Ed Kilgore provides a very nice service over at the Political Animal blog in providing a good overview of what is happening in politics throughout the day. And even though I’ve always know that he is a New Democrat, he hasn’t manage to really annoy me until yesterday. That’s when he started writing about the American Prospect/Democratic Strategist forum on entitlements. He quoted approvingly the following from Henry Aaron, “With opposition to social insurance more intense than in decades, progressives need to consider carefully what extensions of social insurance they want to seek, what redesigns of the current system they should entertain, and what cutbacks in the current system they might tolerate in exchange for high-priority gains.” That’s a winning strategy there, my New Democratic “allies”!

But it sounds kind of familiar. Actually, very familiar. Isn’t that exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing for the last 38 years? Isn’t that what Obama seems to be best at: bargaining with himself? It’s weird, but I don’t remember any major meeting of Republicans where they discuss what kind of military cuts they’ll take in exchange for tax reductions on the rich. Maybe that’s because as fucked up as the Republican Party is, they at least support what their base believes in. In fact, the Republican elites are actually more conservative than their base. But with the Democrats: no.

This has been going on for forty fucking years! The Republicans take a step to the right so the Democrats follow. This is not because the people keep moving to the right. What seems to have happened is that economic liberalism has been defined out of existence. But the fact remains that the poor vote liberal, and the more poor the terrible economic policies make, the more people will vote for the Democrats. But there seems to be no economic liberalism left in the party at the elite level.

Now liberalism is all about social issues: abortion-choice and gay rights. That does not bode well for the Democratic Party. Abortion will continue to be an issue, but in a generation, gay rights will not. Is that what our entire two party system is going to be about: abortion? And given how well the Democrats have done protecting their former economic agenda, in 2034 the big debate will be whether the “morning after pill” should be legal. Great job guys! Who do I write the check to?

Let me be clear: all this New Democrat and the old Democratic Leadership Council bullshit is nothing but the power elites trying to push the Democratic Party to the right on economic issues. They are fine with the social issues because they do not really care about the social issues. Just like the Republican elites. The Koch brothers don’t much care about abortion so long as their taxes stay low and they can destroy all unions. Regardless, the rich can always move or send their pregnant daughters to Italy for an abortion. Even if the Democrats win all their social battles, it won’t mean much to the people in the new banana (“Finance!”) republic we’ve allow this country to become.

Ross Douthat is back with another one of those articles where he pretends that the Republican Party is “moderating.” And that means that Jonathan Chait had to write an article where he mocks Douthat but strangely agrees with him. They are both wrong. So let me sort this all out.

On Sunday, Douthat wrote, At Last, Conservative Reform. That title is hilarious because that describes at least six columns a year for Douthat. He can be forgiven to some extent, since he doesn’t write his own headlines. But that headline is totally accurate. Douthat notes that at the end of Bush’s term in office, conservative policy “wonks”[1] had run out of ideas. I might note that all their previous ideas had run the economy into the ground, but I’ll leave that for now. Once Obama got in office, said wonks like Yuval Levin (!) got to work and came up with lots of “new” ideas. But they weren’t real as long as nationally known politicians weren’t championing them. But now they are! Or at least Douthat thinks that.

Chait responded with, I Have Seen the Future of the Republican Party, and It Is George W Bush. It provides a really good rundown of just how good and serious these ideas are:

Chait suggests a new avenue for the Republicans: a return to Bush! He says that what really makes the Republican proposals sound so vile to any but the conservative hardcore is that they insist upon balancing the federal budget. If they just give up this idea, they can have unpaid-for tax cuts for the rich, unpaid-for wars, and have a little left over for unpaid-for pandering to the middle class. And most important: they won’t have to make life any worse for the poor.

Let me be very clear on this point: this is what the Republicans will do if they get back in power. This is what the Republicans always do when they get back in power. Of course, this is not what they say they will do. And I think Chait tries to pull a fast one by saying that Bush the Younger walked back the Republican austerity agenda during the 2000 campaign. Of course he did! The federal government had a budget surplus. But what did Reagan run on 1980? Balanced budget. (Along with a 30% tax cut, of course; because you can have it all if you are a Republican!) What did Bush the Elder run on in 1988? Balanced budget. And then the Republican base got mad at him for doing something about it.

