Why it doesn't pay for pols or pundits to be right

Noted pinhead Francis Fukuyama

"Our system actively promotes people who will lie in the right way without even having to be told to and actively gets rid of anyone who is not a useful idiot – by which I mean anyone who does not tell the lies useful to the powers that be."

-- Ian Welsh (see below)

by Ken

I don't know what prompted this sudden burst of truth-telling by our friend Ian Welsh toward right-wing halfwit Francis Fukuyuma. Is it possible that while I wasn't paying attention, someone was caught taking the pinhead seriously?

Which doesn't mean that I in any way disagree with what Ian has to say about Francis the Writing Mule. And the passage he dredges up, which was indeed once much quoted, apparently noncomically, always struck me as preposterous beyond imagining, and I don't see that there should be any statute of limitations on numbskullery of this dimension. Nevertheless, I bring it up not for the Francis-bashing per se, but for the conclusion to which it leads him to.

It provides a working answer to such imponderable mysteries as:

* How is it that the pols and pundits who were wrongest about the grounds and sensibleness of the invasion of Iraq have almost without exception been rewarded while those who were rightest have almost without exception been punished?

* How does it happen that the economists who were tracking the housing bubble and warning about the dangers of resulting economy-wide implosion have remained voices crying in the wilderness while the stooges who were looking the other way or even deriding the nervous Nellies are still regarded as economic sages? (To put it another way: Why hasn't the Economics Department of the University of Chicago been mission-redirected to flower arranging? Why don't people burst out in hysterics at mention of "Chicago economist"?)

* And in general, why is there so often no reward for pols and pundits who are right and no punishment for those who are wrong?

Just listen.

Sewage

2012 FEBRUARY 20

by Ian Welsh

Why is Francis Fukuyama considered an intellectual? Why is he considered an intellectual worth of praise, his opinion important?

I ask this not because I don’t know the answer, I do, and I’ll get to it, but because so many people seem to believe he is an intellectual.

Let me quote Francis Fukuyama himself, from “The End of History” for no words I could write could condemn him as well as his own:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Have more stupid words every been written? Probably, but these are certainly in contention. The stupidity was evident at the time (I heard the title, in my twenties, and knew immediately the author was a high functioning liar or a high functioning moron), and the piece should have been published only as a way of letting him drive a stake through his own heart, at which point he would slink of into well deserved obscurity, being sure to never show his face in learned society ever again, to spare himself the titters, coughs and awkward “oh, umm, hello”s.

Our system actively promotes people who will lie in the right way without even having to be told to and actively gets rid of anyone who is not a useful idiot – by which I mean anyone who does not tell the lies useful to the powers that be. (Well, they can tell the occasional truth, on the rare occasion when it is useful.)

Still, Fukuyama at least made it look good. The newer generation, on both “left” and right barely even goes through the motions.

(Just to be clear, the "conclusion" I was referring to wasn't this last part, which is interesting but not quite so cosmic. It's the next-to-last part.)

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