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

Joel: “Oh no, no, no! Oh, my heavens, no! No! Oh God! Oh Porgy! Oh my dear heavens, no, no, no, no, no, no, no….”

Crow:Well, y’think that’s enough to convey the raw terror she must feel as a giant bowl of “California Cornucopia Vegetable Jubilee” slithers towards her on all fours, it’s hellish maw…[1]

That’s how I felt today reading David Atkins article, Where Did the Republican Political Acumen Go? Look, I admire Atkins; he’s a keen political observer but, “Oh, my heavens, no!”

He started by discussing what a great political machine the Republicans had in the early days of the Bush Jr administration. I agree with that. But Republicans generally have good operations when they control the White House. The Republican Party is an authoritarian group. When they have power, their army falls in line. It is only when they don’t have power that they fall to pieces.

But Atkins really lost me when he wrote, “Conservatives had forced or persuaded a Democratic president to declare the era of big government at an end, to smash welfare, to deregulate Wall Street and pass free trade agreements one after the other.” Really?! That’s not my memory of the 1990s. I’ll admit, this is a time of special focus for me since I’m working on a book that focuses on the New Democrats and their abandonment of liberalism. But still, I remember the 1992 campaign and how conservative Clinton was. I especially remember him promising to “end welfare as we have come to know it.”

So it isn’t the brilliant Republican political machine that pushed Clinton and later Obama to the right. What I would call the center right is where these men feel most comfortable. Another thing I remember from the 1990s is just how crazy the Republicans were. They are marginally worse now, but they were still crazy. Remember how Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons? Even Ken Starr investigated it! This was mainstream stuff. The Republicans didn’t get Clinton to bend to their will; it was the other way around. Imagine what Clinton might have accomplished if he had been a real liberal!

What the Republican political operation shows is that political operations don’t mean that much. Even with a hopeless eight years, they still managed to get the White House back. (They also came close to doing it democratically!) And after all this madness, they may well get it back in 2016. They don’t need to be smart or reasonable or even disciplined. All they need is a good economic slowdown or crisis. That’s how politics works in the United States. Remember, as brilliant as Karl Rove may have been, Bush still lost the 2000 election. This is despite the fact that the unemployment rate had stopped falling and was beginning to rise. Bush should have won that election fairly easily and didn’t.

I think that David Atkins is falling for a myth. The Republicans’ lack of success in governing is not a choice. They really aren’t good at it. If they had been, they would have managed to create their conservative economic utopia in Iraq. Instead, they made a mess of it. All they’ve really been good at is continuing to exist during the dark 1960s and 1990s. Just like bad managers, if political parties stay around long enough, they will be rewarded with power. I understand the desire to look back on it and provide a narrative. But there has never been a brilliant Republican Party in my lifetime. Time in grade.

None of this should be taken as a reason for Democrats to feel safe. Quite the contrary. It means that regardless of how good a job we do, Republicans will soon be back in power. This is why the New Democrats bug me so much. Their idea was that by moving to the right, they could win elections. But just as with the Republicans, the Democrats’ time had come in 1992 and 2008. By electing a conservative Democrat in 1992, the party allowed the political landscape brought in by Carter and Reagan to ossify. Bush Jr came in and pushed things further to the right. Obama is now allowing that new normal to ossify. The problem we face is not the brilliance of the Republicans, it is the cluelessness (or simple conservatism) of the Democrats.

[1] That’s from Crow T Robot’s great screenplay, Earth Vs. Soup. Watch; enjoy; learn:

Last week, Joshua Green wrote, Obama’s Top Economic Adviser Tells Democrats They’ll Have to Swallow Entitlement Cuts. He went to a Q&A session with Gene Sperling and concluded that the administration is trying to soften up the liberal base for a deal that offers entitlement cuts in exchange for Sequester cuts—no new revenue at all. There are a couple of things wrong with this.

The big thing wrong with this is that I don’t know any liberals who are actually in favor of the Grand Bargain. Maybe at one time, it wasn’t such a bad idea. But now the deal has been reduced to limiting loopholes in exchange for decreasing entitlement spending. We all know that the loopholes will quickly come back while the entitlement cuts will go on and on. So regardless of what proponents say, it is a short term tax increase in exchange for long term spending cuts. That’s a bad deal for liberals!

