Scanning the New Yorker I located this old article about Pat Moynihan and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I found this unrelated passage interesting because it was just the kind of thing that made Moynihan's so confusing.
"Let me tell you a story about the difference between academe and politics," Moynihan said. "In 1966, my friend Jim Coleman did this enormous study that found there was very little relationship between school funding and school outputs. You could spend more money, and the students wouldn't do any better. What mattered was family. I got some money from a foundation for a conference, and people came from all around—statisticians, economists, the lot of them—and we all felt that we learned something important. Well, when his study got out to the political world, they tried to drum Jim out of the profession. They accused him of being a tool of conservatives who were trying to cut social spending. He was just trying to see the world as it was. Hannah Arendt had it right. She said one of the great tactical advantages of the totalitarian élites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."
Moynihan would constantly act as critic to the Democratic line and then vote in tow with the party. Here he states plainly that more funding doesn't mean better education, and the he would go and vote for more funding. Why are so many natural conservatives afraid to be conservatives?
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