Shankar Vedantam has
an interesting discussion of Bush's tendency to behave like King Lear -- to
surround himself with only those who will agree with him and tell him that he's brilliant. Here's a taste:
Social psychologists have long studied what happens to groups that exclude contrarian viewpoints, and in the 1970s Irving Janis first coined the term "groupthink" to describe the phenomenon. Two decades later, Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior and political science at the University of California at Berkeley, analyzed decisions around crucial moments in history, such as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, John F. Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion, Richard Nixon's efforts to cover up Watergate, and Lyndon Johnson's escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
Tetlock found that leaders who encouraged dissent were more likely to make the right calls compared with those who discouraged dissent. But he found that leaders who welcomed contrary points of view were not guaranteed success -- Jimmy Carter's botched attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran being one example.
Overconfidence is a central problem for policymakers, Tetlock said. Political experts are more confident about their predictions than their track records (and results) warrant.
Tetlock said liberals might be more comfortable than conservatives with the idea of systematically encouraging dissent, but presidential scholar Fred I. Greenstein said his study of chief executives over the past half century showed that the man who best exemplified the encourage-conflicting-views approach was Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Greenstein, the co-author of "How Presidents Test Reality," credited Eisenhower's approach with keeping the United States out of Indochina in the mid-1950s, noting that Democratic presidents pursued the opposite style of decision making a decade later in Vietnam.
"It was the antithesis of cherry-picking points of view," he said of Eisenhower's technique, which included not only finding people who disagreed with the president but also helping them perfect their arguments. "They often had contrasting points of view in parallel columns. They would be for and against encouraging a coup in Guatemala, or engaging in a missile program. The idea was to institutionalize disagreement."
Greenstein said history would have to rank how Bush compares with other presidents in aversion to dissent, but said there is little doubt Bush has hurt himself by shutting out people who disagree with him -- as King Lear also did.
"Shakespeare is one of our great social scientists," Greenstein said.
There is another reason the Lear analogy may be particularly apposite. By the end of the play, with death and disaster all around, Shakespeare makes sure you understand that King Lear's tragedy was not just his own.Doing agency and appellate law, I often see lawyers who "drink their own kool-aid" -- who let themselves get convinced by their own arguments to the point where they lose their effectiveness. One of the smartest lawyers I know is a guy who is always saying, "Well, what the other side will probably argue is . . . . " It's incredibly helpful to have someone like that in your group. You've got to not only think of what the other side will say in response to your argument, you've got to put yourself in their shoes and see why, from their point of view, their argument is correct. One of the least effective lawyers I know is a guy who is just determined that his arguments are right and that the agency or court will, of course, be swayed by them. He fails to anticipate the other side's arguments (thereby assuring that he'll fail to answer them) because he's sure that they'll fall prostrate at the brilliance of his arguments. Bush thought that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators. Flowers. Candy. George Bush Boulevard.
This administration has no Cordelia, not even the press which has, at least in the past, played that role for other presidents even when their kitchen cabinets failed to do so. Perhaps the next real question is
whether Bush has a Fool -- perhaps, in this case, that's the role the press will play. The Bush junta, where it's explicit that, "You're either for us or you're for the terrorists," has been extremely ineffective in everything except looting the U.S. Treasury. It's sad.
