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A Little-Noticed Exchange at the Gruber Hearing
The recent grilling of Professor Jonathan Gruber included a remarkable, 20-second exchange (which occurs at the 2:54:00 mark of this video) between Gruber and Chairman Darrell Issa:
Issa: When you made these repeated comments, these glib inappropriate comments, in an intellectual community with lots of like-minded people, did anybody come up to you and tell you that what you were saying was inappropriate?
Gruber: Not that I can recall. No.
Issa: I guess what you said was popular in that community.
Much focus has been on Gruber’s arrogance and his assertions that American voters are “stupid.” In the above exchange I believe that Issa was referring to this. But I suspect that Issa was also referring to something else: Gruber’s predilection to tell noble lies. That is, for instance, Gruber has admitted that he and others tried to disguise tax aspects of ObamaCare and that they also tried to hide the fact that the law would transfer money from healthy people to sick people. As he explained, “I wish… that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”
In a recent book I discuss the use of race in admissions at UCLA (thus violating the California Constitution). But another focus of the book is a more general problem: the pervasive dishonesty among university professors. As I note:
Published in GeneralThat’s the main reason I wrote this book—to expose the disregard for truth that I see slowly becoming a habit among university professors and administrators.
One hundred years from now, I believe historians will marvel at how crazy things currently are in academia—how such smart people can have such a massive disregard for the truth. I believe that such historians will look upon this era approximately the way we present-day Americans look upon the accusers during the Salem witch trials or slave owners during the early American republic. Just as we ask “How could they be so irrational?” or “How could they be so cruel?”, future historians will ask of present-day professors and university administrators, “How could they be so casual with the truth?”.
While I’ve spent 150 or so pages writing about race and admissions at UCLA, I really don’t have much interest in the topic….
Mr. Kestrel: Dr. Gruber, at any time in any of these groups did anyone jump up and say – NO!, Wait! We can’t lie like this to the American People.
Dr. Gruber: No. … Not that I remember.
Gruber made those remarks in those circles precisely because his listeners share an identical mindset. Habits of caricature and contempt are cherished indicators of status in some circles. These are the same great minds who think government stimulus spending has giant multipliers and that Putin and ISIS can be managed with “smart” diplomacy. They don’t believe in any tradition religions but did believe in peak oil, overpopulation and still believe in catastrophic man-made climate change. They live stable family lives but endorse and enforce every anti-family policy and ideology ever inflicted. They know people who have clerked for Federal judges but almost nobody who served in the military or the police.
Our national elite sucks. There needs to be a revolution in academia, the possibility of which is the only silver lining in the student debt crisis.
What Gruber said is revealing and disturbing, but I really thnk it’s more disturbing that Congress feels that they have the right to call him up to testify and hang him out to dry. Congress is the reason the ACA is law, not Gruber. He may have understood the law more than the average Congressman, but the law is what it is and if they didn’t understand it then they only have themselves to blame.
When you say this, remember to point out that the ACA had no Republican votes.
Fallacy of composition. Saying “Congress passed the law” is using Congress as a term of art. No Republican voted for the steaming heap of hallucinatory, duplicitous Progressivism, and they have every right, personally and as our representatives, to hang out to dry, rake over the coals, or kick in the butt J Gruber et al.
Unfortunately, it will likely only raise him in the esteem of his academic colleagues and harm him nowhere.
These kinds of hearings make for fine theater, but fine theater is getting to be pretty thin gruel for those of us hungry for policy change. I realize that government policy is not the concern of this post; but if the ACA stands in spite of what has now been revealed, the toxic influence of leftist Ivy League intellectuals on government policy will continue unabated.
No matter the mountain of evidence history provides, good-hearted intellectuals will always have difficulty imagining how sophistication and evil can harmonize… while good-hearted grunts wonder how their intellectual leaders can be so stupid.
When truth is not merely missed or subdued but flipped entirely, regularly on its head — so that evils become virtues, villains become heroes, lies become dogma, and noble traditions become anathema — that is not an accident. That’s a plan.
