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Austerity, Objectivity, and Amtrak

Lately, the degree to which discourses of “objectivity” have dominated our political theatre is astounding. Everywhere one turns, he or she is confronted by a variety of appeals to some qualification outside the bound of “politics” and “partisanship”. Importantly, however, facts are hardly an apolitical realm. They are inert and must have life breathed into them. This is precisely what the name I have given this column is meant to suggest.

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to…

 – David Byrne

Crucially, and somewhat perversely, due to the constant appeal to the transcendent terrain of facts and reality and “the real stuff “and “the way it is”, etc… we have now ended up with a bigger problem than we started with: a quasi-ontological division between political groups.

There is now  a world of “lefty-facts” and “righty-facts” each fed by entire discursive apparatuses whose complexity would give Foucault a real run for his post-structuralist money. Sure there will be those who object to this, pointing out the heroic efforts put forth in the recent “fact-checking” craze. Nonetheless, we must recognize that both the recent “fact-checking” craze and the constant partisan appeal to “bipartisanship” are essentially expressions of the same belief. This belief holds that there exists a realm of truth in politics unadorned by partisan distortion that must both reside outside of contention (hence, according to this logic, in compromise) and within the realm of scientific-empirical verities.

Of course, in response to this, we have to keep in mind that though the New York Times printing a “fact-check” report may bring to light certain manipulative prevarications it does very little to stunt the metastasizing of nonsense. “Fact-Checking” doesn’t make an utterance go unsaid. Furthermore, even if it did, people could always claim biased fact-checking.

It is quite possible that sorting this epistemological divide out might be the principal intellectual ambition of our time. Perhaps what is necessary is a casting off of the “objective” pretense and instead a focus on self-reflexive criticism, agonist respect, and a irenic ethos of pluralism. This all is, of course, fodder for a future column. For now, however, it suffices to say that perhaps what Weber didn’t predict was that though rationality may be an iron cage, we aren’t all in the same zoo.

Anyway, let me bring this opening salvo into the “real world”  of campaign politics.

While Obama and the Democrats are certainly guilty of discursive trickery, Mitt and his advisers have been giving whole new meaning to this kind of activity  (please don’t get the impression that I am suggesting some sort of a priori equivalence between political camps. This presumption is precisely part of the problem.) Outside his standard policy prevarications, Mitt’s far more sly maneuverings regard his false appeals to objectivity.  I want to focus on one of these in particular.

A well-known, indispensable part of Mitt’s stump speech is his spending-cut shtick.

In it he makes an appeal to budget-minded concerns, painting the deficit as hammering economic growth (just consult the 1950’s to see if this was the case in the past) and therefore a problem needing to be redressed by a stern but fair executive/father-figure.

So how does this routine go?

He starts with a classic “I’m getting serious” line to appease the critics :

“Listen, guys, there are programs I like but I have this test. It’s called the China test!”

Then here comes the meat of the line:

“We have to ask ourselves if the sort of expenditure is worthwhile its worth borrowing from CHINA to pay for!?”

Obviously, there is a LOT to unpack here already. Beyond the paternalistic grace of this austerity formulation, there are some huge problems. Though clearly Romney is trying to appeal to a non-partisan principle he ends up doing more damage than he would have otherwise.

First, we must ask ourselves who is making this decision?  Under what matrices or supposedly objective, pre-political schematics is this “decider” making these tests (a good question unless Romney is a closet Schmittian)?

It’s imperative here to recognize that pretending that budget concerns enter the arena of “the experts” and not the politicians is not only inaccurate but also morally objectionable, and, I will argue (not in this column) fundamentally anti-democratic.

Furthermore, what’s the deal with the powerful undertone of anti-China sentiment? Is this statement as masterful a pronunciation of the meeting point between Neoliberalism and Neo-Conservatism that I suspect it is? Is there something in this cheap appeal to a presumed Anti-China bias a marker of Romney’s lame estimation of the American public’s  foreign policy sentiments?

At this point, Romney attempts to drive his point home with a real, live example:

“I believe that we have to let things compete by themselves. If they cannot float, then so be it. The first of these things will be Amtrak”

Woah!

All of a sudden, despite being deliriously roped in on a pseudo-objective line of argument, we area suddenly faced with the very partisan, substantive policy assertion that Amtrak should lose its public subsidies.

Now, according to Romney’s particular economic creed, this should work just great. Yet even a cursory understanding of economics, let alone transportation economics, can throw a cast of doubt onto this suggestion.

To begin with, there is the problem that the great majority of large-scale railways across the world receive government subsidizing. Even if we concede that in doing so they are running monopolies, there is no necessary conclusion stemming from this that a more cost-friendly version would otherwise be more forthcoming.

For the last 11 months, Amtrak has put up record passenger number. This is nothing to sneeze at. This points clearly towards the sign that Americans are using their trains. And should they not be?

Surely, Mitt “I’m a car guy” Romney might not be that enthused about the idea of trains. But that does not change one last thing: trains are a social good whose operation may simply not lend itself to profit.

Ultimately, this inability to conceive of social goods as deriving value from values distinct from the profit incentive is Romney’s economistic problem (think Sesame Street). This dire gap is fully on display in the rest of the spending cut portion of the stump speech.

About the Author

Benjamin Davidson is a junior concentrating in political theory, with an emphasis on the continental tradition. As far as a hometown is concerned, he grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida but currently calls Utah home. With regards to politics, he believes that it all begins with one's diet.

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