I hate to write about the Republican presidential candidates because they are really all the same. That is probably the biggest element to the “clown car” aspect of the nomination process. If they actually had different policies — regardless of how extreme — there would be something worth paying attention to. But instead, it is all just a game of one upmanship. We saw that most hilariously recently when Jeb Bush said that his policies would increase economic growth to 4%. It was a totally unrealistic promise based upon no economic theory. Predictably, Mike Huckabee proposed 6% growth via his “fair tax,” because what the hell?! Neither claims mean anything, so why not throw out random numbers. Maybe Herman Cain can come back with a new 9-9-9 plan: 27% growth! (Or 729% if you want to multiply the numbers.)

And now, Jonathan Chait has reported, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio Propose “Plans” to Replace Obamacare. He describes them as “not so much plans as skeletal descriptions of planlike concepts.” As I’ve noted many times before, Obamacare is the conservative healthcare reform plan. If the goal is to make our healthcare system work better, Obamacare is about as conservative as we are going to get. This is why for the last six years, all the Republican plans to replace Obamacare have been nothing but a collection of policies that Republicans want for other reasons. The best any of them would do would be to marginally improve the system. The worst of them — like buying insurance across state lines — would make the system worse.

Or consider Planned Parenthood. Donald Trump is the only Republican presidential candidate who doesn’t want to simply defund the group. The candidates walk in lockstep like a group of Nazi Youth on parade. That’s the Big Tent, my friends: everyone thinks the same thing except for the idiosyncratic billionaire who the Republican establishment claims isn’t a real Republican.

This all comes down to the fact that the Republican Party really is post-policy. It has nothing to offer that appeals to the people. But that isn’t to say that it has nothing to offer. To its true consistency — the haves and the have mores — they have lots of policy ideas. But those are too vile for public consumption. And this is where we get into the more vexing issue of how the Democrats have allowed this by moving to the right themselves — providing no real policy ground for the Republicans.

The big problem that we face today in US politics is that the Democratic Party has long been determined to be Republican Lite. But given that the Republicans don’t stand for much of anything other than enriching themselves and their rich friends, what does it mean to be “not as bad as” them? Still, I’ve become somewhat optimistic during the campaign thus far. Even while the Republicans are showing themselves to have nothing to offer, the Democratic primary is turning out to be fairly substantial. I like what I’m hearing from Clinton, Sanders, and O’Malley. There are real issues and they are talking about how to address them. It’s an amazing contrast to the Republicans who make up problems (slow economic growth, Obamacare, Planned Parenthood) and demagogue the issues to see who can sound most badass.

Since I’m very interesting in economics, without being trained in it, I find the sociology of the field fascinating. There are, roughly speaking, two camps in economics: the “salt water” or roughly Keynesian side and the “fresh water” or roughly rational expectations side. Now I talk a lot around here about the conservative and liberal economists. Paul Krugman, for example, is a liberal economist, and Greg Mankiw is a conservative economist. But this is not the divide we are talking about today. Because as far as I can tell, both Krugman and Mankiw are more or less Keynesians.

Here we are talking about Robert Lucas and his followers. I always feel a bit worried when discussion people like Lucas, because he is by all accounts a brilliant thinker. And I’m just a blogger and a physicist. But I try. One of Lucas’ greatest contribution had to do with the Phillips curve. This is a relationship between inflation and unemployment. If unemployment went down, inflation tended to go up. If unemployment when up, inflation tended to go down. But in the 1970s, this broke down during the so called stagflation: high unemployment and high inflation. “Aha!” said the fresh water folks, “Keynes is dead! Long live Friedman!”

As for the details of what was really happening, it seems to be that stagflation was due to sharp oil price shocks. So it wasn’t that the Phillips curve was wrong. It was just a special case of a new model. You can think of it as the Hook’s Law of the Ideal Gas Law. But the fact of stagflation really shouldn’t have been seen as a revolution regardless. To begin with, the Phillips curve isn’t part of Keynesian economics. And it was only ever an empirical relationship. But like a lot of such things, it became something of a law among Keynesian economists.

As a result, this caused a great social rift that Paul Romer has been writing about (ad nauseam if you ask me). He is trying to understand why it is that the fresh water economists closed in on themselves and basically stopped listening to any economists outside their circle. And as a result, fresh water economics has turned into something more like a Euclidean cult than a modern scientific enterprise. And I mean that in a specific way, because the fresh water economists continue to innovate and come up with new insights. But they are always rather far removed from reality.

The whole thing reminds me of the skeptic movement (of which I’m part). At some point, they simply decided that based upon a single success and the perceived (but wrong) failure of Keynesian theory, that Keynes was in fact dead and that they never had to deal with it again. But there is a difference. I don’t pay attention to the constant background noise of Bigfoot spotting. But if tens of thousands of new people started making reports, I would have to reconsider. And I know that the skeptic community would head out into the forest and look into it. So why haven’t the fresh water folks done the same? Well a lot of economists are trying to figure this out.

