“When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?” That famous riposte was offered by John Maynard Keynes, the British intellectual who revolutionized economic thinking in the twentieth century, in response to the accusation that he was being inconsistent in his policy recommendations. There are all kinds of variations on Keynes’s insight, one of the simplest being that a person who recommends carrying an umbrella on a cloudy day is perfectly right to recommend leaving our umbrellas at home on a sunny day, but the overall point is that this ubiquitous adolescent retort—“But you used to say something different!”—is all too often a meaningless gotcha.
Vice President Kamala Harris is currently being accused of such inconsistency on a number of fronts, with the press—not only the right-wing media but the supposedly neutral press as well—zealously lobbing accusations of “flip-flopping” against her, with the idea being that Harris is somehow being sketchy or too-clever in her answers. This framing has become so automatic that a video clip from a recent “Meet the Press” segment was titled, “Pete Buttigieg defends Kamala Harris’ flip-flops on policy,” even though neither the interviewer nor Buttigieg said “flip-flop” even once during the 9-minute conversation.
The press has, in other words, moved past the “raising a question” part of its narrative to the lazy “everyone knows and dares not to challenge” the new conventional wisdom in attacking the Democratic nominee.
As I will explain here, those accusations against Harris are silly on a fundamental level. That is, they are not wrong in the narrowest sense of misrepresenting a fact as a lie, but they are meaningless in the sense that no one should care about those accusations at all.
In today’s Part One of this column, I will focus on the accusations of flip-flopping that the mainstream press has echoed and amplified regarding Kamala Harris’s policy stances. In Part Two tomorrow, I will explain that this is part of a broader misunderstanding about what even counts as an argument, a misunderstanding that gives an unearned free pass to Donald Trump and Republicans in general.
From Policy Discussions that Ignore Policy to Arguments with No Argumentative Content at All
Last week, in a two–part column here on Verdict, I noted that Republicans claim to want Donald Trump to “talk policy” but in fact would be distressed if he were ever to try to explain their proposed solutions to policy issues. They only want him to say inflammatory things about matters that people are already angry about (especially immigration and consumer prices) without even coming close to offering and defending anything resembling a policy agenda that could solve any of those problems.
As I noted in that column and in a follow-up column last Thursday on Dorf on Law, the mainstream press is more than willing to join Republicans to “define down” the very idea of policy discussion, moving from demanding that a politician offer a proposal, explain it, and then show how it would solve (or at least help to solve) the problem in question to being satisfied when Trump says without supporting details that he will simply make something “great” happen.
And that carries over from the policy realm to the simple inability of mainstream journalists and pundits even to recognize a bad argument for what it is—or sometimes that there is no argument on offer at all, just a blur of words that add up to nothing.
Is that bad for democracy? As I will argue—actually argue—yes it is.
The Flip-Flopping Accusation and Being True to One’s Values
Last month, in her first major interview after becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Harris was confronted with the accusations that she had changed her positions on various matters in the five years since her unsuccessful 2019 presidential run. Before exploring her key response, it will be helpful to understand what a true flip-flop is and is not.
In and around 2016, J.D. Vance said some scathing—and accurate—things about Donald Trump, one of the more memorable of them being that he (Vance) “go[es] back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole … or that he’s America’s Hitler.” Vance later said that he changed his mind about all of that because of Trump’s great presidency.
That explanation is beyond implausible, because Vance never in fact tried to defend with facts and logic the idea that Trump’s presidency was anything but a disaster. If anything, the people in 2016 who were hoping that Trump might grow up and become less erratic instead saw their last remaining hopes dashed. Even though there is nothing crazy about the idea that a person can change their mind—even by one hundred eighty degrees—after receiving new information, Vance’s explanation does not pass the laugh test. Vance’s sole purpose is to give himself greater power, and in that, he has not flip-flopped, which I suppose is a kind of minimal level of intellectual consistency.
