Jonathan Chait wrote a great article recently, Donald Trump Is Getting Serious About Populism. I don’t want to get into his whole argument about Trump; go read the article. But I was thrilled to see what he had to say on the issue of populism. Because this has been the argument that I’ve been making for a very long time. “One of the important underlying facts of American politics is that rich people tend to have more socially liberal and economically conservative beliefs than the country as a whole.” This is exactly the opposite of populism.

So Trump is getting more populist by attacking what Teddy Roosevelt might have called “the interests”: big banks, defense contractors, big oil. And Byron York, maven of conservative thinking, wrote, As Vote Nears, a More Radical Trump Emerges. As Chait noted, “The new version of Trump is less radical, not more.” The problem is that we’ve gotten so used to a government by, for, and of the rich that it seems “radical” when a politician tries to appeal to the people.

Note that when Trump was just talking about Mexican rapists, the issue that conservatives had was not on substance, but on style. In their own ways, they wanted to “build a wall.” The Republican Party has had a “secure the boarder” mantra ever since Obama got into office, despite the fact of record deportations, and, More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the US. So Trump wasn’t a radical on that issue — just coarse and low. It’s only when he starts attacking the rich that he gets the label of “radical.”

And note: the conservative movement can’t get enough of attacks on the poor. And there is a whole industry of conservative pundits like Robert Samuelson who spend most of their time attacking middle class retired people. But that’s not radical because “radical” is defined relative to what the rich as a group think.

Populism Is Popular

I’m very sympathetic to populism. There are problems with it, of course. I greatly value diversity — for its own sake, but also because it is good biologically and sociologically. In general, it is also good economically. Immigrants enrich us — or they would so long as there is a fair economic system where the fruits of the nation are shared. (And they would be with populist economic policy.) And I’m not a social conservative. Most important of all, I consider reproductive rights, in addition to other things, an economic issue. But overall, I respect populism, and would give up a fair amount in order to get its economic policies.

But what really defines populism is that it is popular. If I had no knowledge of modern American politics, I would have thought that our country would have two parties that are on either side of populism. There would be one party that was a little more economically liberal and socially conservative, and there would be another that was a little more economically conservative and socially liberal. But we don’t have that at all. We have two parties that are distinctly to the right on economic issues. And on social issues, they are all over the map.

There are many reasons for why this is. Certainly, I think a big part of it is segregation and racism. But my interest here is not in explaining the why of the matter. The fact of the matter is that we clearly don’t live in a democracy, except in a nominal sense. This is bad for us and has been so for a long time. But you can depend upon not just conservatives but the mainstream media itself claiming that any move towards a more fair economic system is “radical.”

David Dayen wrote what turned out to be an amusing article over at New Republic, Michael Bloomberg’s Target Voter: Himself. It is about his grumbling that the people are tired of the extremism of the two parties and what they really want is a “moderate” like himself.

Obviously, coming from a billionaire, this is the basis of high comedy. Michael Bloomberg reminds me of Malvolio in Twelfth Night smiling and dressing like a clown. It also reminds me of a story I had read told by an ex-slave about his master doing target practice in preparation for the Civil War. Those with great power are most prone to make huge fools of themselves because they have no one to keep them in check.

Dayen described the true situation:

But even if you got rid of his gun and immigration policy preferences, conservative voters would still hate him. But this is all part of a larger issue about the class of people that Michael Bloomberg represents. They really do think they are in the “sweet spot” of American politics. They see gun right absolutists — people who think they should be allowed to carry machine guns into banks — as just the other extreme of people who think that the minimum wage ought to at least keep up with inflation.

This is why I’ve long been against the New Democrats. The movement was all about keeping socially liberal policy, but basically accepting conservative policy on economics. (The net result was to push the Republicans to the extreme right on economic policy and create a new “left of center” economics that is decidedly right of center.) And this is what I like most about Bernie Sanders: he’s willing to say what establishment Democrats have been unwilling to say for 25 years, “Neoliberalism doesn’t work.”

But as Dayen noted, there are a lot of people in the New York and DC areas who just love what Bloomberg has to say. To someone like William Saletan, what Bloomberg stands for is not just his opinion — it is The Truth™. It is self-evident to this crowd that the society is working just great. All it needs are a few tweaks: get people to drink less soda, get rid of unions all together, and everything will be fine!

