Legislators Have to be Evaluated in Relative, Not Absolute, Terms

One defense of that ridiculous Gillibrand hatchet job is to argue that it shows that Gillibrand is acting out of “impure motives.” Not only is this transaparently silly — it amounts to criticizing a politicians for doing politics, and no prominent politician acts entirely out of “pure motives” — note the implicit assumption in the “conversion” narrative that the Gillibrand who represented NY-20 is the “real” Gillibrand and the one who has held statewide office is “impure.” Given that Gillibrand 1)is far more liberal than you need to be to win statewide office in New York and 2)was well to the left of her House district there is less than no basis for this assumption. But, of course, you don’t write or defend an article that leans heavily on Gillibrand’s college internships and omits her support for single payer running in a red House district in 2006 because you’re trying to honestly assess her record — this is inept clearing-the-field-for-Bernie propaganda, nothing more.

But anyway, let us head in a more productive direction and engage with one of our most valuable commenters instead:

I’m gonna be honest: I was careful to fact-check most of it, because Jacobin, but there was some shit in there from her time in the House that make me like Gillibrand much less.

I still basically like her but there’s some ugly shit in her record and I’m not very sympathetic to “it was a conservative district.”

The big question is… okay. You don’t like Gillibrand because you think she’s vulnerable to pressure in ways you don’t care for and/or because you think her positions are insincerely held and thus, will be abandoned if it proves convenient for her to do so or difficult for her enact desirable policy. Fine. I can accept that as well.

The first problem here we’ve already discussed: since Gillibrand has always been to the left of whatever jurisdiction she’s represented, I have no idea what the basis for the assumption that the NY-20 Gillibrand is the “sincere” one and Senator Gillibrand is the phony is. I don’t think much of the whole enterprise of uncovering the “real motives” of legislators, but if you’re playing that game there’s much better evidence that the 2017 Gillibrand is the “real” one, not the 2007 one.

But there are bigger problems with the whole concept that politicians have to be evaluated in absolute rather than relative terms:

• One implicit assumption would be that Gillibrand had a moral obligation to run in NY-20 exactly as she would run in a statewide race, and if this means permanent Republican control of Congress (which it would!), so be it. This is very wrong, and indeed I don’t believe that Murc believes it.
• If we use absolute rather than contextual records to evaluate politicians going forward, it produces obviously absurd results. You would assume that Joe Lieberman or Andrew Cuomo would have governed to the left of Lyndon Johnson if they became president at the same time. You would have to join Matt Stoller in asserting that Mitt Romney might govern to the left of Obama rather than as the orthodox national Republican he obviously would have had he become president. Again, this is obviously wrong and I can’t believe Murc believes this.
• Another problem is that, if applied consistently, it would exclude a lot of potential talent from the presidential candidate pool. To me, the fact that Gillibrand was able to win as a pretty (although far from perfectly!) liberal candidate in exactly the kind of swing district Trump used to win the presidency is a significant — although far from dispositive — point in her favor. Evaluating politicians in absolute terms, conversely, suggests that you’d rather have a presidential candidate with a more orthodox record who won in a district a footstool would win if they ran on the Democratic line. Again, that makes no sense to me.

The record of politicians has to be evaluated carefully, in context. This is precisely what hatchet jobs asserting that Gillibrand is a closet reactionary who is a “suspect tribune for anti-Trump resistance” fail to do.

…I should clarify, since Murc thinks I’m being unfair, that there are two related but distinct fallacies here. One, which I agree 100% he avoids, but the Gillibrand hatchet job exemplifies, is…I need a catchier name, but let’s say the “arbitrary, cherrypicked, decontextualized dealbreaker” fallacy, takes individual issues and declares that they make a candidate unfit rather than making holistic comparisons to the viable alternatives. (Virtually all third party wankery in this country also requires this fallacy, and the “Cuomo over Warren” commenter would also be an example.) Murc is absolutely not guilty of this, as his comment indeed makes clear. The other fallacy is to compare positions taken by legislators in absolute terms rather than relevant to the political context in which they’re situated, and on that I stand my my argument here.