This contrasts with former Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, who has changed her mind about Trump so many times that it is difficult to keep track of her blatantly contradictory statements. She is like Vance in caring only about her own political advancement, but she is simply not as good at it. Vance is no more admirable than Haley, because he still supports Trump, but he is trying to say something that might be true: I thought one thing, then things changed, and now my opinion has changed. He should not get a free pass for now supporting the end of American democracy, but while “fascist or fascist-enabler” is an accurate way to describe Vance, “flip-flopper” is not. Which one is worse?
So Republicans have no problem with people changing their minds when it suits them. The press loves to grab onto labels like “flip-flopper,” however, because they can present such an accusation as a neutral, nonpartisan assessment. “She did change her position, and I’m not saying that’s necessarily good or bad,” a reporter might take pains to say, “but it is true.” But of course, the implication is that “people don’t know what this candidate truly believes,” which makes it very much a negative judgment. And so the attacks on Harris continue.
The fact is that anyone who is paying attention knows more than enough about Harris to have a good sense of what she would do as President. She is a center-left Democrat who will surely disappoint progressives like me on more than one occasion. She is clear on abortion and reproductive rights, labor rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so on. Oh, and she is not Donald Trump. The idea that we do not yet “know her” because she has changed her mind about tactics (such as the best way to deal with border security) over the years is fatuous. This is a made-up story.
Yet the media pushes onward, apparently in a futile effort to parry Republicans’ attacks on the press, making a big deal out of the simple reality that Harris has updated her thinking over time. During the interview that I mentioned above, the interviewer pointed out that the now-Vice President had said in 2019 that she was against fracking, but now she no longer opposes it. Harris’s response was that her “values” have not changed. That was in fact a very good answer—the perfect answer, one might say—even though the interviewer and the post-interview spin from other reporters dismissed Harris’s reply as mere wordplay.
Why is Harris’s answer so strong? I can answer that question by referring to how I form my own views about policy stances. Throughout my career as an economist, I have opposed tax cuts for the rich. I do so because the evidence shows that the Republicans’ threadbare trickle-down story—that rich people will use their tax cuts to create jobs for everyone else, so the benefits will not stay at the top—has been thoroughly and repeatedly disproven by careful econometric analysis. Tax cuts for the rich benefit the rich, while everyone else does worse. And I oppose that.
But what if I were to become aware of a new kind of regressive tax policy that would indeed help the middle class and the poor by first helping the rich? Would I oppose that policy? Should I oppose it, to avoid being called a flip-flopper? Of course not. Like Keynes, I would say that a new situation calls for an honest appraisal of what to do next, even if it seems to be inconsistent with what I once said. Were that new situation to arise five years from now, five months from now, or five minutes from now would not matter.
The reason that I would feel comfortable “changing my mind” is exactly what Kamala Harris was talking about in her answer about fracking. My deeply held value is that inequality is a social evil, not that a particular tax policy proposal is bad per se. It is true that I could change my larger policy goals—deciding that Social Darwinism is not immoral, for example—but that would truly be a change in my values.
How can Harris be willing to accept fracking without having changed her underlying values? That is easy to understand, once we drop the “but she flip-flopped” mindset that is currently polluting (no pun intended) the discussion.
As a threshold matter, one can readily concede that the fracking question does differ from my example in one categorical way. In my hypothetical world, I could support a trickle-down policy if one could be found that reduces inequality, which is my value-driven policy goal. By contrast, nothing has changed in the past five years to make fracking less bad for the environment, and pro-environmental goals are what Harris holds out as her true values.
Even that, however, does not ultimately matter to the larger question. After all, there are situations in which I would be willing to accept (however reluctantly) some policies that worsen inequality, because there are other considerations at play. In 2018, for example, I argued that the Republicans’ cap on the state-and-local tax deduction for the federal income tax should be repealed, because even though doing so would help richer people in blue states, the cap constitutes unconstitutional unequal treatment of states based on their citizens’ and leaders’ political viewpoints.