The truth is that the Michael Bloomberg crowd doesn’t see their pro-Wall Street opinions as opinions. It is unthinkable to them that we could have a system that works differently than the one that I am more than willing to admit works for them. It’s bad enough when people just go about their lives without examining their assumptions. But when we are talking about the most powerful people in the country, we have a real problem.

Here’s the thing: if Michael Bloomberg ran for president, I’d be surprised if he got one percent of the vote. But he would get huge media attention because the elite media share his blind spots. I think Dayen was wrong in one thing he wrote. He noted Bloomberg’s “sycophantic advisers.” But the problem is so much deeper than that. Thomas Friedman isn’t paid to be Bloomberg’s yes-man. Thomas Friedman has the exact same unconsidered assumptions. And he’s not alone.

As ignorant as the people may be, they are far better at choosing a president than these jokers.

Paul Krugman wrote a really good column on Monday, How America Was Lost. I highly recommend reading it. But he wrote one thing that was not a reflection of the wider reality, “I still encounter people on the left (although never on the right) who claim that there’s no big difference between Republicans and Democrats.” I suspect this is an indication that Krugman hangs out with a wide range of liberal people, but only the most marginal of conservatives. Because it is simply not the truth that Republicans don’t make the case that the parties are the same. Um, is the RINO extinct?

What we’ve seen over the last seven years, if not a lot longer, is that conservative voters are not ideological; they are tribal. This is why Donald Trump is doing so well. These Republicans don’t care about policy, they care about chest thumping. And that is why they think there really is no difference between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Sure, the policies would be quite different. But they would both be standard issue establishment types who would treat the presidency as an office with a history and norms that ought to be followed. They are not, in other words, revolutionaries. (Note: I could make a case that Bush would, in fact, be a revolutionary and that his brother most definitely was.)

This all takes me back to 2011 when I was at the Sonoma County Fair and came upon the local booth for the Republican Party. And the biggest sign they had up was a “No RINO” sign. A RINO, of course, is a “Republican In Name Only.” This was the local GOP establishment and in a fairly liberal area: not just California, but one of the most liberal parts of California. You would think they would be interested in moderate Republicans. But no, they were holding the fort for the conservative revolution coming any day now.

Democrats have an equivalent term: DINO. But it appeared after and in response to RINO. But what it all means is that for Republicans, there really is “no big difference” between the vast majority of their candidates and the Democrats. That’s what purity is all about. This is why the Republican establishment brooks almost no variance from orthodoxy. It’s funny that people talk about how the establishment has lost control of the presidential race. Even the great Republican populist Donald Trump had to put out by far the most regressive tax plan in order to shore up his credentials.

If it appears to Krugman that Republicans don’t fall into the trap of thinking the two parties are the same, it is probably because the Republican Party has been so successful at banishing all RINO from being competitive for major offices. The conservative columnists at The New York Times would never claim that the Democrats and Republicans are the same. But we can’t go by that!

The more pure their party has become, the more paranoid the Republicans are about RINO in their midst. Last September, Free Republic published an article, John Boehner Caught Conspiring With Nancy Pelosi. It’s not a minor outlet. And the article tells us, “Functionally, there is absolutely no difference between Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner.” Clearly, at least one columnist doesn’t get out enough.

And it’s funny that Krugman would think that it is only Democrats who think the parties are the same given that he has been so prominent in the Clinton-Sanders war. But maybe that’s what’s blinding him. He’s so worried about the Sanders supporters that he can’t see the wider reality. But if he thought about it, he’d see that what’s going on is just that the Democratic base is having a fight over whether the party will be liberal or slightly more liberal. Sanders isn’t demanding purity and he surly isn’t saying that Clinton is the same as Bush. And neither are any prominent Sanders supporters. I do wish people would stop basing reality on Twitter and Facebook arguments.

But here’s something that I run into all the time in arguing politics with conservatives. Because I’m pretty knowledgeable about this stuff and I’m not arguing with Greg Mankiw, I destroy conservatives in these arguments. And their fallback is always, “Well, they’re all the same!” When I was a libertarian, and I made my fine tuned arguments against liberals, they never ended by claiming, “Well, they’re all the same!” So among the extremists on both side, you will hear that there is no difference between the parties. But it’s primarily in the Republican Party where you will hear ordinary voters making that claim.

Of course, Democrats have recent history to remind them:

Afterword: Michelle Goldberg and the RINO

Note that Goldberg’s argument here is still largely wrong. This is a video that Democrats need to watch. But pretty much everything she says about Democrats is true of Republicans. It is not “a particular pathology of the left.”