For years, I’ve been hearing that Texas is going to turn into a “purple” swing state in the next decades. And my response has always been the same: that’s nonsense. I’m not saying that it is untrue. I’m just saying that there is no way to know. The brilliance of the Republican Party is how it is able to sculpt a world of the deserving and the undeserving. The fact that African Americans are not part of the Republican coalition is not directly because of their skin color. If the Republicans could win by glorifying African Americans and dumping on the white middle class, they would — just as long as they were still able to do their real business of taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

But last week, I saw this paper, Projecting Partisan Change Deep in the Heart of Texas, by Tiffany Cartwright and Tyler Young, two political scientists at Collin College. They looked at the changes of demographics over the next 35 years. Not surprisingly, they find that if voting patterns stay the same, by 2050, Texas will be a solidly blue state. Of course, voting patterns do not stay the same. But what shocked me was not how things would look in 2050, when we really can’t say what will be going on. The shocking finding is that by 2020 — just five years from now — Democrats will have a solid (six percentage point) advantage in Texas.

Note how stark this is. The last time Texas voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was 1976. Also, “Texas Democrats have not won a statewide election in over twenty years.” There is a reason that the people supporting Texas politicians running for president are so certain that Obama is in the process of “taking over” Texas with this Jade Helm nonsense: Texas isn’t just red — it is crazy red. So if Texas became at all competitive in the next few years, it would be amazing. It would also make things really hard for the Republican Party.

Of course, Texas is not going to vote Democratic in the 2020 presidential election. It almost certainly would if everyone eligible to vote actually voted. But we know that is not going to happen. And in the case of Texas, the problem is extreme. The demographic shift in Texas is largely due to increasing Latino population. And they are terrible voters! “In the last few decades, reported turnout among Hispanic voters is about half that of white or black voters in Texas.” Of course, that might change as Latinos respond to their greater political power. Sad to say, people are more likely to vote if they think they will win. The problem is that it will take time to get Latinos to take voting more seriously. And during that time, the Republicans will be working to re-brand the “right” kind of people and the “wrong” kind of people.

Nevertheless, I find this all interesting. Even as early as 2020, the Republicans are going to at least have to start protecting Texas as their territory. And that’s a good start. There doesn’t seem to be any move at all among Republicans to reach out to Latino voters. As Republican voters get whiter, they seem to demand ever more extreme demonstrations of anger at immigrants. Eventually, the Republicans will get over that. But in the next five years? I don’t think so.

Amy Fried wrote a very good article on something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, Three Stark, Politically Critical Dynastic Differences Between Jeb and Hillary. Let me give you an overview of it, and then I’ll add my own take, because I think there is a much more profound difference than she talks about.

In a sense, all three of Fried’s differences could be summed up thusly, “Hillary is a far better politician than Jeb” — because Americans are particularly reticent to blame a person for the sins of a loved one. But she was right to break this all out. She started with something pretty obvious, “Bill Clinton is seen favorably. George W Bush is seen unfavorably.” It’s true: Americans don’t mind power families if, you know, they like the power family. Bush Sr isn’t terribly revered and Bush Jr is hated. So Jeb Bush gets nothing positive from his association and Hillary Clinton does.

The second difference is really just the first difference, “The Clinton economic record is far better than the Bush economic record.” That’s why people like Clinton. If the economy had boomed under Bush, they would all forgive his many other problems. But it didn’t. As Fried noted, even if you forget the bursting of the housing bubble, the unemployment rate under Bush started at 4.2% and went up to 6.3%. For Clinton, it was the opposite: from 7.3% down to 4.2%. Are these fair ways of judging a president? No! But they are how people do judge presidents. And Bush’s economic policies were bad regardless.

The third difference is the heart of the matter:

Even with George W Bush’s policies being unpopular in pretty much every area, Jeb Bush doesn’t see the need push against them. Hillary Clinton is showing no hesitation is pushing back against Bill Clinton’s unpopular policies. I just wish she would push back against his bad policies that aren’t particularly unpopular, but that is certainly asking too much. My hope is just that if she becomes president, she will try to do some minor fixes to the way that her husband screwed up things like the welfare system.

But I think there is a much more fundamental difference between the Clintons and the Bushes. I don’t even see the Clintons as a dynasty. They are a power couple. They were both involved in politics before they met. So their existence as a couple is largely due to their involvement in politics. It is the other way around for the Bushes. I don’t think that George W Bush would have gone into politics if it hadn’t been the family business. What’s more, I don’t see anyone taking him seriously if he had. He has always been a silly guy. People took him seriously because his father had been president. People take Hillary Clinton very seriously on her own terms.

