The Intentionality of Coalitions

They're discussing Jon Chait's new book, The Big Con, over at the TPM Cafe book club. Ross Douthat has the first response:

The most attention-catching aspect of Chait's thesis - his argument, restated in his first post, that the best way to understand the contemporary conservative movement is by treating it as a conspiracy to practice class warfare on behalf of the rich - strikes me as little better than name-calling, and undercuts the more subtle political analysis that he practices elsewhere in the book. I don't want to step on anything Megan McArdle might say in her contributions to this discussion, but I think her old post on why, in most cases, people actually believe what they say they believe and should be engaged on those terms applies in spades here.

If Douthat's description of Chait's argument is correct, though, his objections miss the point. If a political movement is functionally equivalent to a conspiracy to practice some covert goal, it makes sense to treat it as such even if no individual members of the coalition are actually conspiring. From the way I read Chait's argument, it's not necessary that there be an actual conspiracy. Chait's evidence of "bad faith" is that any time there is a conflict between upward income redistribution and some other conservative policy goal, tax cuts for the rich win. If that's the case, the movement is functioning like a conspiracy, even if nobody is actually lying.

The idea is hard to wrap your mind around - just ask John Searle. But it's perfectly possible when decision-making power isn't vested in a single individual. Then, the honest reasons that individual people give for their preferences don't explain the behavior of the group. Imagine a coalition comprised of the following elements:

• A group of prominent opinion leaders arguing that, on balance, raising speeding limits is a good idea in some circumstances.
  
• A group of crazy/ignorant but still honest people arguing that raising speed limits always reduces the number of accidents.
  
• A group of wealthy sports-car owners who don't write op-eds, but feel that they have a moral right to drive as fast as they can, and only vote for and give money to candidates who support that right.
  
• A group of potential politicians representing the range of possible policy preferences. They are utterly incorruptible and will not change their a priori policy stances in exchange for votes or campaign cash, but they don't feel bad about being deliberately vague on the campaign trail to broaden their coalitions.
  

Under the right (not terribly rare) circumstances, this coalition will be functionally equivalent to a massive conspiracy with the explicit goal of always raising speed limits every time, and deliberately lying about the reasons why, even if all the individual actors always tell the truth.

The question in an individual case is whether it matters if the participants are liars, or if the argument gets its moral/logical force from somewhere else. Here Chait's case gets complicated, because I think his primary thesis is that the party functions as a conspiracy whether or not most participants are honest, but that he also wants to call out certain individuals as liars in a kind of rhetorical going-for-two. This can make his main case appear to rest on bad faith on the other side, even if it doesn't necessarily.