Ezra Klein made an interesting point in an article at Vox today, Why the President Becomes More Powerful When Congress Fails. It is a push back against Ross Douthat’s recent widely mocked column where he complains about the presidential overreach that he thinks Obama is going to perform. Klein noted that Douthat is right that congressional inaction doesn’t tell the president what to do, but it also doesn’t tell the president what not to do. Congress is dysfunctional and part of that dysfunction is that it can’t really stop the president from acting.

Implicit in Klein’s article is the idea that Congress actually wants the President to do things that it thinks it can’t be seen doing. Or to put it more correctly: Republicans want Obama to do things that in a saner world, the Republicans want to be and would be able to do. This is a critical issue that we saw very clearly last week when John Boehner called for Obama to address the border crisis through executive action at the very same time that Boehner was also suing Obama for dealing with a problem with Obamacare with executive action.

This gets to the great (And poetic!) Mario Cuomo quote, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” The big problem, at least since Obama became President, is that Republican politicians are no longer willing to abide by this. So in the House right now, the majority of the Republican majority are not willing to take 98% of what they want. That missing 2% would destroy the meter of the verse. And, of course, missing 50% would be totally unacceptable—the poetry would be unrecognizable.

But I think the Republican Party establishment really has to take responsibility for this. The truth is that it has nothing to worry about. The party is now well to the right of its base when it comes to actual policy. But the party establishment has allowed itself to be radicalized by the likes of the subgeniuses Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes. Watching the House Republicans, all I see is weakness. It looks like a caucus that is so afraid, that it is unable to do anything. Their base is mad about the border situation, but they can’t do anything, because they’ve become certain they were sent to Washington to destroy the federal government. These are the same people who represent states who get far more from the federal government than they send to it.

So the question is, when is the Republican Party going to make a stand? As it is, the only difference between the “establishment” and the “tea party” candidates are how extreme their rhetoric is. There is no discernible difference in their policies. But the party insists upon treating their voters as though they were children. They continue to allow this idea to fester that through force of will alone, they can have 100% of what they want. But they know that the base doesn’t actually want what they claim, and that if the party actually did what they said they were going to, it would be a catastrophe.

And we are left with the situation that Ezra Klein wrote about where the hated Obama has far more power than if the Republicans would just start acting like a normal political party.

Update (5 August 2014 11:33 pm)

I just noticed that Bernstein had exactly the same reaction to Ezra Klein’s article that I did, Republican Heal Thyself. Of course, he does it in his own (non-ranting) professional style:

What is so great about Digby is that she can blow your mind with a sentence like, “The idea that the Republicans are worried about ‘bad teachers’ when they encourage the practice of kids being taught at home by parents who aren’t qualified to teach someone how to get up in the morning is a joke.” These are the kind of things that seem obvious but which I somehow missed. And this is an issue that I care rather a lot about.

My sister homeschools her son. She has various reasons for this. But she is also well educated and provides the kind of learning and social environment that all but the richest of parents would envy. So I have nothing against homeschooling in general. But we often get into conflict when talking about the issue, because I am critical of the homeschooling movement. I think most parents homeschool their children for the wrong reasons. What’s more, most parents have no business teaching their children and end up being dependent upon prepackaged curricula that are more about protecting children from the great big world of ideas than about educating them.

Consider the National Center for Education Statistics 2006 survey of the reasons that parents gave for homeschooling. Previous open-ended surveys created their own problems, so they offered parents six reasons to choose from as you can see in the following table:

What’s interesting about this is that you can see both what was a factor and what was the primary issue. “Academics” is the smallest of the “big three” reasons. The top two are basically just “moral” concerns: “Environment” and “Religion.” This is responsible for 61% of parents’ primary reason for homeschooling. Now, I’m sure that some of the people in that group were not homeschooling for religious or anti-intellectual reasons. Just the same, I’m sure that some of those who chose the “Academics” reason actually meant, “I’m afraid my child will get a bad education that doesn’t teach them that God created the universe in six literal days.”

