Ideology and integrity

Let’s elect leaders who can admit when they are wrong

The 2016 campaign should be almost entirely about issues. The parties are far apart on everything from the environment to fiscal policy to health care. Many in the news media will try to make the campaign about personalities and character instead.

Character isn’t irrelevant. But the character trait that will matter most isn’t one the press likes to focus on.

You see, you shouldn’t care whether you’d like to have a beer with a candidate, or about a candidate’s sex life, or even about a candidate’s spending habits unless they involve corruption. What you should look for in a world that keeps throwing nasty surprises at us is intellectual integrity: the willingness to face facts even if they’re at odds with one’s preconceptions, the willingness to admit mistakes and change course.

That’s a virtue in short supply.

I’m thinking in particular about economics, where the nasty surprises just keep coming. If nothing that has happened these past seven years has shaken any of your long-held economic beliefs, you haven’t been paying attention or you haven’t been honest with yourself.

As Franklin Roosevelt put it, “The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

What we see instead in many public figures is the behavior George Orwell once described as “believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.”

Did I predict runaway inflation that never arrived? Well, the government is cooking the books. Besides, I never said what I said.

I’m not calling for an end to ideology, because that’s impossible. Everyone has a view about how the world does and should work. Indeed, the most reckless and dangerous ideologues are often those who imagine themselves ideology-free — for example, self- proclaimed centrists — and therefore are unaware of their own biases. What you should seek, in yourself and others, is not an absence of ideology but an open mind.

The press tends to punish open-mindedness, because gotcha journalism is easier and safer than policy analysis. Hillary Clinton supported trade agreements in the 1990s, but now she’s critical. It’s a flip-flop! Or, possibly, a case of learning from experience, which is something we should praise, not deride.

So what’s the state of intellectual integrity at this point in the election cycle? Pretty bad, at least on the Republican side.

Jeb Bush, for instance, has declared that “I’m my own man” on foreign policy, but the list of his advisers includes the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, who predicted that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators and shows no signs of having learned from the blood bath that actually took place.

As far as I can tell, no important Republican figure has admitted that none of the terrible consequences that were supposed to follow health reform — mass cancellation of existing policies, soaring premiums, job destruction — has actually happened.

We’re not just talking about being wrong on policy questions. We’re talking about never admitting error and never revising one’s views. Never being able to say that you were wrong is a serious character flaw.

Suppose, as is all too possible, that the next president ends up confronting a crisis — economic, environmental, foreign — undreamed of in his or her current political philosophy. We really don’t want the response to that crisis directed by someone who still can’t bring himself to admit that invading Iraq was a disaster but health reform wasn’t.

This election should turn on the issues. But if we must talk about character, let’s talk about what matters, namely intellectual integrity.