In general, voters (Not just the conservative ones!) like the idea of a balanced budget. But they don’t like the reality of it. They don’t like cuts to the entitlements or the war machine or basically anything but “foreign aid,” which is less than 1% of the federal budget. What’s more, they don’t like tax increases, although in recent years, the middle class has been so badly squeezed that they are more and more comfortable with a “soak the rich” policy. (A “soaking” is now defined as an increase in the top marginal tax rate of 4.6 percentage points.) But the people will vote for a candidate who promises the impossible and then borrows like mad once in office.

The problem is with the Republican base. There really is a change there. During the 2016 Republican primary, I don’t believe that they will go along with a softening of the intolerance rhetoric. Mitt Romney didn’t talk about the makers versus the takers because he especially wanted to. He did it because the base eats it up. It is who they are. They want to be told the world is divided into the good and bad. They are the good who contribute (even though they usually come from states that take more from the government than the produce in taxes). And those are the bad people who just take and take and take.

After what will then have been seven years of nonstop hysteria about the budget deficit, I don’t think that the base will turn on a dime and decide to support a candidate who says that the budget isn’t a big deal. Yes, politicians will be able to do that. Chait correctly notes that Cheney went from “deficits don’t matter” to “debt crisis” with the ease of a ballet dancer. But there are consequences for political rhetoric. Look at the huge increase in attacks on LGBTs in Russia right now—that didn’t happen in a vacuum.

Once the Republicans choose a candidate for president, he (And I do mean he!) might be able to walk back some of the red meat that was necessary to get the nomination. But Mitt Romney did try to do that. There is only so much you can do. However, it is really important to remember that Romney didn’t lose because of his extreme views or the 47% comment or any of that. He lost because the economy was doing okay. If there is an economic crisis in mid-2016, almost anyone the Republicans run will have a very good chance of winning. And that would be a catastrophe.

You may remember that I disagree with Thomas Frank that the Republicans intentionally wreck the government so that liberals, once back in power, will have to spend their time cleaning up the mess rather than enacting liberal policy. The important word there is “intentionally.” The fact remains that Frank is right that this is what Republicans do. And if the Democrats lose the White House in 2016, we will repeat the cycle all over again, but not with a budget surplus and a strong economy.

So for the umpteenth time, there will be no Republican “reform” in 2016. If they start losing off-year elections, then the party will start to change. But until then, it is going to mean more pandering to the base and fratricide. There is nothing to the minor and vague reforms of Rubio and Lee. There will be no re-ignition of “compassionate conservatism.” There will just be more of the same.

Afterword

Chait says that he wants a better Republican Party because regardless they will eventually get back in power. I totally agree. But things like “compassionate conservative” are all for show. There was nothing that distinguished the two Bush presidencies other than the fact that the second one was managed much worse. So I want a better Republican Party, not better Republican rhetoric.

[1] There really are no conservative wonks.

Over on Majority Report today, they played a bit from a recent Fox & Friends episode that featured Nick Adams. He wrote a book called The American Boomerang. The book is an Australian conservative’s idea of a “pep talk” for America. Go team! Whatever. But he was brought on the show to talk about the feminization of men in general and American men in particular. This is not, apparently, something that Adams can even pretend to be an expert on. But Fox News is pushing this narrative so they are reaching out to anyone who will agree with them.

In the small part that Sam Sedar played, the whole gang was going to town on the idea that we must teach our boys that it is okay to be themselves. And by that, they mean a totally stereotypical view of what a man is. My take on it is just the opposite. Men are acting more like they want. Most men do not not want to act like the boys in Lord of the Flies, nor do most of them dream of the days when it was fine to pinch your secretary’s butt.

The place that these ridiculous ideas of manhood come from are adolescent fantasies about manhood. This is how people assumed their fathers (and actually, more accurately, grandfathers) behaved. And I’m sure there were those kinds of men. But just as now, there were all kinds of men. Today what we call a metrosexual is what we used to call a dandy. There wouldn’t have been a word for it if it were that unusual.