So there is a Bush dynasty, but it is a Clinton partnership. Does that mean that there are no problems with the partnership? Not at all. And it is getting a lot of scrutiny — and it will get a whole lot more. But the Bush dynasty is a greater concern — especially in a country that so fetishizes meritocracy (even though it doesn’t practical it). But it seems oddly “off limits” in mainstream political discussions. Sure, people talk about it on the margins. But just imagine in Jeb Bush were elected president. That would mean that the last three Republican presidents were all from the same family: a father and his two sons. That’s a dynasty — and more proof than is required to call the lie of American “equality of opportunity.” A husband and a wife being president, separated by almost two decades, it is not a dynasty — although I still don’t especially like it.

Almost every time I see Bill Maher, I sigh, “Really, Bill?!” Now he’s upset with Rand Paul because the Senator has turned his back on everything he once stood for. That’s just silly. The only thing that Rand Paul ever stood for is the idea that Rand Paul should be president. Hell, I was calling his father a libertarian pretender in 1988! And Rand Paul doesn’t even swim in the same ideological pond as his father. Do I have to repeat the smoking gun? Rand Paul is (grudgingly) in favor of legalizing cannabis. That is not a libertarian position. That is a paternalistic one, “You can have the one currently illegal drug that I think is acceptable.” And that’s about as close as Rand Paul has ever gotten to libertarianism.

Can Bill Maher really be so deluded as to think that Rand Paul was ever a different kind of Republican? Maybe, because Maher has shown himself to be a singularly limited and facile thinker. What both of the Pauls stand for is not libertarianism but neo-confederatism. They just want local control and it doesn’t take King Solomon to figure out what they want that control for — and even more what their supporters do. And let’s be clear: no one is a serious libertarian who thinks that a zygote deserves full citizenship rights. That’s either someone who is silly or hates women. Again: it don’t take Solomon to figure that one out.

But Maher doesn’t even blame Rand Paul. To him, it is all about the Republican Party. He said, “It’s all just proof that, to be competitive, Republican candidates must say to their base, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, ‘I feel your crazy.'” But nothing is making Rand Paul call for more military spending or turn against same sex marriage or demagogue Jade Helm 15. It’s all what I wrote last year in, Why Republicans Will Nominate Rand Paul in 2016. Rand Paul is the ultimate postmodern president: he doesn’t believe in anything.

I’ve come to wonder over the years why it is that the libertarians find they fit so nicely into the Republican Party. The truth is that I have a lot of libertarian beliefs and after years of being a libertarian, I came to the conclusion that it was the Democrats who more pushed in the proper direction. As I always say: vote for a libertarian, get conservative policy. The libertarians will provide tax cuts for the rich, an end to environmental regulation, and the decimation of the social safety net. But what about the other side of libertarianism: destroying government oppression of the poor, ending drug laws, stopping wars and cutting the military, getting the government out of our bedrooms? Let’s just say that even under the best of circumstances, these are not the priorities of libertarian politicians. So libertarians fit in perfectly in the Republican Party.

But Rand Paul? The only reason he even tries to brand himself a libertarian is so that he can build on his father’s base. And now he is trying to broaden it by dropping all the non-conservative libertarian ideas while still talking the talk. And this seems to work, because I see libertarians everywhere who love him. They just apologize for him, “Well, he has to say that to get elected!” Really?! It is ridiculous to think that once he was elected he would suddenly become a dove and end the war on drugs. He will be just another Republican president, cutting taxes for the rich and destroying necessary regulations.

I suppose we should be grateful that Bill Maher has figured out that Rand Paul will not be his “Republican option.” But he should have always known that.

Bill McBride wrote a very informative article over at Calculated Risk, Public and Private Sector Payroll Jobs: Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. The general information should not surprise anyone: Democratic administrations are much better for job growth than Republican administrations. Of course, we need to remember that this isn’t necessarily a question of policy. The truth is that the economy did well during Reagan and Clinton largely because of Federal Reserve policy. The Fed always has a big impact — for good and (more usually) for bad. And there are other issues.

We don’t have a parliamentary system, so presidents don’t usually get to do what they want. But George W Bush did during his first term. Despite what conservatives say today, for four years, the country got exactly the kind of policy that conservatives claim is so great. And the results were terrible. As you will see in the table below, during Bush’s first term, the country lost 844,000 jobs. That’s a record that is unprecedented in the modern era.

The other side of this is Obama who, despite policy victories in many important areas, saw his ability to grow the government eliminated. Most presidents in the modern era have seen public sector growth of about a million jobs per four year term. In Obama’s first term, he saw a reduction of 702,000 public sector jobs. And in his second term thus far, there have been basically no public sector jobs created. Despite that, his second term private sector job creation will likely one of, if not the, best in the modern era.

