Manufacturing consensus: building a bipartisan truth one questionable 'fact' at a time.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Column - Conference notes

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE, an international public policy nonprofit founded in 1950, describes itself as a "convener." Rather than push for a specific ideological agenda, the organization brings together elite politicians and journalists in a "neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues." What happens in Aspen (and Washington, D.C., and other cities where the institute facilitates debates) does not stay in Aspen; the whole point is to influence policy wherever it is discussed and manufactured.

So it was with keen interest that I received an invitation to attend an October 27 Aspen Institute confab in D.C. on "The Role of Government in the Economy" Libertarians, after all, tend to hold the view that the greater the role of government, the worse the economy. Of even keener interest was the lineup: on the left, recently departed chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden Jared Bernstein; on the right, former Bush administration Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation executive director Bradley Belt, and moderating between them the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington bureau chief and former economics columnist David Leonhardt. Surely there would be some wide-ranging disagreement on the federal government's role in precipitating and exacerbating the economic malaise of the past four years.

No such luck. In his introductory remarks, moderator Leonhardt laid out as a factual starting point the government's "extraordinary and largely successful moves to spare us from another Great Depression." Bernstein went on to decry the "irrational fear of budget deficits at a time when the budget deficit really should be very large." And Belt repeatedly declined to enumerate a specific appropriate size and scope of government. So much for the debate.

Even more interesting than the soft consensus in favor of government intervention was a strong undercurrent that those who disagreed with it were guilty of denying basic truths. One of the questions from an audience full of Senate staffers, policy wonks, and journalists was how can we even bare a rational policy discussion with all these denialist Republicans who disregarded Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous maxim that "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts"? Jared Bernstein couldn't have been more pleased.

"I feel like we're in a climate in which facts just aren't welcome" he said. "I think the facts of the case are that we know what we can do to nudge...