The Certainty Trap

In decision making at all levels—personal, business and government—it appears there is one pitfall everyone succumbs to at one time or another: the certainty trap.  Stated simply, the certainty trap occurs when decision makers grant inordinate meaning to apparent ‘knowns’ that are subsequently revealed to have had little or nothing to do with the outcomes produced by the decision.  The effects of the certainty trap on our failures range from marginal opportunity costs to the catastrophic—from a missed business opportunity to waging ill-conceived wars.  The certainty trap yields fatuous decisions, however carefully justified by ‘knowns’. 

Although we seldom conduct a post-analysis on our victories (after all it was our brilliance and hard work that produced the triumph!), it also seems logical to assert that the certainty trap is outcome agnostic; whether we are successful or not, the certainty trap may have preceded both our wins and our losses.  The decision itself is dependent on the ‘knowns’ but the outcome may prove to have been quite independent of the same ‘knowns’.  Former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld often jousted with reporters over his seemingly magical matrix of knowns and unknowns, focused somewhat fatalistically on those combinations that included ‘unknown’.  But what if the real problem was not with the unknowns, rather it was with the knowns that, in reality, did not matter (or, in Rumsfeld’s case were not actually ‘knowns’ at all)?  More importantly, how do we avoid the trap of granting inordinate weight to factors that are visible and immediate, but ultimately inconsequential?

The first thing to realize is that the certainty trap is a naturally occurring phenomenon.  We need little if any help to fall into it.  After all, upon what are we to base our decisions if not those things that are known?  Here is where the wisdom born from failure can be critical.  While it is natural to point at visible and tangible factors and data to justify our decisions, and equally unnatural to point at the same data and call it into question, doing so may be extraordinarily valuable if the ‘knowns’ are irrelevant (or worse).  It takes an exceptionally confident and wise person to discount the obvious knowns in favor of the possibilities lurking in the unknowns.  It takes confidence born from intelligence and experience and a wide-open mind to make judgments instead of decisions.

And yet, we can observe many ‘unnatural’ judgments that created enormous successes, while there are many more ‘natural’ decisions that resulted in failures.  Steve Jobs made judgments that resulted in the largest and arguably most culturally influential corporation in the world, while Steve Ballmer made decisions that set the incumbent software giant Microsoft on a glide path to mediocrity.  Tesla and SpaceX’s Eton Musk made judgments about the future of travel on roads and in space, while at the same time General Motor’s former CEO, Rick Wagoner, made well-justified decisions that led to GM’s bankruptcy.  President George H.W. Bush made judgments after the collapse of the Soviet Union that prevented chaos in much of the world while his son, President George W. Bush, made decisions after 9/11 resulting in tragic losses of life and treasure and little, if any, meaningful gains.  The outcomes speak for themselves and point to a new rule to observe: worry as much or more about the knowns as the unknowns.

The mindset of the executive who makes judgments vs. those who make decisions is worth exploring.  All the executives listed above are intelligent and well-intentioned human beings.  They vary in experience levels, but that alone does not assure judgment-making over decision-making.  We must look at the cognitive nature of each executive.  Do they view the world as a zero-sum game where limits define options, or a world awash in possibilities?  Do they see issues as black or white, good or evil, or are they intrigued by the nuanced spaces between?  Do they have the ability to see and argue different sides of an issue—possessed of an opposable mind—or do they easily dismiss other options in favor of their predispositions?  Are they deliberative or impulsive?  Do they surround themselves with people who can replace them, or with those who see them as irreplaceable?  Are they curious, or are they certain? Are the unknowns a source of fear, or a venue of creative opportunity?  These are the questions we should all ask of ourselves and of those we choose as our leaders.  These are the considerations that produce judgments over decisions and protect us all from the certainty trap.

Rebranding America

The cacophony that pervades American discourse today, where volume and pitch offend every meter of reasonableness, provides clear evidence that the struggle for American identity is once again underway.  Every eighty years or so America resets its image; reboots its brand.  It is never an easy or comfortable process and this time is no different.  Before I get into the current issues, however, allow me to provide some historical perspective.