There are lots of ways to be a man. But what the people on Fox & Friends are calling for is not for men to be allowed to be men. They are calling for certain men to be allowed to be assholes with impunity. So you see: no one is stopping, for example, Chris Christie, from being an asshole. We all have to deal with people like him. But these conservatives want us to pretend that the way that Christie acts is right. And it clearly has been for most of the voters of New Jersey. But it’s not right as far as I’m concerned. He’s a bully. Not because he’s a “man’s man,” but because he uses his power to pick on people who aren’t as powerful as he is. I knew such people were bullies when I was 5-years-old; I’m not going to pretend they aren’t now.

Above all, shouldn’t conservatives define the ideal of manhood as something more, you know, conservative. Shouldn’t it be someone more like Charles Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie? Isn’t a real man one who protects the weak? When did it become someone like Christie? By this logic, Genghis Khan should be our ideal. He killed a lot of men and fucked a lot of women. Is that what the ultimate conservative man is now? Or is it just that they want to thread the needle: the ultimate man is whichever conservative politician they are currently pushing. Even when it’s a woman.

Chris Christie started his second term today.[1] I saw a bit of it. (I try to avoid these things because they are boring.) But one line really stood out to me, “We have to be willing to play outside the red and blue boxes the media and pundits put us in.” That’s interesting. I didn’t know it was the pundits that were putting politicians in these boxes; I thought it was the choice of each politician. You know: the way I’m a Democrat because I agree more with that party than with the Republicans.

Let’s leave aside the fact that it is looking more and more like Christie has run New Jersey like an old political boss from Chicago where money trumps ideology. That’s generally true of modern Republicans, anyway. But when it comes to ideology, Christie’s “moderation” is phantasmagoric. You can see it in the writings of those political pundits who Christie claims try to put him in a box, but not in reality.

One of the main ways that Christie is “different” from the GOP generally is that he accepts climate change. But as I wrote before, “Christie’s affirmation of climate change has been so weak as to be useless.” What’s more, in a Republican presidential primary, I suspect he would walk that back with something like, “Well, I don’t know, I just think we should look into it.” And that is pretty much the current state of climate change denial: we need more study! When it comes to workers rights and economic issues generally, he is absolutely ideologically pure. All that yelling at teachers? That’s not just because he’s an asshole; it is also because he hates unions. And finally, on social issues he is also absolutely ideologically pure. He’s anti-choice. He’s anti-gay.

The question logically comes up, “Why do people claim that Christie is a moderate?” I think it is simple as this: his rhetoric isn’t as extreme as that we hear coming out of Texas. The biggest part of this is that he doesn’t use religious language about sin and damnation. He talks like people normally do in New York and Washington so he seems like a regular guy. Of course, what’s really going on is that Christie just has a different approach to “fire-breathing” conservatism. It is encapsulated in what Paul Krugman calls him, “Governor Yells-at-People.”

What the current Christie scandals show, regardless of whether he is directly involved or not, is that any actual ability to “work across the isle” is nothing but power politics: forcing the other side to do his bidding. He isn’t interested in “compromise,” that vaunted end-in-itself for “centrist” pundits. Regardless, Republican executives usually get more done with Democratic legislatures than the other way around. Why? Because Democrats are more compliant. If Christie had had to deal with the Democratic equivalent of Mitch McConnell in his legislature, he wouldn’t have gotten anything done—except, of course, through his standard extortion techniques.

So it really annoys me to hear Christie pontificate about the media putting politicians in boxes. Christie put himself in a very small red box. The media have been working overtime to make it appear as though he weren’t a completely ideologically consistent Republican. The media want “bipartisanship” and “compromise.” And they have anointed Christie as the bringer of that, regardless of the facts. For him to pretend otherwise is disingenuous and, frankly, hilarious.

[1] That’s yet another Watergate aspect of this. A lot of people don’t remember, but the Watergate scandal was going strong even during Nixon’s re-election campaign. The Congressional hearings only got going later, but the scandal was out there for all voters to notice, had they been paying attention.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote, The Undeserving Rich. This is a favorite issue around here. Conservatives try to argue that the poor are not deserving and the rich are. In fact, Krugman wrote a blog post about this last week that I discussed, The Rich Versus the Upper Class. (This is quite typical; if you read Krugman’s blog, you don’t really need to read his columns, although I still do.)

