"Qualifications": A Lesson in Liberal Ideology

During the past month we have repeatedly heard liberal commentators proclaim that Sarah Palin is "unqualified" to serve as vice-president. While followers of one party or the other have always disparaged the rival party's candidates because their policies would have undesirable effects, sometimes supporting their critiques with illustrations from the opponent's past record, the particular term "unqualified" has not often been used of candidates running for election to executive office. Of course I am sure that many liberals thought that Ronald Reagan was unqualified for the presidency (I confess that I did). But the term "unqualified" and the paradigm it implies did not, to my recollection, play an important role in the public and MSM discourse during the campaigns of 1980 and 1984. In the current election the demand from the MSM that Sarah Palin prove that she is "qualified"-- or rather submit to a public inquisition by Katie Couric to produce evidence that she isn't qualified--this is something new in American politics.

Something new in American electoral politics, that is. In the past we've heard plenty about candidates being qualified or unqualified in another political realm: nominees for the judiciary. The inquisitions into Sarah Palin's "qualifications" for office, and into John McCain's "vetting" of her, represent the importation of a paradigm routinely applied in deliberations about the appointment of civil service employees and judges.

In particular, during the past three decades nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court have been subjected to dramatic public interrogations by the U.S. Senate. Hearings like these constitute the implicit background of the current demand that Sarah Palin appear before journalists and respond to any questions they might ask, as if the press had a right and indeed a responsibility to subpoena candidates for electoral office and compel them to produce evidence of qualification under oath. (An item on the web today quotes Charles Gibson as saying that journalists have a responsibility to "expose" Sarah Palin.)

The fact that liberals have transferred this discourse from congressional hearings to public elections reveals a lot about how liberals think. It can help us understand what they see in Sarah Palin that horrifies them, and the qualities that nonliberals see but liberals overlook. It also can help us understand what liberals think about elections and about us, their fellow-citizens and fellow-voters.

The evaluation of potential judges according to a standard of "qualification" has long been institutionalized: organs of the legal profession regularly examine and rate the work of judges. This makes a lot of sense, because of what judges do. The task of a judge is that of applying an existing body of legislation and judicial precedent to the particular cases that will come before his or her bench. A satisfactory judge must have expert command of this knowledge or he cannot do the job. Moreover, the judge's decisions, in order to be effective, must be able to withstand appeal to higher courts that implement the same body of law and precedent according to essentially the same principles of judicial logic. The work of a judge, therefore, by its very nature is implicated in impersonal standards that the judge is supposed to put into practice: the judge represents a bench. This body of knowledge is the same for any judge who might be serving at the same bench, and so it makes perfect sense to demand approximately the same knowledge and legal skills of any prospective judges under consideration for a given bench.

Since judges are evaluated according to their professional expertise, those who evaluate them must be professionals who possess the same expertise. Judges are trained lawyers and members of the bar, and they are evaluated by fellow members of the bar who are experts in the relevant jurisprudence. The most important judicial seats are filled by appointment rather than election, and even when seats are regularly filled by election, voters accept and appreciate the evaluations of professional boards, because only legal professionals can tell them whether a judge or prospective judge knows what he will need to know to do the job.

The job of a U.S. president or vice-president is very unlike that of a judge or civil servant, so it should not be surprising that there are no institutions for formally evaluating candidates for president and proclaiming them as either "qualified" or "unqualified". In each presidential term the officeholder confronts a unique array of problems and opportunities. To a very large degree a president is entrusted with choosing how to distribute the administration's attention to these matters. Moreover the president does not merely deal with situations that come before him, as judges deal with cases; presidents can initiate legislation and diplomacy, issue executive orders, and sometimes authorize military action. Every presidency is different, and that uniqueness is built in to the office itself. For that reason it is impossible, even for former presidents, to say exactly what the "qualifications" for the presidency are.

The office of president is also filled by the election of voters, not through appointment by someone deemed better capable because of their professional expertise. It is true that the framers of the Constitution devised the Electoral College to be the body that would select the president. But it has never actually functioned that way, and the electors were never supposed to be experts.

Ultimately it is the voters who decide whether they wish someone to serve as their president, and if anyone were to pass judgment on the qualifications of a presidential candidate it would be they.

To summarize the previous two points: in our system the presidency is not conceived of as a professional position like a judge's, and presidents are not selected or authorized by professional licensing boards.