Now Green is pushing the idea that the White House is going to take long term entitlement cuts for nothing—or maybe a couple of years of Sequester cuts. Even I don’t think that the administration is that clueless. Instead, what seems to be happening is that Green is reading the tea leaves wrongly. I don’t know much about him, but I assume that he’s a typical upper middle class Washington reporter who really wishes to see entitlement cuts. You know what they say: wish in one hand…

But my reason for even talking about this is a comment that Green quoted from White House spokesman Amy Brundage in response to Sperling’s comment, “Gene was reiterating what our position has been all along: that any big budget deal is going to have to include significant revenues if Republicans insist on entitlement reforms.” I really hate the euphemisms. And even more, I hate how they favor the conservative reading of what’s going on.

The word “revenues” is not really wrong. But it has been used so often as a euphemism for “taxes” that I think people get the wrong idea. Again: these would simply be the elimination of loopholes, not new taxes. This is then contrasted with “entitlement reform,” which is the biggest euphemism this side of “collateral damage.” No one is talking about reform. We are talking cuts—pure and simple.

What we ought to be asking is this, “Are you willing to exchange the rich having their taxes go up by a very small amount for a couple of years in exchange for having your Social Security cut each year of your retirement?” In fact, as bad as that “deal” sounds, it is even worse. Chained-CPI would also throw more and more lower and middle class people in higher tax brackets going forward. So many people of modest means would see their taxes go up. What a brilliant idea that would be. Conservatives would clearly love it, but I don’t see what is there for liberals at all.

What Joshua Green is offering up is even worse than this. But like most Washington reporters, I doubt he’s thought much about it. In the group he runs with, there are all kinds of things people know that just ain’t so. And that’s the basis of “objective” reporting!

I learned from The Young Turks this evening that the Los Angeles Times will no longer be publishing letters from climate change deniers. My already high opinion of that paper just went up even further. Let me explain this from my perspective. My PhD is more or less in global warming. That is what all the physics and chemistry that we did went to understanding. So even though I no longer do the work, I understand it really well. What’s more, when I did work in the field, I was highly skeptical. I tend to be a believer in the Gaia hypothesis and it seemed very strange to me that the earth’s climate system could be so easily disrupted.

But that’s a whole different kind of skeptic than we find today. For one thing, the science wasn’t nearly as nailed down 20 years ago. We were looking for additions to the science, not holes in it. In particular, we were looking for negative feedback loops. Today, even the most serious skeptics are little more than charlatans. Those who even pretend to be doing science cherry pick data to make their cases. In other words, they aren’t doing anything like science. Science does not work this way: get an idea; ignore all data that contradicts idea; idea is right!

The problem is so much worse with lay people. They constantly mention things I’ve never even heard. “Oh, such and such, has proven that ice core temperature records are wrong!” Oh really? And how exactly is that? Well, they never know. It’s just the latest thing they’ve heard on Fox News or hate oriented radio (HOR). So it requires me to go actually look for whatever they are talking about. In the vast majority of cases it is from The Heartland Institute. Now that in itself is interesting. As late as 1994, Heartland was pushing the idea that secondhand smoke had no negative health consequences. Today, they are one of the biggest purveyors of quack climate science. Just like with cigarettes, there will never be any convincing them because they don’t do science. They are in the propaganda profession. Eventually, they will drop global warming denial just like they eventually dropped the cigarette-cancer link denial.

But regardless where the “research” comes from, most of the time it doesn’t even say what I’ve been told. A great example of this is tree ring temperature records. There was a lot of commotion about the fact that two independent records didn’t match where they overlapped. Tree rings are not a great source of temperature records. You don’t get absolute temperatures; you just get relative temperatures. So it isn’t surprising that two different investigators would have an offset between their data. Does this mean the data are useless? Not at all. It just means the two sets have to be reconciled and then they work just fine if you want to look at temperature trends. What scientists studying global warming want to do is look at temperature trends. Regardless, when there is an actual data set it is either (1) an outlier of many different sets that show something else entirely or (2) misinterpreted by the “scientist” (most likely willfully misinterpreted).

So the Los Angeles Times is right to refuse to print letters from these lay people. It isn’t just that they are wrong. None of these people think about this stuff. If a Los Angeles Times reader is writing in, all they will be doing is repeating something they heard Rush Limbaugh say the day before. It has been many years since people on that side of this issue have seriously thought about it. Anyway, if you want to read climate change denial, you can just buy the Washington Post and read George Will.

Afterword

Here is The Young Turks segment: