we declined into libertarianism," The New Republic, June 30, 2014.

Mann, Thomas E. et.al. It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. NY: Basic Books, 2012.

Meacham,Jon. "In God We Trust," Time, September 26, 2011.
Milbank, Dana. "Blaming Obama for everything," Charlotte Observer, August 29, 2013.

Mooney, Chris. The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012, pp. 44-47.

Orlando, Anthony W. "Obamacare Is Not a Reason to Give Up on Government Programs," November 15, 2013, accessed at www.huffingtonpost.com.

Sanger, David E. et.al. "Obama Is Urged to Sharply Curb N.S.A. Data Mining," The New York Times, December 18, 2013.

SOTU: Presented January 21, 2013. Accessed at www.whitehouse.gov.

Sunstein, Carl R. "Tea Party Constitutionalism: The unexamined dogmas of the libertarian right," The New Republic, May, 28, 2014.

Author's Biography

     Roland F. Moy earned the Ph.D. in political science from Ohio State University. After teaching for 30 years, primarily in the field of international studies, he retired from Appalachian State University in 1998. In addition to participation, presentations, and office holding in professional organizations, he was active in organizing Model United Nations events each year for both high school and college students.

     A lifelong singer, he continues a century-long family tradition of quartet singing. He has also been active with the local Arts Council in organizing and producing musical shows to raise funds for music scholarships, and in producing fifteen annual summer community chorus events.

     Since joining the Torch Club in Boone, NC in 2007, Moy has developed several papers that apply a core political science concern about abuse of power to the related field of economics. One of these won the 2012 Paxton Award. In 2014 he chose to focus more closely on the current political realm and produced the following paper, which was presented at the May 2014 meeting of the Wyoming Valley Torch Club.