I just got a chance to read Alex Massie’s article that I referenced before, Russell Brand: an Adolescent Extremist Whose Hatred of Politics Is Matched by His Ignorance. In it, he quotes Brand as writing, “Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites.” Massie admits to sometimes feeling that way and I very much do too. But it is extremely dangerous to allow such thinking to rule a liberal.

It is common. How could it not be when most of our federal elected officials are millionaires? One of my favorite websites is Crooks & Liars. But the name does bother me. It feeds into the conservative idea that all public servers are crooks and so wouldn’t we just be better without the government given that it is all corrupt.

But even more important than that, false equivalence is the last line of defense with conservatives. I can get just about any conservative to give up their side of any argument. But they also retreat to, “Oh, the whole system is screwed up. You can’t trust any of them!” And it is pretty much impossible to counter that argument. The reason is that in general, the Republican Party is made up of people who are proudly corrupt. (You can find easy conservative rationalizations for corruption!) But the Democrats are not perfect. No actual person is perfect. And in politics, one has to make concessions. For example, I really like Bernie Sanders. But he’s done stuff I’m not pleased about. So you can always say both sides do it. And conservatives do.

What is especially terrible about the “everybody’s corrupt” argument is that in a fundamental way it is not just the last refuge of conservatives, it is their first refuge. It justifies absolutely everything that they want to do. Why support the food stamp program when it is just administered by a bunch of corrupt political appointees? So the argument we should be making is that public servants are not corrupt. (This has the advantage of being mostly true.) While many and even most Republicans are corrupt, that’s because of their ideology that wants to destroy the government. That isn’t a reason to abandon government; that is a reason to abandon the Republican Party.

Massie’s focus is on the fact that it ever was so—the Dickens Lament. And that’s absolutely right. I would even go further. What’s wrong in this country is actually pretty small compared to what’s right. Mostly, we have one big problem: income inequality. Pretty much all of the other problems stem from that: prisons, global warming, and on and on. And we can do a lot about that. If only…

Election day is 4 November 2014!

Jonathan Bernstein made a funny, but we both know it is very serious. He compared two articles. First, Alex Massie‘s attack on Russell Brand’s “all those liberal politicians are really conservative” game. Second, Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry‘s attack on the “radical” wing of the Republican Party. He wrote, “One of them was about ‘an adolescent extremist whose hatred of politics is matched by his ignorance’—want to guess which one?” The joke is that although it was a description of Brand, it could easily have been a description of Ted Cruz or any number of other Republicans.

Bernstein’s article is about how it is good that Ponnuru and Lowry are calling out the Republican crazies, but that it is being done very gently. As he notes, “Indeed, Ponnuru and Lowry’s five-screen attack on the radicals is packed full of ‘on the other hand’ and ‘to be sure’ qualifications, so much so that at times it’s hard to tell whether the point is convincing convincable conservatives or if it’s to do just enough to be able to claim credit for being on the side of sanity.” My question is why this is. Why is it is that liberals have no problem calling out their own extremists but conservatives never do it.

I think I know the answer: conservatives agree on the essentials whereas liberals have a fair amount of disagreement as to where they are headed. Put another way, the Republicans have an extremely small tent and the Democrats have an unbelievable large tent. I get tired of pointing this out again and again and again. Republicans disagree about urgency. They disagree about tactics. But they do not disagree about goals. And those goals are stunningly archaic.

In a time and place where all land is owned and a man literally cannot make his own way, they want to ossify social positions because they think that they are currently about right. As I quoted social psychologist Paul Piff before, “Let’s imagine that you’re invited to a game of Monopoly. And you arrive at this game to find out that all the property’s been divided up. All of the money has already been handed out. But you’re told, ‘Hey: go ahead and sit down. Play the game; we’re going to give you a chance to play just like everyone else.'” That’s the way all Republicans want the world to be. That’s how they define “equality of opportunity.”[1]

In contrast, Democrats really do disagree about where we are going. This ranges from people who want only what we have now but with perhaps a slightly stronger safety net to people like Russell Brand who want guaranteed minimum incomes. (I’m guessing; I don’t really follow or care about Brand.) But with all of our breadth, what we don’t have are extremists like the Tea Party folk. On the left, that would be equivalent to people calling for the workers to own the means of production. The catastrophe of the Soviet Union long ago scared liberals away from those kinds of ideas. But strangely right wing military dictatorships (eg Augusto Pinochet) have not scared the right away from their path.

It is tiring to see people like Ponnuru and Lowry applauded every time they write articles that make the gentlest of criticism of the conservative movement. Do you know what Rich Lowry was talking about the last time I wrote about him? How Ted Cruz would flummox liberals because he was a smart Ivy Leaguer who thought like Sarah Palin. Ponnuru, of course, is a good critic of his own side. But he is careful in the extreme. And when he talks policy, he is as foolish as most other conservatives. The main thing, though, is that both men agree with Ted Cruz and company with regards to what they want. They would just like these crazies to be smarter about getting to their promised land where all the poor will get their just, painful, but brief death.

Don’t be like Russell Brand: they can only win if you do not vote. Election day is 4 November 2014!

[1] This is clearly not the case for someone like Josh Barro, but even I have a hard time calling him anything but a good old fashioned liberal. And most Republicans would balk at this description of their goals, but this is what the policies that they want would produce. In May of this year, Avik Roy wrote that “equality of opportunity” was nothing more than simply not having laws forbidding people from doing something. In other words, as long as you don’t live in a caste system, you have equality of opportunity. So it isn’t like I’m being hyperbolic here.

Charlie Cook made a great point in an article yesterday in the National Journal, Why 2014 Is Do-or-Die for the GOP. This isn’t anything like the conservative claptrap about how we are on the verge of a socialist hellscape where white folk have to hand out dollar bills to every black person they see because of Obama-imposed reparations. Now, as usual with Cook, this is just clearheaded political analysis.

You see, since 2008, the Democratic Party has had a lot of seats to hold in the Senate. In 2010, there were 19 Democrats and only 15 Republicans up for re-election. In 2012, there were 22 Democrats and only 9 Republicans. And in 2014, there will be 20 Democrats and 15 Republicans up for re-election. (These numbers are probably slightly off, since they are based upon the election results from six years earlier, but they will be close.) So the fact that the Democrats have maintained Senate control all this time is something of a miracle.

But in 2016, things will be reversed because of the huge gains made by the Republicans in 2010. Cook explains:

This is why Cook says that 2014 is “do or die” for the Republicans. I would put it more musically and say it is “Now Or Never”:

H/T: Ed Kilgore