Anyway, in the column, he called Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal to task for just outright lying about the recent economic progress of the poor in this country, Obama’s Envy Problem. Quoting from the Census Bureau, Stephens claimed that the incomes of the bottom fifth of earners have gone up 186% since 1979. This, of course, is wrong. That is not inflation adjusted. If you adjust for inflation (which Krugman points out, the Census Bureau did in the exact same table Stephens got the 186% number from), the bottom fifth of earners have seen their pay go down.

That’s embarrassing. Really embarrassing. In fact, when that error is fixed, Stephens’ article has nothing. It is the linchpin of the whole article. He criticized Obama for talking about inequality. Basically, he was saying, “Sure, the rich are getting richer, but so are the poor!” Except, of course, they’re not. But hey, we all make mistakes. Live and learn. Yet Stephens’ article went uncorrected.

So Krugman upped the ante. Later yesterday, he called out Stephens in a blog post, Department of Corrections, and Not. Apparently, Stephens had complained to the New York Times that since he had written his original article, Stephens had put out another article on how one really ought to use inflation adjusted numbers when looking at such issues. This is one of the most chickshit things I have ever seen in my life. All Stephens would have to do is add an update, “The 186% number is not inflation adjusted. The number is actually blah blah blah.”

It has now been almost two days since Krugman’s column first came out (they come out the night before about 7:00 pm west coast time). And still, there is no correction. Forget about Stephens. What does this say about The Wall Street Journal? Have they no shame? Well, historically, The Journal’s editorial page in fact has had no shame. But I don’t see how Stephens and company live with themselves. When I find out about an error I’ve made, I’m a wreck until I correct it. But conservative “journalist” either just take down embarrassing article or pretend they aren’t wrong, which is pretty much the same thing.

Even worse than this shameful and totally indefensible conduct on the part of conservatives is the effect that this has on other conservatives. People will go on writing articles about the fact that there is no economic inequality problem and they will quote from Stephens’ article. Now, they are conservatives, so maybe they’d just do the same thing Stephens did and pick a convenient number to make their points. But one thing is clear: the conservative movement will never become fact-based if their premiere publications can’t even be bothered to correct their most egregious errors.

Afterword

Bret Stephens won a Pulitzer for commentary last year. That doesn’t speak well for American journalism generally. I don’t mean to say that this one mistake makes Stephens a bad writer. Just last week, I rather liked his criticism of Robert Gates’ new book. But what he’s doing now speaks to a general sense of not caring about facts. The Pulitzer citation reads, “Awarded to Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal for his incisive columns on American foreign policy and domestic politics, often enlivened by a contrarian twist.” Contrary to the facts?

Jonathan Chait wrote an excellent article today, Deficit Scolds Are Holding the Unemployed Hostage. It is broadly about something I talk about a lot around here. The deficit scold industry may have it’s stated purpose—to reduce the long-term deficit—but what it actually accomplishes is to push all economic policy rightward by the use of endless false equivalence. But it isn’t an accident.

This works very simply because of the fact that the Democratic Party isn’t liberal on economic issues. So it turns out that what these rich-people groups want in terms of economic policy is the same thing that, for example, Obama wants. But they can’t admit that. They’ve got to pretend that they are right in between the parties. If only the two sides would compromise! Of course, the Democrats have done little else but compromise for the last 35 years.

Think of a very unfair parent. He has two kids. One of them stabbed the cat to death and the other left the refrigerator door ajar. Fifteen minute timeouts for them both! Except that the deficit scolds are worse than this. Imagine that one of the kids stabbed the cat to death and the other did exactly as he was told. Fifteen minute timeouts for them both! This is a huge benefit the deficit scolds are providing for the Republicans, because regardless of how badly they misbehave, they are never punished for it—at least not by the deficit scolds.

But here is the thing that you have to understand, and that Chait is not willing (publicly anyway) to talk about. The deficit scolds don’t care about the deficit. They really don’t. It is just an excuse for cutting entitlement programs and lowering taxes on the rich. I don’t normally go in for long quotes, but shortly after the last presidential election, Matt Yglesias wrote what I think of one of the best pieces of opinion journalism I’ve ever read. We were headed toward the “fiscal cliff.” If nothing was done by Congress, federal income taxes would go up on everyone who pays them. This is something that should have thrilled the deficit scolds. But it did not. Here he is discussing the top deficit scold group, The Fix The Debt Two-Step:

And then he goes into his brilliant analogy about Quakers who want to balance the budget by cutting defense.