Upon reaching the shores of Massachusetts Bay in the summer of 1630 on the ship Arbella, John Winthrop, echoing Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, framed the requirements and expectations of his voyage-worn future colonists in a sermon that resonated throughout American history.  His Model of Christian Charity[1] articulated a sense of independence, duty, and blessings to those who honored their covenant with God.  Winthrop claimed,

the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own Articles’ and that ‘he ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission [and] will expect a strikt performance of the Articles’ that if neglected in any way would cause ‘the Lord [to] surely breake out in wrath against us’ but if we set the example of His Word, ‘hee shall make us a prayse and glory… for we must Consider that wee shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us ...[2]

Winthrop envisioned “Massachusetts as the ideal place to build a Puritan utopia untainted by the corruptions of the Church of England and distant from a suspect English monarch.”[3]  It was up to the colonists to live up to the standard of the “chosen people” living in the “chosen land”—a “City upon a Hill.”  He defined the Puritan ethos of the new American colonies: independence from the hierarchy of the Church of England; a constant struggle with sin, salvation, and battles against evil; and a high commitment to work and its just rewards with “attention fixed on God.”[4]  In so doing, he also set theological covenant as a standard of social order.  Winthrop believed he could “transfer the principles of nationhood found in ancient Israel to [his] Massachusetts Bay Company with no need for explanation.”[5]

Over the last two hundred thirty-eight years, this sense of American exceptionalism has proven to be the most durable of all aspects of American identity.[6]  Every president, regardless of political affiliation or disposition, has embraced the idea of America’s special role in the world.  Most American citizens, albeit with different interpretations and varying degrees of fervor, similarly believe in the ‘specialness’ of America. We should remind ourselves, however, that by world historical standards a two hundred thirty-eight year-old country is just a pup, at most a testy teen. And like an adolescent, our identity—what it means to be an American—will evolve, subject to new interpretations of old values and perhaps even new values, to craft a new image to be projected across the world.  Notwithstanding the somewhat clumsy brilliance and beauty of America’s early years, we must be mindful that the great powers that preceded America faced the reality of maturation and decline.  There is no reason to believe we won’t face the same arc of maturation.  We might aim to age gracefully, retaining our sense of exceptionalism—preferably as an exemplar rather than missionary— but a graceful course is far from certain.[7]  

This process of American re-identification is natural and recurring.  It actually follows a discernible pattern that includes a four-phase cycle comprised of periods of objectivism, then radicalism, idealism, and finally crisis, each full cycle spanning approximately eighty years.  The first cycle began after the Revolutionary War and founding of our country, then again after the Civil War, and then again following the Great Depression and our entrance into World War II.  At the end of each period of crisis a new American identity is negotiated that more or less endures for the next eighty years.  Following the founding of our country, America embraced an identity as “the new world.”  After the Civil War, America identity evolved to “the land of opportunity.” Since the mid-1940s, when America last re-identified itself as an emerging “world power,” our collective identity has been focused on attaining superpower status.  Today, twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own (mis)adventures as a political superpower and overseer of the world’s financial markets, we are faced with a diminished, if not severely compromised, sense of American exceptionalism.  In effect, we are standing in the middle of another period of crisis and renegotiation of identity, which is always contentious as evidenced by those at the extremes making more noise than the vast majority who sit between them. Liberty, capitalism, democracy, civil and human rights, all of which we believed, as President Lincoln did, would collude to form a more perfect union—the “last best hope of earth”—needs yet another makeover. [8]

Our union today is hardly cohesive and the invocation of hope seems an empty refrain. “Superpower” no longer rings true when the institutions we have developed to serve our interests and project power appear to be collapsing under the weight of hubris and avarice.  Since the end of the Cold War, rather than following the example of President George H.W. Bush by behaving with a sense of restraint and humility, America’s leaders—political, business, religious, and academic —have puffed out their chests and spewed their decrees with the bravado and rectitude of a freshly saved sinner.  These behaviors are markers of a period of high idealism that precede every crisis.[9]  And, as if our own guile was insufficient, now comes a tome of criticism aimed at a fundamental tenant of American exceptionalism—capitalism—by the economist Thomas Piketty.  Not since 1959, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev flustered then Vice President Richard Nixon in what became known as the “Kitchen Debates” have Americans had to bear such criticism about capitalism.  However, unlike Krushchev, Piketty’s study is well researched, well written, and delivered with a clear expression of limits and, moreover, humility.

