Jonathan Chait is right about this, Hillary Clinton Calls the Republican Bluff on Voting Rights. It’s about Clinton’s call last week for automatic voter registration. The summary of the article is, “A new idea to make voting easy that Republicans will have to come up with a reason to oppose.” Because that really is the issue. Republicans have come out big in recent years for making voting as hard as possible. It is always posed as fighting against “voter fraud.” But in fact, it is just a way to get as few people voting as possible because the more people who vote the better liberal politicians and ideas do.

At the end of his article, Chait highlights Daniel Foster in National Review, who wrote, Don’t Make Democracy More Like The Internet. He claimed that automatic voter registration would be “a terrible idea” and “not just because it would certainly be devastating to the electoral prospects of conservatives.” And then he goes on to explain why democracy is a bad thing and it should be limited to those who care enough to jump through all the hoops. He claimed that sure, “dolts” (his word) ought to have the right to vote if they are willing to do everything that Republicans do to stop them, but “that doesn’t mean we have to encourage” them.

This is a standard argument that I have heard from conservatives for decades. But it is fundamentally wrong. Older people are more likely to vote than younger people, but that doesn’t mean that they care more about voting. Older people have — on average — huge advantages that make voting easy for them: they don’t have children to care for; they don’t have jobs to go to; they don’t move often. So arguments like those of Foster are not about who cares the most about politics; they are about which demographics are seen as better because they are more likely to vote for conservatives.

In general, when people complain to me about voters who don’t understand the issues, it turns out that the complainer is extremely ignorant about the issues. The argument really only ever means, “These people don’t agree with me!” Of course, Fox News has made this infinitely worse by allowing its addicts to think that they are being well informed when they are actually being well disinformed. The people who just watch the nightly news are usually better informed that Fox News viewers — except when it comes to Solyndra and Jade Helm.

Democracy is an extremely humble form of government. It is dependent upon the idea that none of us has a monopoly on the truth and so we are better off getting everyone’s input. Conservatives have never much liked this idea. They see democracy as mob rule. And indeed, it can be. But not having democracy leads inexorably to tyranny. The alternative to democracy isn’t some perfect as yet undisclosed system. But conservatives continue to push against democracy because they ultimately believe in monarchy — just one that they are in control of.

At the same time that conservatives are pushing for less democracy, they are undermining the very idea of absolute truth. This is what is behind their war science. So they aren’t even making the argument that the masses get certain issues wrong on a factual basis. Conservatives don’t even care about the factual basis of their claims. They just want the world to work a certain way, and if that isn’t true, they don’t care. They are the ones who define reality. That’s why Sam Brownback claimed that cutting corporate and other taxes on the rich would increase revenue for the state, and after the opposite happened, he continues to stay the course.

The question is whether the conservatives will come up with a better argument than Daniel Foster did to counter Hillary Clinton’s idea to make voter registration automatic. My guess is that they won’t. They will just bluster their way through it. They will never say that democracy is bad, but they will make their “only people who care” argument. They will throw in a little “voter fraud” and how we can’t do a thing until there is not a single fraudulent vote in the nation. And they will just move on. Don’t expect the media establishment to question them.

My father has been watch The Roosevelts. And in relationship to it, he told me, “Roosevelt wanted there to be a lockbox on Social Security.” I sighed heavily. Suddenly, I was transported back into the 2000s and 1990s — the last two periods when everyone was talking about the Social Security lockbox. The problem with it is that it is meaningless. Actually, it is worse than meaningless. The idea of a lockbox is put forward to scare people into thinking that the federal government is stealing money out of the Social Security trust fund in order to pay for Cadillacs for welfare queens.

You probably remember George W Bush, in 2005 after his re-election, going around telling people that there was no money in the trust fund. It was just paper — IOUs! Of course, that’s all cash is. But more to the point, that’s all that bank accounts are. I don’t have money in the bank. I have a number on a ledger. In effect, I have an IOU from the bank. And if the bank goes out of business, I would lose that money except for the fact that that the government guarantees it. So what exactly did Bush think would be in the trust fund? Piles of cash?

