William of Occam

William of Occam

 The intellectual asceticism of William of Occam is not popular in American conservative circles. The American commentator Rod Dreher has extended his dislike for Occam's antinomianism into a distaste for the rule against multiplying causes known as Occam's Razor. Plenty of conservatives who do not often refer to William of Occam by name refuse, in practice, to apply his insight. 

Occam's Razor provides a central insight in all forms of intellectual endeavour, but nowhere does it matter more than in the formation of policy, because in politics the facts and the logical conclusions from these facts matter most when they come with bad, or at least unwelcome, news. Facts always matter, but when they happen to align with our desires, they have only a marginal influence on policy. After all, we seldom turn from doing something we want to do because the facts and logic affirm our choices. Living by the truth only really counts as a virtue when it includes a willingness to live by truths we find unpleasant.

Occam's Razor plays a vital role in this process, by cutting down the number of conclusions possible from any given set of facts. If I write a computer program and the test runs keep providing the wrong output, I can conclude I have made an error somewhere in my logic, or I can decide the operating system has an arcane defect my program has somehow stumbled into, a system error capable of evading detection for decades, and one invoked by only the tiniest set of circumstances. While such things happen, Occam's Razor tells me to start looking for errors in my own work. 

Mollie Hemmingway recently announced her intention to write a book about the 2020 election in an article in First Things. In it, she pretty clearly repeats the now current line among Trump supporting Republicans: if the Democrats did not actually steal the election, a great many influential people, particularly in both traditional and new media, worked very hard to slant the information provided about the election.

In fact, the media, both old and new, did work hard to assure the public of the fairness of the election. A great many media outlets and writers, including a respectable proportion of conservative writers, did condemn President Trump's behaviour and record. Donald Trump did lose the election to President Biden. 

The factual background for these events is well known and difficult to dispute. Ms. Hemmingway's arguments ignore some facts, but more than that, she posits, or more often implies, some very complicated causes for simple effects. Through the past two elections campaigns, Donald Trump proclaimed, loudly, he would not accept any outcome other than a win by himself. When he did win the electoral college in 2016, he blamed widespread fraud for his substantial loss in the popular vote. Add in the inevitable disruptions caused by a global pandemic, and people who care about democracy had a very clear and simple set of reasons to promote clarity in the reporting of election results, and a corresponding effort to answer and to filter out untruths. A Time report Ms. Hemmingway quotes claims an informal group of media and other business executives, political operatives, and activists came together to do just that. How much the peaceful conduct of the election is due to the common sense of most Americans, and how much to well timed messaging we will probably never know; a coordinated effort to save an election makes a better story than the solid common sense of the public.

We need little explanation for most aspects of the 2020 election. A once in a century pandemic serves to explain the changes to the election procedures. Donald Trump's persistent unpopularity, and his personal and political failures more than suffice to explain his failure to win reelection. He never won a majority of the popular vote, which makes him the first president in a century to never win a majority.  His mingling of business interests and public resources provoked continual ethical and legal questions. His administration committed moral monstrosities, such as the separation of families at the border. He failed to carry out any of his promises. In two years in which Republicans controlled the legislature and the judiciary, Trump achieved a tax cut for billionaires. The improved replacement for the Affordable Care Act never materialized, and the flat out repeal the Republicans attempted failed in Congress. The Mexicans never paid a cent for the wall, and despite Mr. Trump's fiscal maneuvers to fund it, the United States built little in the way of an actual barrier. The infrastructure program the Republicans promised never appeared.

When Donald Trump faced his great test as president, he failed completely. He not only failed to prepare for a pandemic, he dismantled preparations his predecessors had left him. When the pandemic broke out, he did everything he could to keep the inflated stock market he evidently saw as a key to his reelection. He failed to coordinate the procurement of emergency supplies, failed to implement effective restrictions, but above all he failed, in any sense, to lead. He ended up leaving the economy in shambles, a population profoundly divided, and a death toll twice that of the nearest industrialized country. 

Given that sorry record, it seems astonishing Mr. Trump got as many votes as he did. Yet Ms. Hemmingway does not discuss the actual failures of the Trump Administration. Instead, she claims "The story of how these institutions worked to rig the 2020 results needs to be told, and I plan to tell it." In order to make this argument, she must logically discount the evidence of Donald Trump's failures, although her claims the "political, media, and corporate establishments... manipulated the COVID-19 response, stoked the violent racial unrest..." suggests she does not so much dismiss it but displace it. That requires another failure to recognize the sufficiency of evidence. We saw, in real time, Donald Trump's fumbling with the pandemic, his failure to take responsibility, his grasping, literally, at "magic". These failures in leadership explain the outcome of Covid-19 in the United States, with no need for an intervention by any "establishment". Likewise the underlying tensions caused by the pandemic as it hit poor people, and in particular racialized poor people, much harder than the wealthy, sparked by the egregiously brutal murder of George Floyd, more than serve to explain the protests of the summer of 2020. Occam's Razor applies here: we can see clearly the causes for the unrest and the political and economic failures of 2020. If anyone did engage in a conspiracy, it's pretty clear they need not have bothered.

All the documented facts about Donald Trump's troubled term explain not only the widespread and energetic efforts to defeat him, they also, equally well, to explain the his rejection by what Ms. Hemmingway calls "political, media, and corporate establishments". Plenty of individuals and institutions, including conservative ones, rejected Mr. Trump. Many news outlets reported Mr. Trump's failures in unflattering terms. People on both the left and the right expressed their conviction he does not legitimately represent the American people. His own behaviour, his own failures, suffice to account for this. 

The cost of an undisciplined assignment of blame for Mr. Trump's failures will fall most heavily on the American Conservative movement. Whether American Conservatives and the Republican party end up in the political wilderness as a result of their failures, or whether they succeed in persuading the voters to give them another chance, the failure to confront their failures will mean American Conservatives will continue to make a less coherent and compelling political argument than they otherwise might.