Piketty’s basic argument is that a society’s adherence to the principles of capitalism—as the most efficient system of allocating capital and distributing wealth—results, in the long run, in a highly skewed distribution of wealth in favor of the very few that, among other effects, compromises other liberal democratic values, including democracy itself.  In short, capitalism threatens democracy.  This is based on his finding that the rate of return on capital is consistently higher than the rate of return on labor, by about three percentage points.  Over decades, this condition (absent significant policy interventions or war) moves more and more wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  Furthermore, he shows, that the impact this has had on the concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1% is no more alarming than in the United States.[10] 

We need look no farther than Washington, D.C. to see that the effects Piketty warns us about are blooming with the ferocity of fertilized dandelions on the Washington Mall.  Money has always held sway over politicians, but now more than ever moneyed interests funded by those who enjoy higher returns from capital have a vice-like grip on Congress. We no longer “get the government we deserve” through our votes, we get the government people like the Koch brothers have purchased.  Across the street from Congress, the Supreme Court is doing its bit too.  It has decided, as Mitt Romney claimed on the campaign stump in 2012, that corporations are citizens too.  Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission (2010) and other decisions like the more recent Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) that support this notion of corporate personhood, and which I expect may someday will be viewed as just as ridiculous as the holding of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), provide a growing body of evidence that suggests a slide from democracy to plutocracy—those with the gold rule.

Plutocracy is not all bad if all you want is a more functional government.  Fewer people with influence means more things are likely to get done, but will they be things that benefit most Americans, or few?  Moreover, plutocracy threatens more than the democracy it supplants, it threatens the very essence of individualism and independence, which are at the core of another tenant of American identity: liberty.  When those with the gold rule, there are a whole list of other “INs” that are at risk: invention, ingenuity, inspiration, initiative and innovation; inclusiveness, integration and integrity; and perhaps most importantly, intelligence and intellect—our collective brainpower.  Opportunity, like wealth, becomes concentrated too.  As Piketty points out, in the history of 19^th century France, the last time similar levels of wealth concentration occurred, inheritance rather than merit defined the path to wealth and opportunity.  Is that where we want America to go?  Will whom we marry matter more than an advanced degree?  Will the next iteration of American identity be that of a wildly wealthy few and a mass of commoners for whom the American dream is restricted to something to read about in the diaries of their grandparents and great-grandparents?  Will privilege trump merit?  Will democracies continue to be replaced by authoritarian regimes across the world?[11] 

If egalitarianism in America (heralded by Tocqueville in Democracy in America) is another durable thread of American identity, it is at best frayed and in need of repair.  However, such values like egalitarianism—broadly interpreted— may not have survived America’s coming of age as a superpower.  Egalitarianism today may be limited to those strands that support civil and human rights, not economic opportunity.  This issue is the anvil against which America’s next identity—especially as it pertains to its economic system—will be hewn.  Indeed, pundit-economists like Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz believe economic rights are an issue of equality, rather than equity; of entitlement more than merit, while others who follow the teachings of Ludvig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek believe the Krugman/Stiglitz world is, to use Hayek’s phrase, the “road to serfdom.”[12]  Of course, seldom do the extremes of any range of argument—the polar endpoints—produce solutions with more benefit than (unintended) costs.  Even Alan Greenspan, a staunch protégé of Ayn Rand’s, realized (perhaps too late) that her argument of the perfectly rational man as a virtuous economic actor was deeply flawed.[13]  So, the question is, in this contentious period of re-identification, can we retain the benefits of capitalism while avoiding its apparent endgame of a very wealthy few?  Unfortunately, the answer is probably no.

