This last week, there are two connected bits of news regarding the national Republican Party that I find really interesting. The first is that Paul Ryan has endorsed Donald Trump. The second is Trump’s stunning comments about US District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel. I know that humans are tribal, but I just don’t see how anyone who is paying even a little attention can stay Republican.

Let’s start with Ryan. Christian Schneider at USA Today called the endorsement a jarring sellout. He seems particularly upset that Ryan laid out certain goals that Trump needed to make progress on in order to get Ryan’s endorsement. Christian asked, “In the 10 days before the endorsement, Trump floated discredited conspiracy theories about former Clinton adviser Vince Foster’s death and attacked the ethnicity of a judge overseeing the Trump University case. Are these what pushed Ryan toward capitulation?”

I don’t know why Schneider is surprised. Remember back when Paul Ryan was deciding whether he would be the Speaker of the House? He made certain demands of the Republican caucus. In particular, he wanted the assurance of its members that they wouldn’t undercut him the way that they had John Boehner. But the caucus members were unwilling to provide this assurance. Ryan took the job anyway.

Ryan’s really the perfect Republican. He’s more than willing to have principles. But if those principles cost him even the smallest amount, they are gone. Power is what matters to Paul Ryan. And there is no upside to standing athwart Trump, yelling, “Stop!” Many commentators have claimed that Ryan will regret his endorsement in six months. But that’s nonsense. The only price that Ryan could pay would be for not supporting Trump. So all Ryan’s talk of “goals” was just his usual political theater — a show for the Villagers who are convinced that he is “thoughtful.”

And then there’s Donald Trump. He thinks that Judge Curiel can’t be fair to him because of the judge’s Mexican ancestry. And when given the chance to walk the statement back, Trump went on to claim that a Muslim judge would be unfair to him as well. The truth is that Trump is just the poster boy of privilege, and any time he doesn’t get what he wants, it means that someone is being unfair to him. For most candidates this would be seen as a major gaff. But there is so much exhaustion with Trump that it’s considered about what you would expect.

But people are wrong to mistake this exhaustion for normalization. It’s clear to me that Donald Trump is just the Carl Paladino of presidential politics. You may remember that Paladino ran for governor of New York in 2010 and only managed to get one-third of the vote. In his case, no one was surprised by anything he did. But it didn’t make those things any more acceptable to the voters.

So the Republican Party elites can pretend that everything is okay — just as a dysfunctional family pretends that dad isn’t a drunk. USA Today can report, Paul Ryan Hopes Trump Endorsement a Turning Point in Race. But barring an economic collapse, Trump is going to go down in flames in the general election.

Last Thursday, Josh Barro tweeted out something really offensive. But before I get to it, I just want to note that he needn’t fear that he will lose his job. You see: he’s a conservative. Unless he comes out with the n-word, nothing he says will matter. Remember that Ted Nugent can repeatedly threaten assassination against the president and nothing happens to him. Meanwhile, two liberal writers have lost their jobs in the last two weeks because they weren’t nice enough.

But Josh Barro won’t get fired for taking a strong stand against democracy. Because only liberals are ever held to account for what they believe. And when Josh Barro makes a bold stand in defense of the powerful, well, that just makes him all the more worthy for a promotion. How long will we have to wait until he becomes managing editor of The Washington Post?!

As much as elites have fucked up in the last decade, Trump's nomination makes it obvious that it's worse to let the masses pick.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) June 3, 2016

It’s interesting how “the masses” are simply the Republican Party in the mind of Josh Barro. And then, let’s look back at this Republican Primary. It’s true that Donald Trump is gauche. But how exactly is he categorically different from anyone else on the Republican Party’s “deep bench”? Barro told us more than he knows when he tweeted this out. Like most conservative elites, what is unacceptable is just a matter of style — never of substance.

But I wouldn’t bring this up at all except that this truly vile tweet led me to find another Josh Barro tweet. This one is equally vile, but it is more interesting in its total lack of self-awareness. It is from two and a half years ago, so at least inconsistency isn’t one of Barro’s sins:

Elites are usually elite for good reason, and tend to have better judgment than the average person. #confessyourunpopularopinion

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) December 4, 2013

In one way, I agree with this — but it is such an obvious thing that it does bear tweeting. A professional plumber (an “elite”) has better judgment about what is causing a toilet to overflow than an average person. But that’s as far as it goes. The problem with people like Josh Barro is that they think “elite” isn’t a situational title. This is why we see successful business people listened to with reverence when they pontificate about the educational system. The truth is that Bill Gates knows quite a lot less about education than the average teacher.

Josh Barro must, at some level, realize this. He is, after all, a reasonably smart guy with a great education and pretty much every intellectual advantage a person can have. But all of this does fold into why Josh Barro is an elite — why he is Senior Editor at Business Insider. And that reason is because he is the son of the very famous (conservative) economist Robert Barro. Do you know where Josh got his bachelor’s degree (In psychology!) from? Harvard. Would it shock you to learn that Robert got his PhD from Harvard?

