A couple of days ago, I wrote about Ross Douthat’s widely mocked column. I was following off Ezra Klein’s idea that Presidents are more powerful when Congress decides to do nothing. I wrote, Republican Delusion Empowers Obama. Well, since Douthat’s first article, he has had a bit of a back and forth with Brian Beutler at New Republic (among others), and I think it is really enlightening about the broader issue that all of this brings up: Republican dysfunction and how the reform aspects of the party are nothing of the kind.

In this case, we get to the bottom of how even the most reasonable conservatives are still just as crazy as the Republican Party itself. Douthat is considered a leading light among Republican reformers. In his article Reformish Conservatives, Ryan Cooper gave Douthat a score of 5 out of 10 in the level of his reform ideas. But remember, Cooper is being very nice, or at least grading on a curve. Republican apologist David Frum got a score of 7. So make of that what you will.

As far as I’m concerned, what makes them Republican “reformers” is that they don’t spit bile. It isn’t that they really want the party to change its policies as that they want the party to talk nice. And Douthat does indeed talk nice. So he got some push back for his Sunday column saying that what Obama was going to do would be “Tyranny! Tyranny I tell you!” This caused him to come out with another, rather long, article where he responded to his critics, Anatomy of a Power Grab. In it, he admitted that his column had been “a little on the shrill side.”

That gives away the game right there, I’m afraid. Douthat admits that he forgot what his job description is. He’s supposed to make right wing talking points sound reasonable. And so in the blog post, he is back to form: telling it like it isn’t in a reasonable sounding way. But Beutler is there to catch the heart of Douthat’s argument. Basically, Douthat is arguing that the current DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is illegal. If he isn’t, then Douthat’s argument is just about norms and it becomes a mess that absolutely cannot be addressed until we know exactly what Obama wants to do. So I have to assume that Douthat, just like the Republican crazies in the House, thinks that what Obama is doing right now is illegal. Beutler:

I think it is more correct to say that a column in support of right wing nut job Steve King would be an act of Reformish Republican malpractice. His job description clearly states that he is supposed to push unreasonable conservative ideas, but dress them up in nice words and formal argument so that they seem reasonable. Otherwise, what is Douthat doing at The New York Times? The Steve Kings and the Louie Gohmerts can speak for themselves. And Douthat knows this. If he stopped cloaking his misogyny and homophobia in the form of “saving the middle class family,” he’d be out of a job. And I don’t think Breitbart.com is hiring right now.

(Just kidding! Breitbart.com is always hiring when gay-hating misogynists are available!)

As you should know, Michael Hiltzik is one of the best political columnists around. But he works on the west coast, so he is largely ignored by the New York punditocracy. But he’s great. That’s why he’s listed on the right under “Daily” (Economy Hub). What Jonathan Bernstein is to political science reporting, Hiltzik is to economics reporting. Except that Hiltzik is actually a whole lot more fun. Anyway, yesterday he wrote a very interesting and maybe even hopeful article, Dire Warning from Wall Street: Income Inequality Hurts US Growth.

The article refers to a report out of Standard & Poor’s. I know what you’re thinking, “Weren’t they one of the companies that were giving high ratings to all that subprime garbage?” Yes they were! But you have to understand: they were paid to do that; this isn’t a paid gig. The point is that Standard & Poor’s is corrupt, not incompetent. So you should pay attention when Chief US Economist Beth Ann Bovino writes, How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening US Economic Growth, And Possible Ways To Change The Tide.

Oh. My. God. I know what you’re thinking, “Thomas Piketty must have gotten to her!” But no. That’s not it at all. This has all been pretty clear for a long time. Think about cell phones. First, if only one or two people had them, no one would care. We would call them walkie-talkies and move one. What’s more, they would be really expensive. You’d have to have cell phone towers all over the world just in case one of the two people who had a phone happened to be there. So it is nice to have a lot of people who make enough money to make things like cell phones and the internet cheap and interesting.

What’s more, there is the issue of having people to sell stuff to. I walked through our local JC Penney this afternoon and it was like a ghost town. Retailers like that are really hurting because there is less and less of a middle class. It seems like we are headed to a country where there are a couple of Tiffany & Co stores and thousands of Dollar Trees. That’s not stable, but our economy is getting more and more like that. Even Kmart, considered really low market when I was a kid, is having problems. The thing is that rich people own stores like JC Penney and Kmart and they can’t keep making money if no one has the cash to shop at those places.

This is one of the reasons I don’t understand why the rich have become so focused on the short term. Their obsession with short-term profits is bad for them long-term. I would think that they would be the most vocal supporters of things like welfare (Food stamps!) and unemployment and education and all those things that allow the middle class to thrive. But in general, they aren’t. Maybe it isn’t that surprising, though. In my experience, people in business are often clueless about how the macroeconomy works.

Regardless of this, I’ve also made the argument that the rich should be worried about social breakdown, The Revolution Will Be Televised. Well, Bovino makes the same argument. Michael Hiltzik explains:

Bovino even offers some suggestions for changing things. She says that we ought to increase access to education. While I agree with that, it isn’t the core of what is wrong in America. And I would really like people to decouple education from “earning potential.” A democracy needs educated people just to survive. We here in America take our democracy for granted. It isn’t. And we are seeing the results of that.

She recommends things like spending on healthcare, but not (I suppose it is too radical) a guaranteed minimum income. But she does suggest increasing taxes on the rich. That is, I’m afraid, the key to the matter. But I fear that the rich will only allow that after things get much worse.

But there is no doubt, it is nice to hear stuff like this coming out of Wall Street. It is a good start.