It turns out that the Social Security Trust fund is currently worth over $2.5 trillion. There is only about half that much in total cash in the United States. So what are we to do with this money? It needs to be invested one way or another. So the Social Security Administration (SSA) does what everyone the world over does with money they need safely stored: they invest it in US government securities. The fact that one government program is loaning its money to another part of the government does not mean that the money is being stolen.

Think about it with regard to individual investors. They generally have a mix of stocks and bonds. Those bonds generally include a lot of US government bonds. No one — Really: no one — says that these investors are just being ripped off by the federal government because it spends the money that it borrows. Rather, everyone agrees that US government debt is about the safest investment in the world. How safe? Right now, US 10 Year Treasury bonds have a yield of 2.31%. That’s with an average inflation rate last year of 1.6%. (Note: inflation has basically been zero thus far this year.)

So what exactly is the lockbox supposed to do? It is a “solution” to a nonexistent problem. Suppose we hired Donald Trump to administer the Social Security program. All the money coming in would go to him. He would then have to do something with that money. I don’t know what he would do with it, and given my low opinion of him, I would expect the worst. But even aggressive investors would take a large fraction of that money and put it into US government securities. This is exactly what the SSA does. Money isn’t being stolen from Social Security. There is no need for a lockbox and people who talk about it are just trying to scare you.

Here is a little factoid that will tell you almost everything you need to know about politics in America. There are currently 14 Democratic women in the US Senate and there have only ever been 17 Republican women in the Senate. The graph above is from Derek Willis’ article at The Upshot, GOP Women in Congress: Why So Few? It shows the total number of women in Congress since World War I. Up to 1990, the two parties were pretty much the same. But since then, the Republican Party has become unhinged. The Democratic Party is almost to the point of gender parity. But the Republican Party has flatlined.

Sadly, Willis’ article is kind of an apologia for the Republicans. If you read it very carefully, you will see that there really is something wrong with the Republicans. But the article tries very hard to make it all about the dysfunction of the system itself. The Democrats are electing a whole lot more women and the Republicans aren’t, “And political polarization seems to be a major reason.” How is that? Well, the argument seems to be that those women who are Republicans are more moderate — thus less likely to make it through the primary process. Yet, “Democratic women who are potential congressional candidates tend to fit comfortably with the liberal ideology of their party’s primary voters…”

This isn’t “political polarization”; this is “Republican extremism.” And this is something that I’ve written about a lot around here. I still find it hard to fathom how it is that Republicans continue to get roughly half the vote in presidential elections. People who were happy with the Republican Party of Nixon and Reagan should be quite comfortable with the Democratic Party of Obama. The fact of the matter is that there isn’t really a liberal party in the in the United States. We have an extreme right, even proto-fascist, party in the Republicans. And we have a centrist party in the Democrats. It is only relative to the Republicans that any kind of case can be made for the Democrats being liberal.

The whole thing indicates why in our system liberals can never succeed by “moderating.” The Republicans have moved hard and fast to the right. Democrats have moved slowly to the right — that’s especially true on economic issues, but even regarding social issues, the party often lags behind the public. The the huge gulf opened up by the intensity of the Republican move causes journalists to discuss the change as “political polarization” as if what had happened was the Republicans and Democrats both moving to the extremes. In addition, people like Peter Wehner are able to claim that Democrats are the real extremists without being laughed out of polite society. It’s just ridiculous.

It’s pretty clear what would cause the parties to be more symmetric in terms of female participation. The Democrats could become more liberal. That would make the existing Republican Party more appealing to women in the middle of the political spectrum. So increasing polarization would cause more female Republicans to be elected to Congress. Of course, the same thing would happen if the Republicans became less extreme. But that just proves the point that the issue is Republicans extremism and not polarization.

Almost 51% of the nation is female. Yet when one party sees an enormous growth in the representation of women while the other sees its growth stagnate, it is time for yet another column about systemic polarization. Journalists not being able to discuss the issue honestly is one of the things that allows this situation to continue. The Republican Party ought to be ashamed of the current situation. But no: the problem isn’t them; the problem is just “the system.”