The Right Honourable Moynihan

[Geee]

Free Beacon:

Intellectuals in public life stand on unsteady footing. Their employers—all of us—are suspicious, and often rightly so. Knowledge can breed overconfidence, imprudence, aloofness, and moral myopia. Yet there are examples of those possessing wisdom that is both contemplative and practical, who can win political success and become a boon to their country. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one. Edmund Burke was another.

 

With this comparison in mind, Greg Weiner set out to write his treatment of Moynihan’s political thought, American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Weiner, a professor of political theory at Assumption College and a one-time aide to Senator Bob Kerrey, sees Burke less as a direct influence upon Moynihan—Moynihan rarely quoted the great Anglo-Irish politician and writer—and more as a lens through which to examine him. Neither was a systematic thinker, and so an explanation of their mutual principles can never be entirely precise. But however imprecise that exercise must be, the ideas that Burke and Moynihan shared were profound.

 

Moynihan deserves Weiner’s diligent study and, to some extent, the comparison to Burke. Moynihan’s career and its accomplishments are sui generis. A Navy veteran and a sociology Ph.D., he was assistant secretary of labor under both Kennedy and Johnson, where he worked on what would become the War on Poverty. The result of this work was a 1965 study entitled The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, the first real account of the breakdown of the black family and its consequences. For this sympathetic paper he was accused of victim blaming. Shuttling back and forth between academic and government appointments, Moynihan served Nixon as an advisor on urban problems and Ford as ambassador to the United Nations. In 1976, he defeated Senator James Buckley, and until 2001 he represented New York in the U.S. Senate, where he was an idiosyncratic liberal anti-poverty crusader, a foreign-policy internationalist, and an eloquent gadfly.

[Valin]

The danger in such a method is always that the model on which these predictions are based might be slightly, but devastatingly incomplete. There might be an important variable one cannot measure or there might be a meaningful cause that is so counterintuitive one forgets to even measure for it. Moynihan criticized this mode of social science in 1970’s Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding:

Social science is at its weakest, at its worst, when it offers theories of individual or collective behavior which raise the possibility, by controlling certain inputs, of bringing about mass behavioral change. No such knowledge now exists…. [instead,] the role of social science lies not in the formulation of social policy, but in the measurement of results. The great questions of government have to do not with what will work, but with what does work.

Instead of basing his predictions on simulacrums, Moynihan sought to analyze the past, to try to comprehend reality, and to figure out what went wrong. Bit by bit, mistakes might be corrected and experiments might prove partial successes. Anything grander was a delusion.

Too confident in modern social science and too dismissive of religious commitments, today’s Democrats won’t follow Moynihan’s lead any time soon. Republicans are better positioned to be the party of vigorous, limited reform that aims to encourage the space between the individual and the state to flourish—and they have a presidential primary season coming up. For politicians looking to the past for guidance, Greg Weiner’s Burkean Moynihan has much to teach.

 

 

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Moynihan was a throwback to an earlier time.