The fools who follow them might be mistaken, but liberal leaders are unquestionably corrupt and malicious.
This is rather an important point and I’m glad you made it, because I’d been so enjoying the spectacle as to miss the obvious. This is the obvious. And now that I think about it, it is also the outrageous. You are right.
I was so enjoying the entertainment of Gruber’s public humiliation that I overlooked this very obvious and very important point. Why does our Congress feel free to bully him? He said something stupid (or perhaps not stupid at all, just remarkably revealing). I believe we call that “His right.” As in, “to say whatever the hell he pleases, however stupid, offensive, arrogant, or self-destructive.” They passed the law.
A long time ago, can’t find the post now, I asked whether anyone had ever found that someone on Ricochet had succeeded in completely changing his or her mind about anything, ever.
You just did. I read that and instantly realized that I had been wrong, and you were right. 100 percent change of mind. One comment.
What the article misses is that Liberalism is built on lies. I know that makes me sound like a crank. And it only dawned on me over a period of time. But once you see it, you see it everywhere:
1. Superbowl Sunday is the highest domestic violence day in the year. Untrue. Based on a wholly fabricated article.
2. Vouchers don’t improve children’s performance in school. Untrue.
3. Rape is an epidemic on college campuses. A fabrication.
Whenever you hear a Liberal argument, you know it is false. Most of us are busy with other things and have neither the time nor the interest to pursue all the Liberal untruths. But if you have an assignment that relates to a Liberal policy or fact, you have the advantage going in of knowing it is a lie and just documenting that fact.
The professoriate has to embrace this tissue of lies because they are all Libs but reality is conservative. Gruber is a classic case. He lied about his lies, which takes things to a higher power (mathematically) but the overall point is that he was advancing a policy that was a lie. That is Liberalism.
The Internet is knocking on the door of higher education. It has not yet found its way in to the mainstream, but it is only a matter of time. The lies that the professoriate is teaching will be a significant factor in the collapse of higher education as it is now structured.
The ‘Gruberist’ attitude on most US campuses is likely partly due to what Prof. Thomas Sowell has noted, and I qoute roughly-When you’ve taken Advanced Placement courses in high school, and then attended an elite university, it creates a sort of hubris, whereby you think you are so clever that you can run people’s lives for them.
Another factor is likely Dennis Prager’s argument that the most dynamic ‘religion’ in America for the past century has been leftism, i.e., the embrace of left-wing politics as religion. Fidelity to this religion justifies lying, arrogance and contempt by its practicioners.
I’m all for someone saying whatever they want. I’m also all for calling someone out who lied and got paid with tax dollars to do so.
It’s not just him speaking his mind. He was advocating, lobbying for this law. Yes, Congress passed the law. He made millions from advocating for it, he visited the White House 20 times, etc. I speak my mind but don’t get paid for it by my fellow citizens, and I’m still waiting, patiently, for my WH invitation to show up so I can tell Barry, et al, what I really think of their smug lunacies.
Bob W says:
“What Gruber said is revealing and disturbing, but I really thnk it’s more disturbing that Congress feels that they have the right to call him up to testify and hang him out to dry. Congress is the reason the ACA is law, not Gruber. He may have understood the law more than the average Congressman, but the law is what it is and if they didn’t understand it then they only have themselves to blame.”
True for those who voted for it. Since no Republicans did, and many were trying to warn us of its contents, the fault lies on the Democrat side of the aisle. And this is one of the reasons for the hearings. The other is to highlight that the law required willful mendacity to pass.
This is an “I told you so.” to the voters.
“Dr. Gruber, would it have had an effect on you?”
Gruber’s “brilliant formula” is a bunch of crap. Not only dose it not perform as promised, but it cannot perform as promised.
Both Romney and Obama funneled large sums of tax payer money to this clever crook.
In 2012 the voters were faced with a choice between these two arrogant, self serving narcissists.
