Martin Longman brought my attention to something interesting in a brief post yesterday, The 50’s Called: They Want Bobby Jindal Back. After last week’s three moderate (the Supreme Court doesn’t do “liberal”) decisions on housing, marriage, and Obamacare, Jindal was beside himself. He told The Advocate in Louisiana, “The Supreme Court is completely out of control, making laws on their own, and has become a public opinion poll instead of a judicial body. If we want to save some money lets just get rid of the Court.” Longman responded, “Over here on the left side of the aisle, we’ve been increasingly frustrated with the decision making of the Supreme Court, from Bush v Gore to the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, but you don’t see any of our governors or presidential candidates calling for the abolishment of the entire Court.”

But this is what has become to the conservative movement in this country. It really is best to see it like an authoritarian movement. There is no thought to consistency. Their ideology is one of results: how do we keep power so that we can continue to enrich ourselves. So it is nonsense to imagine that Bobby Jindal actually believes in anything coherent. Whatever furthers the cause of the conservative movement is good. This week, the Supreme Court was bad for the conservative movement so abolish it.

To some extent, you could say the same thing about ideological coherence about liberals. The big difference is that liberals are not shortsighted. They aren’t willing to destroy democracy in order to “save” it. But when listening to someone like Jindal, I’m reminded of how the Nazis used the democratic system until they had power and then abolished it. Is this what Jindal would do? It’s hard to say. We’ve already seen plenty of Republicans pushing for laws designed to make voting harder. And now they are going after “one person: one vote.” Regardless, the impulse is there.

This “destroy the Supreme Court” impulse isn’t the only one. There is also the “destroy the IRS” impulse. It’s curious. Destroying the IRS would be the same as destroying the government. It just sounds better. It’s kind of like the Walmart CEO saying, “Let’s stop charging people for stuff.” That decision has ramifications — namely, that Walmart would go out of business. But conservatives change what they want to destroy from day to day. For example, Jindal is afraid that the Supreme Court is getting too democratic — having “become a public opinion poll.” But conservatives make populist arguments all the time against Court decisions they don’t like. If they don’t like a Supreme Court decision, it is either that the Court is wrong because it is just following public opinion, or it is wrong because it is going against the will of the people. Reasonable people can’t have it both ways. But Republicans can!

A lot of people have talked about the Republicans being post-truth. It’s actually worse than that. They are post-meaning. And post-planning. If they took the Marshmallow Challenge, they wouldn’t even wait until the proctor was out of the room before eating it. They are the party of the haves who think it is due to their own greatness. As Ann Richards said about George HW Bush, “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.” So whatever offers the easiest way to their goals, they follow it. You know, it’s called our bad luck.

Afterword

That last sentence was a reference to this song:

There is no better place in society to look to see how the power elite rig the economic system than the Federal Reserve. And the best example of this is the way that most people have been entirely brainwashed into self-oppressing regarding monetary policy. Ask anyone which they think is better: a strong dollar or a weak dollar? Unless they know economics, they will say a strong dollar. Yet it is a weak dollar that that is good for workers. It is a weak dollar that makes our exports competitive. The strong dollar is primarily a prize only to people who already have a lot of money — not for people who have to work each week to pay the bills.

So all the time, on CNBC and Fox Business, you will hear people worrying about inflation. Actually, you will hear that same thing pretty much everywhere else. We can’t have inflation! That would reduce the value of the dollar! That might encourage the business community to stop sitting on piles of money and invest instead! They might be forced to hire some unemployed Americans! We can’t have that, now, can we?! Of course, inflation and a strong dollar are not exactly the same thing, but they are related and they both affect how well workers do. And the two things that are constantly pushed — a strong dollar and low inflation — are bad for workers.

Given all this, I was intrigued to see a Ben Leubsdorf article at The Wall Street Journal, US Inflation Undershoots Fed’s 2% Target for 37th Consecutive Month. The Federal Reserve has decided that it should keep inflation right at 2%. So that ought to mean that sometimes it is above and sometimes it is below. But it’s now been over three years and the Fed has managed to keep it under that value without error. I can assure you this: if the Fed kept the inflation rate 0.5 percentage points above 2% for three years, you would see heads exploding on CNBC.

And even the 2% inflation target is a joke. Jeff Madrick in his book Seven Bad Ideas, explained that this target was pretty much made up out of whole cloth by Alan Greenspan. “Persuasive studies find that only annual rates of inflation into the double digits affect economic growth.” But we have the 2% inflation target — not because everyone thinks Greenspan is a genius — but because it is good for the power elite.

Do you know what the core inflation was during the 1980s? It was 4%. That was considered reasonable. But over time, the tax rates that are considered reasonable for the rich to pay go down and down. And the inflation rate that the rich are expected to face goes down and down. It’s a feedback. The more policy changes to enrich the power elite, the more money they have to buy further policy changes that will enrich them. We still commonly see conservative plans to cut the top marginal tax rate down to 25%. We don’t hear much about cutting the Fed’s inflation target down. But it isn’t really necessary, since the Fed seems afraid to ever get much above it, and has no problem coasting way below it. The power elite know the Fed does its bidding: 37 straight months!