Absent the destruction of capital that we saw in World War I and II, which, as Piketty illustrates, flipped diverging rates of return on capital and labor to converging rates, the only way to stem the concentration of wealth and affect redistribution is through various tax schemes, any and all of which are anathema to the Mises/Hayek school and its many wealthy supporters.  Reading Piketty’s proposals of a global tax, or others who have put forward similar tax schemes is like reading a new version of Alice in Wonderland, prompting the query: did Piketty get into Lewis Carroll’s stash?  However, things happen, like the collapse of the Soviet Union, that still amaze people like me, so who knows?

The American values we have historically held dear; that basket of values that includes ideas like liberty, individualism, capitalism, merit, democracy, civil and human rights needs a new handhold we can believe in—a new identity.  Coming of age is an inelegant and klutzy process, but to-date America has handled it mostly well.  We have created more prosperity than any predecessor power in the history of the world.  When called to defeat evil like Hitler’s Third Reich, we put our blood and treasure on the line and, with great help from allies and, in particular, Stalin’s Russia, we won.  We have, for the most part, lived up to Winthrop’s ideal of a “city upon a hill.”  Adulthood is, however, knocking at America’s door. 

·      Will our leaders be wise and graceful, or continue in the vain and bilious manner portrayed by too many today? 

·      Will we be exemplars of self-restraint and moderation, or zealous missionaries of consumptive duplicity? 

·      Will we lock the gates to America, or continue to embrace those who come from foreign lands? 

·      Will we educate our children to know more than us, or fail to enable their dreams? 

·      Will we honor science and take reasonable measures to affect climate change, or will we continue to chant “Drill, baby, drill!”?

·      Will we fight to engineer a system that protects and rewards merit balanced by empathy, or will we accept the pernicious effects of concentrated wealth and its natural progeny plutocracy? 

·      Will we be welcomed in the capitols of the world, or be regarded with contempt and trepidation?

·      Will we honor our American heritage and come together to relight the city upon the hill, or continue to strut down a pathway to irrelevance?

 

In sum, will America be rebranded as ‘beneficent stewards’ of the future of the world, or will the nation of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton become an isolated, self-centered, and decaying archetype of entropy?  These are the choices we face as we step forward to rebrand America.  Other great powers in the history of the world faced the same dilemma; some succeeded, some failed.  There is no clear roadmap to follow and nothing will be determined in the next election, or Supreme Court decision, or annual statement of profit and loss.  This is a result that will be determined by the decisions and actions of individual Americans every day.  Like water carving a new gorge in a mountain of stone, it will be the collective will of the people, expressed in their nearly imperceptible movements that will set the course of the next eighty-year cycle.  The loudest among us will not prevail; it will be the actions—not words—of the vast majority of us who decide how to behave as Americans each and every day.

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[1] Winthrop’s Modell of Christian Charity is available in his papers, volume II, at The Massachusetts Historical Society, http://www.masshist.org/books/winthrop.cfm.

[2] Winthrop in Conrad Cherry, ed., God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 40.

[3] Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), p. ix.

[4] Ibid., p. 5.

[5] Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishers, 1989), p. 34.

[6] See an expanded analysis of exceptionalism and other aspects of American identity in my forthcoming book from Palgrave Macmillan, Presidential Faith and Foreign Policy: Jimmy Carter the Disciple and Ronald Reagan the Alchemist.

[7] This notion of two forms of exceptionalism—exemplar and missionary—are thoroughly illustrated in H.W. Brands, What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Trevor B. McCrisken, American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Vietnam: US Foreign Policy Since 1974 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

[8] Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1962.

[9] This period of idealism is a dialectic synthesis of objective method and ‘settled’ radical ideas/values from the preceding period(s). Assertion of this synthesis is projected on an often-unwilling populace, both domestic and foreign. Other common markers of periods of idealism include hubris, certitude, grandeur, and consumption-based economies. Conspicuous consumption. Get rich quick. Speculation. Deregulation. Class inequalities. High religiosity.  Periods of idealism include 1835-60, 1915-29, and 1985-2007.

