A Serious Commitment to Ideology

Here is an interesting excerpt from a book review by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic of Amity Schlaes' book The Forgotten Man, a biography of Herbert Hoover. The bolded bit is an excellent example of how ideology pokes a stick in the eye of rational thinking:

Yes, Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But (I am quoting Leuchtenburg) "at Hoover's behest, RFC officials administered the law so stingily that the tens of thousands of jobs the country had been promised were never created. By mid-October, the RFC had approved only three of the 243 applications it had received for public works projects." Hoover's head of unemployment relief said that "federal aid would be a disservice to the unemployed." Hoover was a staunch ideological conservative who remarked, in 1928, that "even if governmental conduct of business could give us more efficiency instead of less efficiency, the fundamental objection to it would remain unaltered and unabated."

If you want to see how a right wing hatchet-woman uses her ideology to rewrite history, watch this interview of Amity Schlaes about her book:

I find it interesting how the right wing "reinterprets" things to "help you see" how wrong you are and how right they are. About 4:30 into the above clip Amity Schlaes helps remove the "scales" from our eyes by making a classic right wing ideologue's claim that "coercing" somebody to help somebody else must be morally wrong, i.e. that using government money to help the poor is wrong. Instead, these fanatics stand by the Ronald Reagan solution of "let us help the rich get even richer so that they will let trickle down their blessing upon the poor". Yes! Unshackle the government. Remove taxes. Allow the rich to look after us because we all know that they yearn desperately to help their fellow citizens by showering donations upon the poor, the sick, the unemployed. And, as everybody "knows" the rich would be rushing to do this, but only if we remove the coercion of the law. You know, those nasty taxes that rob from the rich to give to the undeserving poor. Their revulsion over that moral wrong is the only thing keeping the rich from rushing to the aid of all those in need.

Schlaes is full of nutty "knowledge" like this. She merrily romps through history re-interpreting it to match her ideological folderol. Her revisionist interpretation of Hoover as a closet "liberal" is laughable. Her claim that the most pressing issue of the time was whether the "forgotten man" was the taxpayer or the welfare recipient is idiotic. But the right wing press is over the moon with joy. They have found their woman, the hatchet person to go after those nasty liberals.

Read the Jonathan Chait review of Schlaes' work for the necessary antidote.