So how bad is it? Well, last year, David Wheeler made quite a splash with his short The Atlantic article, Old Earth, Young Minds: Evangelical Homeschoolers Embrace Evolution. The subtitle is, “More Christian parents are asking for mainstream science in their children’s curricula. Will religious textbook companies deliver?” So the fact that some evangelicals actually want their children to learn real science was a big deal. I think that tells you how big the problem is.

So let’s get back to Digby’s insight. These are the parents that Republicans think are just great for teaching our children how to be good and productive citizens. When they push homeschooling, they aren’t thinking of my sister with her Biology degree from the University of California and all her liberal ideas. They are thinking of the people who are trying to keep their children from learning anything that Bronze Age Palestinians didn’t know. And we are supposed to believe that these Republicans are trying to improve public education by destroying teachers’ unions? No. They are trying to destroy teachers’ unions because they want to destroy teachers’ unions. And if they simultaneously destroy public education, that will be an extra benefit.

While clicking around last night, I happened upon a 2011 Michael Lind article at Slate, Why Libertarians Apologize for Autocracy. He argued that libertarianism really is incompatible with democracy. I think he is right about that claim, although if you talk to actual libertarians, you will usually find that they are delusional. In my experience, most of them think that libertarianism is unpopular only because the people don’t know just how great it would be. The serious libertarian thinkers, however, know that libertarianism goes against the very idea democratic rule.

Lind noted that the two irradiating lights of the libertarian movement—Friedman and Hayek—very much saw the fundamental problem. You should read Lind’s article for his take and all the historical evidence. I will explain it here from my own perspective. Liberal democracies are the result of people starting with the idea that they want to maximize everyone’s freedom. Over time, they find that it is necessary to enact laws that go against the “maximum freedom” doctrine of libertarianism because, for example, my next door neighbor’s freedom to pollute is interfering with my freedom to live a healthy life. So people who are looking to maximize overall freedom naturally move in the direction of liberal democracy.

The problem with the likes of Friedman and Hayek is their focus on “maximum freedom.” They both want to remove all government-caused diminution of freedom, but don’t care about other things that reduce freedom. What this means is that they are interested in maximizing the freedom of those who, in a liberal democracy, already have the most freedom. Consider public schools. There are a number of reasons for having them, but one is compensate for the vagaries of birth. It should be clear to everyone that the freedom gained by public education is vastly greater than the cost of taxes to pay for it. Except it isn’t to the libertarian.

So libertarians find themselves interested only in one side of the freedom equation. They are looking to create a society in which some people have the maximum possible freedom. But you don’t need libertarianism for that! Kim Jong-un and his associates have the maximum possible freedom. So it is no surprise that libertarians would gravitate toward despots like Pinochet, who (unlike Kim Jong-un) use the language of free markets.

It may seem shocking that many libertarians think that an autocrat could set up a libertarian utopia and once completed, the autocrat would just yield power. But libertarians are not known for their deep thought or understanding of human psychology. And note how much this idea sounds like Stalinism, where there was only going to be a dictatorship until the communist utopia was realized. And this is more and more how libertarians seem to me: like communists of the 1920s. But the truth is that Milton Friedman didn’t actually care who was running the government, as long as the rich got to do what they wanted.

Lind noted one of the most interesting contradictions of libertarian thought. It may claim to care about freedom in a general sense, but all its followers are ever interested in are issues of economic freedom. And it isn’t just any economic freedom—it is the economic freedom of those who are already rich. Consider this:

Lind doesn’t mention it, but the libertarians have been worse than apathetic to real issues of freedom like civil rights and police abuse. They have been antagonistic toward them. They always find some way to disagree with them. I never get into an argument with a libertarian in which they don’t at some point mention that local government is always better. They can’t seem to accept the fact that the worst domestic abuses of the government over the last century have been by state and local governments. Nor do they engage with the fact that “states’ rights” is code for anti-democratic and racist state policies. (Lind also noted that Confederate President and American traitor Jefferson Davis was posthumously inducted into the “libertarian hall of fame.”) Libertarian thought is not about freeing the average man; it is about enslaving him.

So I completely agree with Lind that libertarianism is incompatible with democracy. In fact, I’ll go further. I think that idea is cooked into the libertarian philosophy itself.