You may wonder what “rate-cutting tax reform” is. Normally, this is where tax rates are decreased, but so are deductions so that the total amount brought in is the same. Much of the debt scold industry claims to want to do this so that the total brought in goes up. It doesn’t much matter. Let’s just go with the equalized case. What is the point of doing it? Well, you could do it because it is fairer. (I discuss this concept in depth in, Hidden Welfare for the Rich.) But that’s pretty minor. It is not the reason that billionaire Pete Peterson has spent oh so many millions trying to change the tax code. Tax deductions are far easier to get enacted than tax rate reductions. What’s more, it is especially easy for the rich to get those special loopholes. So it’s a great deal: swap the deductions for the rate decreases. In ten years, the deductions will all be back but the new low rates will still be there.

So everything that Fix the Debt and related groups are doing is designed to take money away from the poorer classes and give it to the rich. “Fix the Debt” would be more appropriately called, “Screw the Poor.” And by “poor,” I many almost everyone in this more and more unequal society.

It is Martin Luther King Day! It is the day we celebrate the mythic figure rather than the man. And that is how it should be because no country has ever celebrated an actual man. But at least King is a happy exception to Lord Acton’s observation, “Great men are almost always bad men.” King was that kind of man Acton had in mind when he equivocated. Still, given that we are celebrating the symbol and not the man (we celebrated his birthday when it actually occurred last Wednesday), I would prefer to call it, “Civil Rights Day.”

I know that’s kind of generic, but it does have a few advantages. One very big one is that while King was hugely important to the civil rights struggle, he was hardly alone. What’s more, the civil rights struggle continues. Just ask blacks in Virginia. As I’ve noted before, “Everyone now accepts that poll taxes were a real issue meant to stop poor blacks from voting. What are voter ID laws other than a poll tax by another name?”

But I have a not-so-pure reason for wanting to call today Civil Rights Day. Republicans really bug me when it comes to Martin Luther King. Because he has become a mythic figure just like George Washington, he is cuddly and can be embraced by everyone except people who are explicitly bigots. I would find it less annoying to argue about the continuing civil rights struggle (Republicans think it ended in 1965!) than to argue about how King would now support the Republican Party.

Last night, TMCB Patriot sent me to the following image made by some true believing Republican:

As TMCB Patriot noted, MLK Was A Republican! Photo Montages Don’t Lie. I guess I can see how a Republican who said, “We believe in setting people free,” would think that. And all that disguised control in the form of charity! I can just imagine King saying those immortal words, “”Free to starve, free to starve! Thank God almighty we are free to starve!”

But this is the kind of nonsense we get from Republicans. They really are the postmodern party: reality is whatever we agree on. So if they say that Martin Luther King was a Republican long enough, he must have been. Just like in the 1960s they said (And some still do!) that he was a communist. But there is no evidence of either of those claims. Publicly, King stayed nonpartisan. Privately, he clearly tended Democratic.

What I find interesting is that Martin Luther King Sr was a Republican. At least he was until 1964. And then in the 1970s until his death in 1984, he was an outspoken Democrat. His political journey indicates what happened to the parties. The Democrats—especially in the South—had been a racist party. Similarly, the Republican Party used to be in favor of civil rights. But the Democrats evolved on the issue and the Republicans devolved on it. That’s why the image contains pictures of pre-Civil War icons.

Look at the whole message of the image: blacks vote Democratic out of habit or something. The use of the Elbert Guillory quote implies that blacks are either stupid or childish for voting Democratic. But note that the image reveals its own lie. Yes, blacks used to vote overwhelmingly Republican. And then they changed—because the parties changed. At least when the Democrats were a racist party, they didn’t run around whining that blacks were just voting Republican out of habit.

So happy Martin Luther King Day! And happy Civil Rights Day! But it is not a destination, just another step on an eternal journey.

Update (20 January 2014 11:35 am)

Ed Kilgore has a great King quote from a 1965 sermon:

Amen!