Black Nephews vs. Black Daddies

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine carried an article "Data You Can Believe In" (Jim Rutenberg, 6/23/13) that gushes about how a gaggle of young number crunchers were responsible for identifying Obama's wavering supporters in the 2012 campaign, then targeting torrents of media messages to these waverers with high precision and minimum cost, thereby ensuring Governor's Romney's defeat. 

Remembering Dr. King

An academic prodigy who entered Morehouse College in 1944 when he was 15 years old, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not just a man of great wisdom, but a man whose mastery of the written and spoken word enabled him to share his wisdom in a manner that made his sharing one of the most unforgettable experiences of our lives. Although his sonorous "I Have a Dream" speech contains his most famous words, as a Neoskeptic I have always been more impressed by the quiet brilliance of his carefully reasoned "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" introduced below. 

Neoskeptics -- Our Platform

Way back in the 1960s, there was a left-leaning reporter/analyst named I.F. Stone who edited an incisive little newsletter that criticized government policies but only used data from sources available to the public. No secret sources. No "Deep Throats." Today, I cannot recall a single policy that Stone railed for or against, but I have not forgotten the subtext of everything he wrote, i.e., that things were seldom what they seemed to be.

The 1970s saw the rise to prominence of the Neoconservatives -- Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, James Q. Wilson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, etc. -- via their highly respected journal "The Public Interest." Although I remember their positions on many issues, I remain far more impressed by their rigorous use of publicly available data to support their skeptical positions. To be sure, their conservatism energized their efforts to ferret out weakness in the reigning dogmas of the Liberal Establishment that had dominated American government since the 1930s; nevertheless it was their data, not their motivating ideology that persuaded me that they had succeeded in identifying unintended negative consequences of the well-intended programs of the Great Society and its War on Poverty. Indeed, the subtext of much of what they wrote was similar to Stone's -- things are seldom as simple as they seem to be.

By the mid-to-late 1980's, the data-driven Neoconservatives were succeeded by the data-free "Neocons" as policy analysis gave way to abbreviated polemics. Neoconservatives had expressed skeptcism as outsiders about the liberal policies of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations. But under Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush, the Neocons were the government. Whereas the data-driven Neoconservatives challenged the federal government's capacity to stimulate economic development in our nation's inner cities, the data-free Neocons -- such as William Kristol (son of Irving Kristol) -- had no doubts that the U.S. government could not only democratize the entire Middle East; it could do so at little or no cost to U.S. taxpayers ... Thus began the "forever wars".

My fellow skeptics,  I say it's time for us to take back our "Neo." Skepticism is neither conservative nor liberal; skepticism questions all power because we skeptics know deep in our bones that things are seldom as simple as they appear to be, no matter who is in power. And I suggest that what distinguishes "neoskepticism" from traditional skepticism is our commitment to basing our policy critiques on data from public sources that can be freely shared with other neoskeptics. ... :-)

Roy L. Beasley, PhD

Editor