[10] There are those, however, who dismiss the importance of the gap between today’s rich and poor in the United States.  Gilbert Chin and Elizabeth Culotta, editors at Science, suggest it is not so bad.  They point out that it is much worse in South Africa (even though it is worse than more likely comparable economies like those of Japan, Europe, and all of Scandinavia.)  I am not sure I can remember another time we have pointed at South Africa to make ourselves feel better, as Americans; at least not since apartheid. See Gilbert Chin and Elizabeth Culotta, “The Science of Inequality: What the Numbers Tell Us.” Science, 344:6186, May 23, 2014, p. 820.

[11] See Joshua Kurlantzick, Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

[12] Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: A Classic Warning Against the Dangers to Freedom Inherent in Social Planning (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1944)

[13] See Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin Group, 2008).  See also, Jerome Tuccille, Alan Shrugged: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, the World’s Most Powerful Banker (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2002).

Coming this November

I hope you are enjoying your summer. I have decamped Texas for the Colorado Rockies to be with my wife where fishing, hiking, biking, kayaking, and visits by family each await us as viable answers to the question, “What do you want to do today?”  These are the things that make life grand.  In addition, my mind has been wrestling with the question exposed by Thomas Piketty’s 2014 study, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century: is there a bad—really bad—side to capitalism?  I have set his work aside Ayn Rand’s 1967 edited volume Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal and am scratching my head with both hands.  More on that in my next post when the scratching ends and pen meets paper.

            In the mean time, I want to let you know that sometime this November—if my publisher’s schedule holds—my study of presidents, religion, and foreign policy will be released by Palgrave Macmillan, titled Presidential Faith and Foreign Policy: Jimmy Carter the Disciple and Ronald Reagan the Alchemist.  I give you fair notice here in part so you can save some of your earnings from summer’s odd jobs since Palgrave is pricing the book somewhere north of a Benjamin.  I hope their sense of demand exceeds my joy/relief in its completion.  Otherwise, they will have plenty of doorstops with Carter and Reagan’s faces printed on the cover.

            In addition to my ruminations on Rand and Piketty’s assessments of capitalism, my mind is stumbling through a new thesis whose working title is “The Certainty Trap.”  It is a critical analysis of decision making—by presidents, corporate chieftains, and even us lowly commoners—that observes what happens when the so-called ‘knowns’ are granted inordinate meaning in decision making, even though in post-analysis the same knowns often had little effect on the outcomes.  And, of course, how can we avoid this trap?

Cheers for now.

All-American Assholes

I am an asshole.  Perhaps a recovering asshole, but as the saying goes, “Once an asshole, always an asshole.”  If you are a white male whose life began in the United States between World War II and when Kennedy was slain in Dallas, you might be an asshole too.  If you’ve got a few bucks in your bank account, a respectable title after your name, a house or houses paid for, and a family that mostly tolerates you, then you are probably an asshole.  Add to that a membership at a country club, a seat on someone else’s board (and yes charitable boards count too), and money contributed to political candidates or Super PACs, you are most definitely an asshole. But, “Wait!” you say, “You’ve just described what a successful American man is supposed to be!  You are talking about what Tom Wolfe celebrated in his 1998 book, A Man in Full.”  Yes, but success, or being “full,” doesn’t make you likeable; rather, it probably assures your membership in an unprecedented and oversubscribed club of assholes.

            Just look around you if you think I am exaggerating, or if you think I may be spiraling into a dive of self-deprecation.  Ask yourself, is that older white man you know really all that nice?  Does he listen when spoken to, or is his mind occupied by what he is going to say or do next?  Does he care for his spouse, children, and friends as well as he cares for his many possessions?  Does he actually do charitable work, or just write checks and show up at the ball?  Does he yell at other white male pundits on TV, or stare at the charts and crawl on CNBC?  Does ESPN stream on his smartphone on weekends during the only significant time he has to spend with you?  Does he have the answer for everything?  See, we assholes are everywhere.  But, it is not all our fault.  We became what we were expected to become, and damnit, it was easy.

