In defense of Cass Sunstein

Cass Sunstein, a lawyer and former professor at The University of Chicago Law School, has been appointed by his friend Barack Obama to be the new director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a heretofore obscure job that Sunstein, one of the nation's leading public intellectuals, will no doubt make into a think tank influencing the full regulatory sweep of the Obama Administration. In a prolific career, Sunstein has ranged far beyond the law, writing books on FDR's fostering of new economic rights, the influence digital technology is having on democracy, and the roots of radical extremism. At the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Chicago in 2007, I heard Sunstein give a brilliant talk on the dynamics of group polarization (the kind of thing sociologists would study) and its role in creating terrorists. Sunstein's mind is supple and his writing is very accessible, two traits that the new president no doubt finds appealing.

On Hullabaloo yesterday (one of the major political blogs on the left, http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/), digby tore into Sunstein after confessing that she knew little about his work. Mischaracterizing it based on comments from other bloggers, she punished him for, among other things, suggesting that regulatory control should shift to the extent possible from coercive measures to incentives, and claimed that this meant it might as well be coming from the usual free market-worshipping conservative playbook. So much for trying to ascertain where a writer or thinker is actually situated along a spectrum of views from left to right (to the extent that that spectrum is still descriptively useful). For digby, if Sunstein is willing to think about modifying traditional regulatory schemes in order to coax markets toward outcomes consistent with national policy, rather than simply order them to comply, it means he's a right-winger in disguise. Apparently she's not willing to let Obama's people explore any fresh policy alternatives if they are not branded and vetted as issuing from the playbook on the other side of the ideological spectrum, which is presumably the one that worships command economies and state dictation of commercial life.

For another view of Cass Sunstein, it's useful to consider his ideas about political extremism in the context of the search -- in which Western foreign affairs ministries and law enforcement agencies are engaged -- for new long-term policies that might help curb terrorism, inasmuch as existing policies, on which enormous sums have been spent in recent years and which have required vast deployment of military forces, don't seem to have discouraged terrorist networks from replenishing their ranks. Sunstein has written a bracing book ("Going to Extremes") on one dimension of the subject: how radical extremism is incubated. Bringing behavioral psychology and political sociology to his analysis, Sunstein offers crucial support to the fundamental progressive understanding that radical groups hijack legitimate political grievances and that unless those who have those grievances see that extreme violence is likely to hurt and not help their causes, and that there are alternative ways to fight for their rights, there will continue to be a market for that violence. Clearly, Sunstein is a thinker so much more adept than most of the so-called conservative intellectuals that his appointment signifies that Obama wants not only to govern differently, he wants to extinguish the hold of the conservative paradigm on the political class.

Admittedly, Sunstein is not a predictable, programmatically minded social democrat, so if you deplore those who believe that effective government need not be "bigger government" -- which is to say, if you agree with conservatives that the debate about government should be about its size rather than its efficacy -- you won't be able to see how useful Sunstein's work is, in the struggle to rebuild a national consensus about the importance of public action, public resources, public regulation and public well-being. No new president, merely by being elected, can suddenly announce a new political order that everyone will happily embrace. Part of creating a new order involves changing the way people think. And that requires dismantling the default beliefs of conservatives, which have become the default beliefs of the political class. Conservatives have been "drugging the public mind" (a great phrase of Lincoln's, about Southern slave-holders' defense of states' rights) for two generations now. Sunstein has been a great ally in undermining the premises of their ideas.