Two Ideologies and a Funeral-- David Michael Green

[Demeter]

http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Two_Ideologies_And_A_Funeral.html

Social scientists aren’t generally blessed with the ability that those in the physical sciences have to manufacture artificial conditions allowing hypothesis testing.

In a worst case scenario, a physicist could be required to scrounge up tens of millions of dollars to build a particle accelerator, or a Hubble telescope. A social scientist, on the other hand, might need to launch a war to measure its properties, or starve people to study the psychology of famine. Oops – er, no can do. Try getting a grant for that!

Sometimes, though, you just get lucky. And when it comes to judging the central political debate of our time, we are lucky (as social scientists, that is, which means that we’ve been very unlucky, of late, as citizens).

America has conducted a natural experiment in ideology over the previous century, and we are now in a position to evaluate its results. From the 1930s through the 1970s, this country adopted essentially liberal policies (American liberal, to be sure, but still liberal). From the 1980s to the present, America charted a largely conservative course. There were huge exceptions to both tendencies, of course, but the overall trajectory of national politics during these eras cannot seriously be denied.

Now we are in a position to ask the simple empirical question: Which was better?