Jonathan Bernstein just wrote yet another in what has become of political reporting genre that I hate, How to Target Nonexistent Fraud. It follows on Justin Levitt’s Wonk Blog article, A Comprehensive Investigation of Voter Impersonation Finds 31 Credible Incidents Out of One Billion Ballots Cast. Hooray! There is no in-person voter fraud! Or, to be more exact, this kind of voter fraud occurs at a rate of 0.000003%. The effect of miscounting—even in recounts—is undoubtedly larger. So voter ID laws don’t make any sense.

In fact, Bernstein looks at it from a cost-benefit perspective:

Okay, sure. But this kind of analysis legitimizes racist conduct. The term “voter fraud” is the newest form of dog whistle politics. You may remember that in 2009, many conservatives were claiming that Obama only won the presidency because of voter fraud committed by ACORN. Many even made that claim in 2012, even though ACORN did not exist because of a concerted, dishonest, and highly successful attack on the group. This is the basis of the current conservative freak out over voter fraud.

Now I understand that the average voter ID enthusiast doesn’t consciously think that these laws are going to “get the darkies!” But in their mind, that is exactly the kind of voter who they see as committing fraud. This is what’s going on with Chris McDaniel and his outrage over the Mississippi Republican Senate primary. In the first draft of a press release, it referred repeatedly to “black Democrats” wrongly voting in the election. So even for the Republican base, this is a racial issue.

For the Republicans who are pushing this, it is explicitly, but strategically, racist. That is to say that they know how their arguments will play with the base, but they don’t necessarily have anything against blacks and other minorities, except so far as they tend to vote for the Democratic Party. But even if we take the racial element out of this, the point of voter ID laws is to disenfranchise Democratic leaning voters. And that is all that has to be said.

So every time someone writes a column trying to show that in-person voter fraud—the only kind of fraud that is addressed by voter ID laws—is not real, they are implying that voter ID laws are being passed because people are really worried about voter fraud. They aren’t. This is just a mercenary anti-democratic effort by Republicans to keep Democrats from voting. No amount of evidence like that produced by Justin Levitt will ever convince the Republicans that voter ID laws are not a good idea for suppressing Democratic Party voting.

That is a segment from last night’s All In with Ezra Klein sitting in for Chris Hayes. It was called Congress: Less Popular Than Head Lice? It is based upon a Washington Post–ABC News poll that found that not only is Congress unpopular, but for the fist time, a majority of people say that they are unhappy with the job their own representatives are doing. This is news because normally people hate Congress but love their Congress members. Now I’m going to explain why none of this matters.

Let me start with some statistics that Klein provides later in the segment. In a NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll of Americans: 71% say the country is headed in the wrong direction; 60% described the country as in a state of decline; 76% are not confident their children’s generation will be better off than their own. These statistics mean pretty much nothing. The last one isn’t quite so bad because it implies economic conditions, but even it isn’t explicit. Overall, these are the vaguest of questions.

What does it mean that the country is headed in the wrong direction? What direction is that? I agree: the country is headed in the wrong direction. By that, I mean that we are headed toward ever more inequality which is destroying our democracy. But other people think the country is headed in the wrong direction because women don’t wear dresses anymore and minorities demand things like voting rights. Similarly, is the country in decline? I say yes! But I say this because, like all empires, we are focused on our military and maintaining our power instead of just doing the work of the people and trying to make everyone’s life better. But other people think the country is in decline because same sex marriage is becoming a national right and woman can still get birth control pills.

This same dynamic is going on with the polls about Congress. I don’t like Congress because the House is controlled by the Republicans, the Senate can largely be ground to a halt by the Republicans, and many of the Democrats in both chambers are far too conservative and timid for my tastes. But your average Fox News viewer would say, “I don’t like Congress because Republicans in the House voted with Democrats to raise the Debt Ceiling.” About the only thing that historically low approval of Congress means is that the Republicans have been so good at blocking everything that low-information voters just have a vague idea that Congress isn’t doing much.

The statistic about being unhappy with our own representatives is different. But it is no more meaningful. It is a cliche, but it is true: politics is the art of the possible. The question on the ballot is never the choice between a real candidate and some idealized candidate who does everything exactly as you want. The question on the ballot is two candidates, each with their own flaws and each who will disappoint us once they are serving. Consider that Obama’s low 40% approval rating is about the same as it was going into the 2012 presidential race—which he won.

In addition to this, I wonder just how much this disapproval of “my own representatives” is driven by the relentless push of conservative media that everything is terrible and if the Republicans in Congress would just stand up to Obama and crash the global economy, everything would be perfect. In other words, I’d like to know if all the extra discontentment isn’t coming primarily from the right. In case you haven’t noticed, it is primarily conservatives who are always complaining that everything is going to hell—you know, the ones who love the country and are so patriotic:

There’s something else very interesting in this segment. The people overall dislike the Republicans in Congress a whole lot more than the Democrats. But they are pretty much evenly split over who they want to control Congress. Now, those stats are from two different polls, so you never know. But apparently the reason it is so different between who the people blame for the problems and who they want to be in control is that they want the Republicans to be a check on Obama’s power. (This is madness, as I explained yesterday, Republican Delusion Empowers Obama.) These are the same people who claim they are upset that nothing gets done in Washington. But when given the chance to elect a Congress that would get things done, they decide it is best to vote for a check against that Kenyan socialist in the White House.

The bottom line is that none of these polls actually mean anything other than that the economy sucks and so people are unhappy. Anything else they demonstrate (like the irrationality of people) has long been established.

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.