More to the point, I could find myself supporting a multi-part tax bill that includes some regressive components because it also includes progressive components that make the overall impact of the bill progressive. Question: But Professor Buchanan, you’ve always said that you’re against trickle-down tax policies. How could you?! Answer: Easily. Policy is complicated, and piece-by-piece acceptance or rejection of a bill ignores the reality of legislative tradeoffs.
As it happens, the most infamous accusation of flip-flopping was not a flip-flop at all. In 2004, the Democratic presidential nominee (then-Senator John Kerry) was roasted at the Republican National Convention by delegates waving rubber footwear in the air. Why? When asked why he had voted against a specific military appropriations bill, Kerry had answered: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.” Stupid, right? Not at all. He had voted for a version of the bill that included a provision to pay for the cost of the new military spending by reducing Republicans’ regressive tax cuts, and when that offset was removed, he changed his vote. In short, this was not even a situation in which a person changed his mind but not his values, because the second vote was on a substantively different bill. That is the opposite of flip-flopping.
Regarding my example above regarding the cap on the state and local tax deduction, I should state unambiguously that I would even support a clean repeal with no offsetting progressive element(s), even though I would of course try to include things that would reduce inequality. Again, however, that would not be flip-flopping on my values, because even though I favor tax progressivity and reducing inequality, I also value the idea that Republicans should not be able to punish states that elect Democrats. Sometimes two core values come into conflict.
When it comes to Harris and fracking, however, the story is not even that complicated. At some point in the last five years, she could have decided that she was willing to support an energy policy package that trades off fracking for some green initiatives that might add up to a net-beneficial policy that achieves goals that are consistent with her values.
That is true of Vance as well, by the way, but in the worst way possible. He was and is committed to a reactionary, sexist, bigoted set of values. In 2016, he thought that Trump was not going to advance that agenda, so he opposed Trump’s candidacy. Now Vance has changed his mind about Trump’s usefulness, but his repulsive values are intact. I suppose that counts as a “two cheers” moment.
In any event, and to be very clear, the kind of tradeoff that I discussed above would even be consistent with the cynical suspicion that Harris is merely refusing to acknowledge the obvious political syllogism: “Pennsylvania is a key state to become President; candidates who oppose fracking will probably lose Pennsylvania; ergo, I no longer oppose fracking.” She obviously has every good reason not to say that out loud, but she also is not somehow dishonest for being politically realistic.
Harris wants the U.S. to reduce the environmental damage that it creates, and she is part of the presidential administration that passed a historic package of green policies as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Reducing or eliminating fracking would have been part of a first-best policy package, but we do not live in a first-best world. Sometimes, we settle for less for scientific reasons, sometimes for economic reasons, and sometimes for political reasons. Get over it.
To return to my views on tax policy, I sometimes surprise people who ask me whether I support or oppose one kind of tax or another, even in a context where we are only discussing a menu of progressive policies. For example, even though the Social Security system is not going bankrupt, I believe that our retirement program should be supplemented with progressive taxes to allow benefits to increase. Which progressive taxes should we impose? I will honestly tell people that I do not care. If political opposition makes estate tax increases toxic but upper-bracket income tax increases possible, fine by me. If we could enact a tax on unrealized gains but would hit a brick wall on enacting a wealth tax, why would I quibble?
In the end, however, the insta-conventional wisdom that Kamala Harris is “not yet known” is a dodge, and the idea that her changes in tactics and strategies—but not her goals or values—make her a flip-flopper cannot be taken seriously. She is an imperfect human being, as we all are, but she apparently is not imperfect enough for Republicans or journalists to find something non-imaginary with which to attack her.
In Part Two of this column, I will move beyond this “But you changed your mind” mindlessness and look at some other examples of what currently passes for argumentation in U.S. political discussion. It turns out that Donald Trump and the Republicans do not even bother to try to make coherent arguments, but far too many reporters and commentators nonetheless act as if naked assertions and non sequiturs count as devastating arguments. The results are all too predictable.