I agree with Gruber, the voters are stupid for putting up with this two party farce and buying the lie that they really are being given a democratic choice.
Trust me, there were Republicans that would have voted for it. The only reason there were no Republican votes is because of the massive arm-twisting done by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. Republicans were threatened with reprisals that would have made their lives hell had they voted for the ACA.
I suspect some are glad they didn’t vote for it now but they would have then if they could have safely.
Pilli: #16 “Trust me, there were Republicans that would have voted for it. The only reason there were no Republican votes is because of the massive arm-twisting done by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. Republicans were threatened with reprisals that would have made their lives hell had they voted for the ACA.”
I put a like on Pilli’s comments because Pilli is exactly right. McConnell and Boehner would have made the Quislings lives hellish if they had capitulated. In this case, and I think in a great many other cases, McConnell and Boehner demonstrated leadership.
I am not sure I know quite the best way to handle the myriad difficulties that the incoming Republican-majority congress will face, but I suspect that these two will work to bring about the best result without making the Republicans look like utter fools, and may make Barry and the Dems look bad in the process – noting that I don’t believe that Pelosi and Reed will be nearly as successful in keeping the Democrats in line.
Maybe, just maybe, we can get enough votes to override a presidential veto on Barrycare. Wouldn’t that be something?
Here are some other people who would have chuckled knowingly at his comments about the people’s stupidity, in fact who would have fallen out of their chairs laughing: Carl Rove, John Boehner, Mitch McConnel, John McCain…, the list goes on.
It has occurred to me as I re-read Gruber’s comments that both he and his critics are perhaps a bit mistaken. Gruber shows disrespect or condescension toward the American public – the voters as they’ve been referred to in the comments. He has stated that the drafters of the ACA had to conceal and obfuscate the truth about the law in order to get it passed through Congress – and he castigates the intelligence of the American public for not being perceptive enough to figure out the truth about the ACA. But the public never voted for the ACA; the “voters” in this instance were the Democrats who passed the legislation. The American public was certainly lied to, but it was never allowed to vote on the legislation – much less review or discuss it before voting. So, to the extent that Gruber and his fellow drafters concealed or obfuscated, they did it in order to fool Congress (this ties in perfectly with Nancy Pelosi’s comment that “we have to pass it to learn what’s in it.”). The Democrats either didn’t know (or didn’t want to know) what was in the ACA, or they knew and voted for it anyway! The Republicans did know – or at least suspected – what was in the legislation and uniformly voted against it. So really, the only fools or idiots were the Democrats who voted for the ACA. They were the ones whom Gruber found so easy to fool; they were the only ones who voted for the ACA – not the American public. Now it’s true that by getting the ACA through Congress, Gruber “put one over” on the American public – but not because the public was stupid!
Indeed. What people say is certainly affected by who their audience is. You wrote a book about measuring media bias. Why isn’t composition of the audience/readership considered a reliable metric for bias? People angry about how something is slanted either tend to drop out of an audience (when the bias displayed is typical of the publication), or if the bias displayed runs counter to expectations, then a significant portion of the audience will complain and the publication will feel a need to placate them.
I predict this will never happen. This is no different in nature to how today’s Left simply ignoring how–before WWII–American Leftists looked up to European Fascists as admirable pioneers. (See Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascists for the details.)
Similarly, this mendacity will either go down the memory hole or be transmogrified into some uplifting narrative that is favorable to the Left.
As the late Christopher Hitchens pointed out, the problem with notion of “speaking truth to power” is that usually power already knows perfectly well what the truth is.
There are a lot of Dems involved. I expect that their handle on the ACA ranged from knowing what they were voting for to not caring about the details because the ACA was a massive increase in govt power that–similarly to the Great Society–would never be rolled back once it had put down its roots.
Gruber’s political smokescreen was to keep the unwashed rubes from getting wise before the deed was done.
Interesting interpretation–I mean that–but somehow suspect Gruber wasn’t intending whatsoever to make such a fine distinction, even if half-consciously. Just as “gut tells me” kind of thing …