            We came of age in the final and glorious ascent of America, when the U.S. became a superpower that defeated godless communism, and then ushered in the digital age.  We helped create more wealth than the world has ever seen (even though much of it proved illusory in 2008).  We were taught to play to win, not to collaborate.  We sought promotions even if we only met half of the stated qualifications.  Our lives became a series of objectives without any end in sight.  Our mantra is “More!”  Sometimes also “Better!” (in deference to fellow asshole Steve Jobs), but always “More!”  More money, more power, and more toys.  Confident? Damn right we are.  We view successor generations of American males as narcissistic pussies, if and when we consider them at all.  Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are all assholes (even though the last two are much more clever assholes).  Presidents Clinton and Bush? Yup.  Donald Trump? Duh!  Collectively, we institutionalized the American male asshole.

To be sure, women can be assholes too, but they usually need a book to tell them how.  Recent contributions to this field to train female assholes include Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, Arianna Huffington’s Thrive, and Katty Kay and Claire Shipman’s The Confidence Code.  It is worth noting that the best-trained female assholes achieve aptitudes that meet or eclipse the Trumps and Limbaughs, but it is not a natural disposition; it is learned.  Sadly, too often in an irreversible manner.  Unlike male assholes, female converts are unlikely to return to a more reasonable or graceful state.  Just ask their female cohorts upon whom they direct most of their acquired asshole skills.

            There are some things, however, that we male assholes can do to affect our liberation.  While those like Trump and Limbaugh are clearly beyond help, the rest of us run-of-the-mill assholes can escape more or less intact, and we might even enjoy our lives a great deal more.  Here are six suggestions.

1.     The first step is to realize that if your life is all about, or mostly about, yourself, it is a life of no significance whatsoever. I don’t care how much money you have, or houses, or places that have your name on the wall, your family and friends will likely be quietly pleased when you are gone.  They may even do what they can to accelerate your departure.  (Be careful when signing that power of attorney.)

2.     The next step is to realize that yes, my aspiring Buddha buddies, less is more.  Get rid of all your crap.  Downsize your footprint on the world by living smaller.  Introduce yourself to the Goodwill Donation Station and slip a Benjamin in the pocket of that Brioni suit you donate to the next poor schmuck who wants to be like you.  Trade complexity for simplicity.  If you do, you will have time for what follows below, rather than spending your day acquiring and maintaining more stuff.

3.     Next, take a lesson in humility and go back to school.  It has probably been years since you had your butt kicked, and seeking an advanced degree will do that and more.  Study something well beyond your current knowledge or skills.  The ultimate goal is to unlock your head and become a whole-minded person again, like you were when you were a boy.  Then once you think you know something new, apply or teach that knowledge to something or someone else.

4.     Serve and share. Stop writing checks to charities and showing up with your newly bleached teeth for the social pages photo-op.  Pick a place in your community and actually volunteer your time and energy.  Get dirty in the reality of the lives of non-assholes.  There won’t be a new plaque on the wall with your name on it, but you might actually like yourself better in the process.  And, express gratitude for the opportunity to serve.  Trust me, you will get more out of it than they will.

5.     Create rather than optimize or maximize.  As I have written here before, Renoir claimed only beautiful things are truly durable.  Aesthetics are as important as function.  (Jobs understood this.)  Leave your optimizing and maximizing skills behind and focus on creation for the sake of creation.  It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it appeals to your senses first, and your analytics last.

6.     Slow down, dude.  Breathe.  Speed is no longer your friend. Enjoy movement frame by frame – as a set of still photos rather than high-def video.  You’ll be amazed by what you have been missing, and it just may add years to your life.

 

Follow these steps and you may just make it out of the club.  Moreover, people may actually, genuinely, like you again.  Or, stay on the path you are on and get thick, frail, and even angrier than you are today.  After all, the Senator McCains of the world need someone to listen to them.