Matthew Yglesias: Where Are the Obama Boosters? Starts with a link to a Jonathan Bernstein post titled "Where Are the Liberal Hack Economists?" It's a reasonable albeit naive question. Recall, after all, how eager conservative economists were to tout the jobless Bush recovery as soon as the growth numbers went positive. Bush then and the Republicans now never lacked for mouthpieces for whatever the party line was. The Democrats have a tougher time, partly because they don't have the payroll or party discipline of the Republicans, partly because Obama's economic team decided to save Wall Street ahead of Main Street despite the interests of most rank and file Democrats, and partly because so many left-identified economists aren't hacks. Someone could make a case that the economy is much more robust after a year with Obama that it would have been with McCain or Hoover or any other Republican you can think of, but it's hard for the reality-based party to see that as much of a triumph. Only fantasists are so readily elated.

Yglesias tries to explain this:

I wrote about "optimism inversion" back in January 2009, noting that over the previous five years liberal commentators had been consistently more pessimistic about the economy than conservative ones. I saw three factors at work:

1. I believe left-wing politics and pessimism are generally correlated traits.
2. Left-of-center commentators are generally smarter than right-of-center ones and pessimism was the correct position.
3. People inclined to be hostile to the incumbent administration are naturally disposed to believe that disaster looms around the corner.

I then noted "at some point after the inauguration, the valence of factor (3) will switch and I wonder how much force that'll have in pulling things along." It seems, in general, to have had very little influence. As a general matter, I think that both (1) and (2) are underrated features of public discourse. I also, despite factor (2) and the fact that I'm pessimistic about the next 24 months worth of economic outlook for the USA, generally think that left-of-center people are too pessimistic about the trajectory of human affairs.

There is a lot of stuff to unpack here.

• Both political parties turn to populist themes -- perhaps popular pandering is a better way to phrase it -- during election campaigns, then turn back to established power centers after the election. The Republicans look natural when they do this because they started with first allegiance to the rich and powerful, and most of their lowlife followers fall in line, accepting the need to cater to the rich and powerful to gain support for their single-issue obsessions. But when Democrats shift post-election, they lose most of their followers, because there's little way to reconcile the opposing interests. It's not so much that Democratic politicians are hypocrites as that they have such a huge gap to straddle.
• It doesn't help Democratic party discipline that so many people vote for Democrats just to keep the Republicans out of office. To take an obvious example, if you are antiwar you had to vote against McCain, even if you got Obama instead. But you don't have to like Obama's wars because McCain's would have been worse. Voting is a much more discrete act than liking someone.
• The long-term correlation of pessimism and left-wing politics has much to do with the long-term ascendancy of the right and its marginalization of any sense of public interest. If the right weren't so powerful, and if their power didn't have such pervasive effects, the left would have less to be pessimistic about. (In general, the left identifies with the public and public interests, while the right promotes private interests, often but not always their own.)
• One aspect of being smarter is that your perceptions are more rooted in the observable world, and this is close to what Yglesias has in mind. Of course, there are other ways of being smart, such as being clever at manipulating rhetoric and emotions, and the right has lots of people who are smart like that. They are the ones who brag about inventing reality, as opposed to those who merely study it.
• Yglesias's occasional forays into long-term optimism have rarely struck me as persuasive. That's partly because a lot of persistent worries -- like overpopulation, resource depletion, pollution -- have never lost their logic no matter how many specific predictions have failed, while panaceas like progress of technology and human ingenuity still seem like slim threads no matter how many times they have worked out.

Sometimes I worry that I'm being too pessimistic. One thing we necessarily do is oversimplify issues, which has the effect of exaggerating risks and benefits. Some trends that I find deeply alarming, like the loss of equality in things like mean wages and educational costs are certainly problems, but don't seem to be as severe as my reasoning suggests. Maybe they will hit some catastrophic point where social cohesion unravels completely, but more likely we'll see a bit of reform or some other way of compensating for the effects. Climate change is something that grabs people because it seems clear cut, but it really isn't very clear: there are wide range of possible outcomes, with all sorts of reactions and revisions. About the only thing I'm sure of is that massive stupidity isn't the answer.

And, indeed, that's the main thing that makes me pessimistic. There are lots of ways to deal with most problems, but the two that don't work are stupidity and carelessness. When you see, time and again, rank nonsense spouted by people who care next to nothing about the fate of other people, you get pessimistic. The tipping point issue is whether we choose to face inevitable problems from a framework of unity -- we're all in this together -- or we let each person or group fend for themselves. If the latter, which is a position that enjoys significant power in America today, we are doomed.