Headlines from The Economist aren’t normally the sort to make you spit out your coffee, but every once in a while they still manage to surprise me with a masterpiece of political absurdity that stands in sharp contrast to their well-sourced (if nevertheless biased) economics and foreign policy coverage. This week’s edition opens with the amazing claim that Mitt Romney has, throughout his primary campaign, been pandering not only to the far right, but to the left as well.
If this left you scratching your head and wondering if perhaps you had blacked out on Ambien for a couple of weeks and missed the part where the “severely conservative” plutocrat showed up at an Occupy camp with a bongo drum, you’re not alone. But no: The Economist claims, with what I can only assume is a straight face, that Romney has been pandering to the left by criticizing China for alleged currency manipulation.
The idea that bashing China represents a pander to the left is so ludicrous on its face that one does not know where to start refuting it. Perhaps with the simple fact that China has been considered an enemy by the American right wing ever since it became Communist China and, as a country that is still nominally Communist and made up of of differently-colored people speaking a strange-sounding language, has remained an especially convenient foreign bogeyman since the collapse of the USSR. So I ask you, who is Romney’s China-bashing more likely designed to appeal to: the people at Occupy Wall Street (I thought leftists were supposed to be the “blame America first” crowd?) or the ones at the Republican primary debates who booed Jon Huntsman for speaking Mandarin and called him the Manchurian Candidate? I suppose if you’re into cocktail-napkin political theories you can yell that “the left” hates free trade and Romney’s China policy would harm free trade and therefore Romney is a leftist, Q.E.D. Except that Romney’s entire argument is based on the notion that China is violating the free trade rules of the WTO and IMF, which we all know leftists love.
The question here isn’t the soundness of Romney’s trade policy, which the article nevertheless does a pretty good job of shooting down. The question is why The Economist feels the need to stretch distort utterly disregard the truth in their framing of the issue. And the obvious answer is that this is a particularly egregious example of the centrist fallacy which holds that the greatest mark of Serious Political Wisdom is to assign equal blame to both sides of a political divide so as not to appear “partisan”, regardless of the logical merits of either side’s argument, or in this case, even accurate characterization of their positions. This is particularly amusing in the case of The Economist, which devotes the bulk of its coverage to nations where universal healthcare and the urgent threat posed by climate change are part of the centrist consensus, and then, like a liberal college kid visiting his redneck relatives for Thanksgiving, strains to appear balanced and find nice things to say about a party that thinks government is socialism and isn’t sure whether global warming is an Illuminati hoax or is caused by gay marriage. Perhaps Mitt Romney isn’t the only one who should stop swerving wildly for the sake of political posturing.