Despite all the caveats, the data are pretty hard to get past. There are really only two explanations that conservatives can offer. The first, I’ve already touched on: the idea that Republicans didn’t get to enact true conservative policy. There are a few problems with this. First, Democrats have been even more stymied in enacting liberal policy. Second, this argument devolves into the libertarian fallacy where non-perfect policy is to blame. The implication of this is that conservative policy will make everything worse the closer you get to the ideal, and then right at the end, everything will be great. Almost nothing in the real world works that way.

The second explanation for this is better: the Republicans just had bad luck. But it is still terrible. Reagan, for one, benefited enormously during the middle of his presidency (“morning in America”) because of the pent-up demand brought on the recession at the end of Carter’s term and action by the Federal Reserve at the beginning of Reagan’s. George W Bush similarly benefited, but still managed to have a bad economic recovery.

Here are all the data combined into a single table:

Note that in the table, Obama’s second term only includes the first 27 months. Assuming the same growth for 48 months would lead to 10,745,000 private sector jobs (second highest in this list), and 53,000 public sector jobs.

One thing on this table that may surprise people is that Carter had a really good term in office. There are two reasons that people don’t think of good times when they think of Carter. First, there was a recession at the end of his term. That is, by the way, why he lost re-election. People seem to only remember the ends of presidents’ terms. This is why Obama is likely to be remembered fondly and why Bush is still persona non grata among conservative elites. But the bigger reason is that the narrative is set by the power elite. During Carter’s time in office, there was high inflation. The rentier class will never forgive him for that (not that it was his fault), and they will not let the rest of us forget it.

This is the way that we should think about the economy. Jobs are what matter. GDP is also important. But as we’ve seen for the entire period that we’ve been talking about, there is little relationship between the growth of the economy and how that translates to the lives of ordinary Americans. Of course, from a political standpoint, none of this matters. The people will continue to vote on how the economy does in the nine months leading up to the next presidential election. And if the economy stalls out in 2016, the electorate will put a Republican in the White House — most likely with predictable results.

I am breaking form tonight by throwing an extra post in. I just have to say something about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev getting the death penalty. Regular readers know: I don’t believe in it. Not for Pol Pot. Not for Hitler. Not for anyone. I just don’t see the moral or practical argument for it. But there is more to it than my general philosophical opposition to the death penalty.

There really isn’t any doubt that if his brother, Tamerlan, had been captured alive, that Dzhokhar would not be put to death. This is all about a cultural rite. The society feels the need to have a public execution to solemnize the terrorist act. Tamerlan’s death on the street wasn’t good enough because it had no ritual value. I understand that symbols matters. But this strikes me as pathetic, especially since not one in a hundred people understand that this is what is going on.

In addition to this, it really bothers me that people think that the Boston Marathon bombing was some especially vile act. There are plenty of people who raped, tortured, and murdered many others who didn’t get the death penalty. As a matter of fact, if Tsarnaev had been tried at the state level, he would not have faced the death penalty. What kind of “justice” system do we have where someone’s fate depends upon which bureaucratic structure tries you? But I know what the death penalty apologists respond with. They will say something to the effect that it doesn’t matter about justice in those other cases, we have a chance for justice in this case. That is so ridiculous that it shouldn’t need to be countered. But let me just say that random acts of “justice” is an injustice.

I suppose what really bugs me is that most people will cheer this decision. And that means that collectively, we are just as morally bankrupt as the Tsarnaev brothers were. I understand, we think we have justice on our side. But no one has suggested that the Tsarnaev brothers were psychopaths; they too thought they had justice on their side. They thought they were paying America back for something or other. People always have reasons for doing things. And they always justify what they do — most especially when they murder.

Over at The Intercept, Murtaza Hussain noted, “US Attorney Carmen M Ortiz said in her statement today, the execution of Dzhokhar will send a message that ‘we are not intimidated.'” Really?! Is that the message that it sends? The implication is that it sends that message to the rest of the world. But I don’t think the rest of the world really cares. What Ortiz didn’t mean, but which is correct, is that it sends a message to the American people that “we are not intimidated.” And it is necessary to send that message because we are intimidated. It takes almost nothing to cause us to cower in fear. That’s why spending almost as much money on our military as the rest of the world combined is still not enough for us. We are so afraid that we jump when a young man flips off a security camera.

This is a sad day — not especially for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — but for us.

Update (15 May 2015 11:57 pm)

If Charlie Pierce had managed to publish his end of the weekend post earlier, I wouldn’t have felt the need to write this. He said pretty much what I said. This sums it up: