[updated and revised from an earlier, pre-election post]
“[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Donald Rumsfeld, Press Conference, Feb. 12, 2006
“Look at what Iraq is not doing, OK? They’re not competing with Iran to sponsor terror in the region. They’re not threatening Kuwait. We don’t have to station troops in Saudi Arabia. They’re not trying to restart the nuclear weapon program. All that would be happening under Saddam.” — Jim Talent (R-Mo.), Meet the Press, Oct. 8, 2006
The removal of Donald Rumsfeld today has been widely reported as a response to the Democratic victory in the election last night. Yet there is another connection between those two events, and it has to do with the logic of the Republican party and its ultimate failure. Simply put, the electoral defeat of the Republicans and the downfall of Rumsfeld are both signs that there are real limits to what I’ll call the “what if?” theory of the world.
What both Rumsfeld and the Republicans employ is a method of analysis where progress and success can be measured only by comparison to a hypothetical universe, a universe that only they can see. The point of this line of argument is to push the debate past known facts (“known knowns,” in Rumsfeldian) and into the area of speculation and fictional scenarios –- on the theory that when you can’t argue the facts that are there, you might as well argue the facts that might have been there.
Anyone who has spent any time in the universe of political rhetoric should be familiar with this kind of argument. It starts by citing a fact — let’s say that I claim that Bush has handled the economy poorly. The facts for this assertion are simple. The economy, as measured in the two most basic possible ways, is worse off under Bush than it was under Clinton: the stock market’s steady progression has faltered and job creation has been much slower. (For a more detailed analysis, see this)
But, the response goes, those measures don’t count (indeed, Republicans did try, without much apparent success, to campaign on the strength of the economy); what matters is what would have happened if things had been different. You see, all the good things that happened under Clinton were the result of external forces beyond anyone’s control — a chicken could have been president and had those results — and so none of the credit lies with Clinton. As for Bush? Well, given the external forces surrounding his term, the economy has performed much better than if he hadn’t been in control; he stewarded us through those rocky times and has brought us back to Clinton-era levels.
The ultimate conclusion is that if Bush had been running things when Clinton was president, the ’90s would have produced the best economy in the history of this country (except, of course, it already was … perhaps it would have been even better) and if Clinton was president instead of Bush, the ’00s would have been a complete economic disaster (hmm … completer?). But, I have to admit, I can’t prove that Bush wouldn’t have been better and Clinton wouldn’t have been worse. Gotcha!
This thinking reappeared in other races and in other contexts leading up to the election. Bob Corker implied that Harold Ford’s opposition to the Patriot Act is dangerous, because it means that he opposes one of the tools necessary to stop terrorism. His argument relied, in part, on a classic Tiger Repellant argument: the Patriot Act has been in place since 9/11, and because there haven’t been any terrorist attacks since 9/11, it is clear that the Patriot Act is necessary to stop terrorist attacks. Still, that’s impossible to refute: I can’t say for sure that there wouldn’t have been a terrorist attack had we not put the Patriot Act into place. Gotcha!
So, too, does the biggest, most important issue in this country — the Iraq War — likewise become a victim of the hypothetical. Here, every conceivable metric for success is immediately attacked as irrelevant or inconclusive. American dead: over 2700. Well, they say, we didn’t go to war to minimize American deaths, we went to help the Iraqis. Iraqi dead: tens of thousands dead (minimum) and over a million displaced. Well, we didn’t go to war for Iraq, they say, we went to stop terrorist attacks. Terrorist attacks: according to the government’s own statistics, attacks have increased dramatically since the beginning of the war (to the point where they are no longer publicly releasing figures). Here they fall back to their ultimate rationale: we didn’t go to war to stop terrorist attacks now, we went to war to stop terrorist attacks in the future (invoking the familiar and increasingly tenuous connection between A) foreign invasion, B) establishment of democracy, and C) cessation of terrorist-producing conditions).
And it looks like they’ve got me there, too: I can’t measure whether or not the Middle East will produce fewer terrorists twenty years from now and I can’t measure whether the invasion has produced fewer attacks from 2003-2006 in a parallel universe where we didn’t invade. For that matter, I can’t measure whether Iraq would have eventually developed a nuclear bomb and I can’t measure whether Saddam would have killed/displaced more Iraqis on his own. Gotcha!
The traditional method of rational argument (marshalling evidence and positing conclusions drawn from that evidence) does not work in the face of imaginary universes; victory through reason is impossible to achieve because they’ve created a place where there are no facts and where there can never be any facts.
Thus, the fight against this is more than just a fight for a particular set of policies (although it is obviously that, as well). It is a fight for a world where knowledge is based on observable, measurable, empirical evidence, instead of a world where intuitive belief generates its own facts. A fight for real people’s lives instead of speculative people’s deaths. A fight for a world where terms like “known unknowns” are relegated back to the category of oxymoron.
And so the connection between the inglorious exit of Donald Rumsfeld, who consistently looked at the Iraq he wanted to see instead of the Iraq that was there, and the defeat of Republicans like Jim Talent, who focused on what Iraq might have been instead of what Iraq has become, is clear. An American public sick of the disconnect between hypothesis and reality finally used a weapon that the Republicans could not “what if?” their way out of. In the end, what felled Rumsfeld and the Republicans was the very thing that they built this theory to protect themselves from: the intrusion of an empirical and observable phenomenon with objective results. An election.
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