The fact that liberals are making such a fuss about the Governor of Alaska's alleged lack of "qualifications" to serve as vice-president shows not merely that liberals have a problem with Gov. Palin, but that they have a problem with the characteristics of the presidency and vice-presidency outlined above. When liberals talk about the "presidency," they are not in fact referring to the office now held by George Bush and held previously by Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, JFK, FDR, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. They are referring to an imaginary office that is much more like a professional civil service or judicial position. Some (deluded) liberals may think the presidency is already that, and that President Bush is the one dreaming he holds a job that doesn't exist. Others may want to make the presidency the equivalent of a professional civil service position. But either way, when liberals make proclamations about whether presidential and vice-presidential candidates are "qualified," the presidency they have in mind is not the real one, but the imaginary liberal presidency that is occupied only by qualified professionals who have been authorized by expert practitioners of the same profession.

This conception of the presidency is not merely an accident. It is intrinsic to liberalism, which is an ideology that might accurately be described as the political expression of social science. According to classical social science human affairs follow regular patterns like those of inanimate nature and can therefore be studied "scientifically." From this premise it follows that the only true and valid understanding of human affairs is that of trained experts, and that all practitioners of actual politics should either be experts or should implement "policies" that experts provide for them.

Therefore from the liberal standpoint, political progress requires that the government be controlled by experts, that office holders answer to experts rather than to voters (just as judges answer to the law and not to public opinion), and that the requirements of public service be defined in terms of obedience to the authority of social science expertise. In this framework, office holders are not supposed to lead, and the views of the voters are not supposed to matter. Office holders and voters alike are supposed to believe and do what experts tell them to.

In this ideal liberal world the board of experts that enforces the progressive regime of social science is supposed to be the news media, acting with the advice and support of higher academic experts who are quoted in interviews. The media (those heroes who saved America from fascism by exposing Watergate and publishing the Pentagon Papers) believe they have been entrusted with the quasi-official responsibility of exposing incompetence in office. The media also believe they are not expected to report news of actual events that readers may want to learn about, but to transmit images and conclusions that experts have determined are appropriate, so that members of the public do not get any wrong ideas: if, according to social science experts, criminals are not a problem, the NY Times may publish statistics about crimes and their alleged causes, but nothing about criminals. It may not be news, but it's "truth", since it's what social scientists have told the journalists we should know.

Why then do liberals say that the Governor of Alaska is "unqualified" to be vice-president? And why will we hear in the next election too that the Republican candidates are ridiculously "unqualified"? Is it because Republicans just can't find anyone who got a higher grade than C in political science to run for office? Or because Republican voters don't know the difference between an expert like Joe Biden and a rube who winks at them? Liberals might say "all of the above," but the truth is, "none of the above." Liberals will continue to find non-liberal candidates "unqualified" because certain people, like Republicans and the Postliberal here, don't subscribe to the liberal ideology: we don't believe that government should be an expression of social science. We think that human affairs do not follow such regular patterns and laws as social scientists would have us believe, and that the policies of social scientists can and indeed have led us into great error. We believe it is better to have officeholders who think for themselves, and that citizens who think for themselves are also better than citizens who have been indoctrinated.

So why then did John McCain select Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee? Was it because he submitted her to a Ph.D. oral examination about foreign policy and decided that she passed it? Or because he meant to give her the exam and forgot? Or because he thought she could win votes even though she flunked the exam? None of the above. I am absolutely sure that McCain selected Palin because he knew about her work as the Governor of Alaska, he got to know her personally, and he concluded that she had what it took for the job of vice-president and running mate that he needed done. Of course, that wouldn't be the way to appoint a judge. But for a vice-presidential candidate it makes perfect sense, much better sense than the process of "vetting" demanded by liberals who know about "issues" but don't know what vice-presidents and presidents actually do.

The problem here is not Palin's ignorance. It's the ignorance of liberals. These textbook-taught experts have no capacity for self-criticism. They do not know that real scientists test their own hypotheses and not just those of rivals. They are so blinded by their social science paradigm that they cannot even imagine an alternative to it, and so they simply dismiss anyone who doesn't subscribe to it as an idiot, religious fanatic, or some other kind of intellectual deviant. Sorry, liberals. Some people aren't like you. They're smarter. Sarah Palin is one of them.

And the voters--including those who actually are liberals themselves--are also smarter than liberals think they are. If anything about the present election is more aggravating than the media-bashing of Sarah Palin, it is the persistence of the media in attempting to coerce us into voting for Obama. It's offensive and disturbing. It's not just about electing Obama; it symptomatizes a lack of faith in the voters, and therefore a lack of faith in democracy. We who think for ourselves had better show our protectors what thinking people can do. Casting a vote for McCain and against Obama would be one step. Dropping subscriptions and turning off the news would also help--with the web, who needs the media any more? But there are other steps that may be taken after the election. The Postliberal will propose some. And if anybody has suggestions, please share.