Fundamentally, I think the problem is that economics doesn’t work very much like a science. I think it is that there is too much money in it that poisons the system. Based upon what I’ve seen, I think Keynes was about 80% right. And the likes of Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas have added some wrinkles onto that. But that seems to be what the New Keynesians have done. The fresh water economists seem to be lost in their own fantasy land. But they can live there quite happily, as long as they continue to get funding. And given that their policy ideas tend to be exactly what the power elite want to hear, I don’t see them changing any time soon.

Last week, Right Wing Watch reported, Michele Bachmann: Obama Fulfilled End Times Prophecy With Iran Deal, So Celebrate! She is apparently happy about the Iranian nuclear deal because she thinks it will bring on the end times. I have to admit to being a little impressed. With conservative Christians, there is this general dissonance: on the one hand being thrilled about the apocalypse (Coming any day now!) and on the other hand freaking out about how liberals are making God mad. Why do they care? When God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, he made sure to save Lot because he was a good man.

The reason, of course, is that the conservative Christians just want something to bitch about. So it is good that Bachmann is standing up for things going to hell — at least as she sees it. She thinks this is all about Zechariah 12:3. But there is major question begging here. She takes it as given that the Iran nuclear deal means that Iran is going to attack Israel. The logic is, shall we say, weak: the deal will lead to Iran having a nuclear weapon; they will use it against poor defenseless Israel; but God will stop it.

How clueless do you have to be to think that Iran would use any nuclear weapon against Israel? Israel has between 75 and 400 nuclear weapons. To be honest, of all the nations in the world, the one we should be most worried about is Israel because they are (understandably, but frighteningly) paranoid. So if Iran attacked Israel, Israel would retaliate against it with overwhelming force — just like it does against the Palestinians. And that’s saying nothing about what the US would do. Israel is ranked 11th most powerful military in the world. It isn’t some weak country that anyone needs to worry about. Yet for conservatives, the idea that Israel might be able to get a nuke in the next decade is far more worrying than Israel having hundreds of uninspected nuclear weapons.

But Bachmann is even wrong on the Bible. Zechariah 12:3 is translated in many ways. But in no way does it say that the United States will be leading the fight against Israel — as Bachmann claims. And then, the actual text is much more vague. If we look at the New American Standard Bible — generally considered the closest to the original text — it says:

It doesn’t sound like destroying Israel; it sounds like occupying it. And there have been so many times over the centuries that Israel was occupied by others, are we really to think that Zechariah 12:3 wasn’t referring to all thos other times? Of course not. This is just another case of every generation of Christians thinking that they are the last. When finally there is a last generation of Christians, it won’t be because Jesus comes back. It will be because they finally realize that their beliefs are silly, and get onto to thinking something more reasonable.

Ezra Klein noted last weekend, Donald Trump Is the Perfect “Moderate.” But you need to know what he means by “moderate.” He’s talking about how moderates are very often extremists on individual issues, which just cancel out to create a “moderate” voter. So let’s suppose that you are in favor of a $15 minimum wage and for ending all immigration. Well, the first belief would be marked as extremely liberal and the second belief would be marked as extremely conservative. Thus, such a person would be considered a “moderate.”

Klein noted that Trump has these exact same jumble of views, which make him a moderate. He might sound very conservative on immigration and foreign affairs. But there is another side to him:

This is all pretty standard stuff, and this is why I’ve been saying for a while that I would prefer to see Trump nominated. It isn’t, like with many liberals, that I think Trump would lose in the general election (although I think he would). It is rather that his opinions are far better than the rest of the Republican field. His conservative opinions are no worse than those of Jeb Bush or Scott Walker.

But I’m afraid that Klein is falling into the same trap that he is writing about. You can’t just throw all political beliefs into a single bucket. As I write about a lot, a populist in this country is an economic liberal and a social conservative. So it is ironic that the two major political parties are more conservative on economic issues than the vast majority of the voters.

So what can we say about Donald Trump? By the standard of American politics, he seems to be an economic liberal. And I would say that being anti-immigrant is part of that. It also goes along with his skepticism regarding free trade. The only place that he is clearly conservative is on foreign affairs. On social issues, he is kind of a mixture.

To a large extent, what liberals and conservatives get from their candidates is not policy. There are a few things they care about, but what they most care about is an attitude. For conservatives, that attitude is “strength.” And that is certainly what Trump appeals to.

What the other Republican presidential candidates have to offer are consistently repugnant ideas. All they offer that makes them more acceptable is that they aren’t willing to say things like, “Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers.” But the immigration policies that they favor are the same as those Trump favors. So just how are they more acceptable? It’s all about what can and cannot be said in polite company. And that’s meaningless. If Trump is unacceptable (and I think he is), then all the Republicans are unacceptable. But given that they say and do what all the other Republicans presidential candidates say, the mainstream press treats them like they are acceptable. It’s sad.