New York Times Columnist: U.S. Government Is ‘most successful organization in modern history’

Remember that number-cruncher extraordinnaire

Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight
blog for The New York Times became the go-to spot for
electoral prediction and numerical analysis in 2012? Well, Silver
has since moved on to his own broader venture (still called
FiveThirtyEight), leaving
the
Old Gray Lady lagging in the fashionable (if
scarequote-worthy) “data-driven
journalism” space. The paper
plugged that gap this spring with a new mini-pod called
“The Upshot,” edited
by economics columnist David Leonhardt.

Some of us have been skeptical
about the rise in
fact-checking, “explanatory” journalism, arguing that it

too often attempts to bathe a solidly
statist bias in the holy waters of above-it-all empiricism.
As if to live out that theory, here are the first two paragraphs of
a
David Leonhardt Upshot piece today:

If you wanted to bestow the grandiose title of “most successful
organization in modern history,” you would struggle to find a more
obviously worthy nominee than the federal government of the United
States.

In its earliest stirrings, it established a lasting and
influential democracy. Since then, it has helped defeat
totalitarianism (more than once), established the world’s currency
of choice, sent men to the moon, built the Internet, nurtured the
world’s largest economy, financed medical research that saved
millions of lives and welcomed eager immigrants from around the
world.

This is a telltale exercise in
scoreboard-pointing, responsibility-assumption, and blurry
timelines. For example, if a measurable chunk of the success of the
United States is due to the revolutionary, limited-government
architecture of the Constitution, which provided a framework
protecting the non-governmental pursuit of happiness (including
commerce), then that design victory technically belongs not to the
current U.S. government, but to its immediate precursor, no? If the
majority of America’s globe-topping GDP–which created the
conditions for the dollar becoming a reserve currency–emanates from
the private sector, is it numerically sensical to assign primary
responsibility to the much less productive sector that taxes and
regulates the Apple Computers of the world? And though the raw
numbers may be higher today, the continent was more legally
welcoming to immigrants under British, French, and Spanish rule
than it has been over the past century under the Yanks.

Then there are the U.S. government’s many egregious failures,
ranging from slavery to colonialism to internment to pointless war
to mass incarceration. In fairness, Leonhardt’s column is actually
about government screw-uppery and the need to correct it;
the we’re-number-one stuff is more of a sweetener to make
the medicine go down easier:

[P]rogressives in particular will need to grapple with these
failures if they want to persuade Americans to support an active
government.

The fact that such a sentence still needs
to be written 45 years after Charles Peters
founded an entire public-policy journalism
genre around the notion of intellectually rigorous, sacred
cow-slaying policy analysis from the left, speaks volumes about how
far the Democratic/media center of gravity has
drifted. As I wrote in a May 2013 critique
of the new New Republic,

An entire valuable if flawed era in American journalism and
liberalism has indeed come to a close. The reformist urge to
cross-examine Democratic policy ideas has fizzled out precisely at
the time when those ideas are both ascendant and as questionable as
ever. Progressivism has reverted to a form that would have been
recognizable to Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann when they
founded The New Republic a century ago: an
intellectual collaborator in the “responsible” exercise of state
power.

If your starting point is that the U.S. government is the most
successful organization in modern history, there are many possible
adjectives to describe your journalism. “Data-driven” isn’t one of
them.

Hat tip: Rowland
Stebbins.