Steve M over at No More Mister Nice Blog wrote, The Conservative Ethic: Punish the Losers. It’s a comparison of two articles by Paul Krugman: one about Jeb Bush and the idea that Americans should work more, and one about Europe’s cruel treatment of Greece. They certainly are linked. The essence of conservatism is that those with power are the right kind of people and those without it are the wrong kind of people. This is what leads to hundreds of billions of dollars given to banks without a thought but protests in the streets about helping home owners.

But I think Steve trivialized the situation a bit when he wrote, “The underdogs are supposed to do all the sacrificing, because the world is divided into the deserving and the undeserving, and the deserving shouldn’t really sacrifice at all.” Certainly, that’s true on some level, but it is just how the disease presents itself. The cause is deeper. And he got at it when he summed up the thinking of the power elite, “They think of themselves as the ones who have a genuine work ethic and who are willing to delay gratification, but in reality they insist that their gratification must proceed uninterrupted, because they deserve that.”

There are two attributes of the power elite that motive them. The first is a callousness toward others. All people have a tendency to over-honor those they are around and to mistrust those they aren’t. But the poor don’t dehumanize the rich, because our entire media and entertainment system is designed to lionize the rich. For every appearance of Montgomery Burns, there is an appearance of Undercover Boss and literally dozens of “rich people as oracles” segments on the news. And that is to say nothing of rich guy superheroes like Bat Man and Iron Man. These are the images our society has of the rich. The images the society has of the poor are of unkempt and dirty street people — usually also criminals. So it is no wonder that the rich especially can disregard them as undeserving.

The other attribute of the power elite is that they are shortsighted. That is a great irony, of course. As Steve noted, they are the ones who think they delay gratification, but they do no such thing. And the best example of this is how they fight tooth and nail against anything that will help the working class. You literally cannot help the poor without indirectly helping the rich. But you can very easily help the rich without helping the poor. Helping the poor grows the economy. The rich would be richer with more equality, but that might take a couple of quarters — even years. Can’t have that!

But it also takes us back to the first attribute of callousness. To a large extent, the rich don’t care about the absolute level of their wealth. It is the relative wealth. And that is a zero sum game. The rich can’t feel rich unless the poor are doing badly. If it came down to it, I’m sure the rich would be happier being poorer if the working class did even worse, than they would be to be wealthier if the working class were to close the gap. Of course, I don’t expect a rich person to think this in the abstract, but this is the conclusion based on how they act.

So there you have it. The rich are shortsighted and callous. It isn’t that they are necessarily horrible people — at least at first. But our system of economics and politics makes them horrible. And this is why they feel very good about themselves as they call for the lower classes to work more hours or for Greece to suffer for another decade or two.

I guess it is time for a little Political Science 101. Some conservatives are freaking out at the prospect that Donald Trump will lose the Republican primary and then go on to become an independent candidate and act as a “spoiler” in the 2016 campaign. That could certainly happen. The problem is that people are relating it to Ross Perot’s 1992 run for president. Donald Trump himself recently told Washington Examiner, “I think every single vote that went to Ross Perot came from Bush. Virtually every one of his 19 percentage points came from the Republicans. If Ross Perot didn’t run, you have never heard of Bill Clinton.” Oh those wonderful conservatives and their myth making!

The main thing for me is just that the economics predicted that Clinton would win. The economy was tanking and so the election was Clinton’s to lose. And he could have lost if he had made the election about foreign affairs or something. But he didn’t. Remember, “It’s the economy, stupid!”? So Bush was toast. I suspect that if Perot hadn’t ever entered the race, Clinton would have won by more than he did. The whole thing shines a light on one of the great Democratic myths, too: that it was all about his “Sister Souljah” moment and his conservatism. Hogwash.

But for those of us who lived through it, this conservative narrative of Ross Perot acting as a spoiler is clearly wrong. Perot did not appeal to one party. What was claimed about the Tea Party was actually true of the Perot’s Reform Party. It really did include people from the center: conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans who were very much concerned about the national debt. And that’s why the Reform Party wasn’t able to last as an important movement past Perot: the group had nothing to hang onto. (It eventually became a tiny party that nominates people almost randomly.) The Tea Party does, because it is now and always has been the base of the Republican Party.

Steve Kornacki released 21 tweets the other day that go through the history of this. It really isn’t complicated. Clinton led the polls throughout the last months of the campaign. And those polls showed that Perot supporters’ second choice candidates were evenly divided because Bush and Clinton. But even more than that, there is that odd bit during the campaign where Perot dropped out because, he claimed, people were threatening his family or something. And as the polls suggested they would, the Perot voters split about evenly for Bush and Clinton.

All this stuff about personalities in elections is fun. But it doesn’t mean much to the final vote. It certainly is true that Donald Trump would hurt the Republicans if he ran an independent campaign. He’s positioning himself as the Pat Buchanan candidate — the one who tells the base the “painful truth” that they are so right to hate minority groups. The people who would vote for him skew heavily toward the Republican Party. But as such, I doubt Trump could make the kind of go of an independent campaign that Perot did. The truth is that while the Republican base might love hearing Trump in his campaign of speaking bigotry to weakness, they know that the policies of Scott Walker would be just as good as those of Trump. So why split the bigot vote?