I’m sure Josh Barro would take offense at this (he has skin as thin as Donald Trump’s), but he’s a royalist. And that makes him a great example for the modern conservative movement. It used to be said that conservatism evolved from Edmund Burke. I think that was true up until about 40 years ago. Since then, the conservative movement has regressed back to Burke. Josh Barro might use different language, but at base, he thinks God wants things the way they are. It’s just that Barro’s God is meritocracy, and his career has nothing to do with having a rich, famous, and powerful father.

I’m writing this on Saturday, so it is possible that Paul Krugman will finally write about Friday’s disastrous Jobs Report. But he wasn’t on top of it as other economists were — ones that still care about economics. No, his last column was about how horrible Trump is and ended with a potshot at Sanders supporters, “And if Democrats don’t rally the same way, he [Trump] just might make it to the White House.” And his blog posts have been almost nothing but attacks on Sanders and apologetics for Clinton. What about the economy, Krugman?

Paul Krugman knows that the single biggest determining factor in presidential elections is the economy. Clinton has a far greater threat in the form of our weak and declining economy than it does from Bernie Sanders supporters who say they won’t support Clinton in the general election. But where is Krugman on this issue? When I saw the Jobs Report, the first thing I thought was, “President Trump.” But I’m beginning to see Krugman like all those Labour Party leaders who would simply rather lose power than have it with Jeremy Corbyn. And that’s sad. I never would have thought that Paul Krugman could sink so low.

My primary concern about the Jobs Report is that it means the economy is weak and workers are going to continue to suffer either without jobs or with jobs that pay poorly. But my secondary concern is that the economy is heading downward and that this is a huge benefit to Donald Trump in the general election. Everyone should be concerned about this. What is the maximum that the “Bernie or Bust” could cost Hillary Clinton: a million votes? I think that’s even ridiculously high. But a bad economy could cost her ten million votes.

I’ve said all along that Trump is a bad candidate. He may even be so bad that with the economics strongly in his favor, he would lose. But his only path to victory is that the economy takes a nose dive. But is Paul Krugman worried about this? Apparently not. And he’s not alone. I see a lot of other liberals continuing on with the idea that the only threat to Hillary Clinton is petulant Sanders supporters. Saturday morning, Steve M wrote, What if Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Need Sanders Diehards? First, who ever said she did need Sanders diehards? Second, what if all the Sanders diehards wouldn’t be enough to save her because the economy is collapsing?

But at least Steve M has the advantage of never showing that he understands economics or its effect on politics. Paul Krugman used to know how important economics was to politics. He used to know that the economic trend was responsible for about half of the results of presidential elections. But now it is just “Bash Bernie Day” every day. And if ever there was a time to reach out to Sanders supporters it would be now. Because Hillary Clinton now has a far more formidable opponent than Donald Trump. Now she is up against a bad economy. The old Paul Krugman would have been interested in that fact.

You have to ask yourself: does the Federal Reserve still want to raise interest rates?

On Monday, we got a devastating jobs report. In May, the economy created only 38,000 jobs. That alone makes it the weakest month in just under six years. Now 38,000 jobs might sound okay, but the economy has to create roughly 150,000 jobs just to stay even because more people join the labor force than leave it. But worse than that, the Department of Labor revised the number of jobs created in the previous two months by 59,000. So we have a net loss of 21,000 jobs.

A Very Bad Quarter

If we look at the last three months now, the average monthly job gains has been 116,000. In other words, even if we just assume this is a blip, as Brad DeLong does, the economy is not even managing to tread water; it is sinking.

If you are a casual listener of economic news, the only thing you likely have heard is that the the unemployment rate went down from 5.0% to 4.7%. But this has nothing to do with people getting jobs, obviously. This is just the result of a sudden drop in labor force participation. More people have given up looking for work, so they aren’t counted as being unemployed, even though most of them do want jobs and have simply given up looking for one.

Fed Can’t Raise Interest Rates — for Now

The good news about all of this is that it makes it almost impossible for the Federal Reserve to get away with raising interest rates at its June meeting. And as The Wall Street Journal put it in a statement that drips with disappointment, it “complicates the possibility of a move at the July meeting.” But it isn’t just the Wall Street apologists who want interest rate increases; the Federal Reserve itself has been itching to raise them for the past several years.

The justification is always the same: the economy is improving and so in order to head off inflation, the Fed must raise interest rates. But this is pure hokum. The Fed wants to raise interest rates because it is good for the banking industry. And so it has looked for any excuse to do so. When they raised interest rates in December, there was no compelling reason to do it. The Fed claimed that the economy was going to grow faster in 2016 than it had the previous year. (The Fed has been making this same claim for the last several years.) As Dean Baker wrote at the time, “Job growth was likely to slow even without the Fed raising rates.” And six months later, we see he was (as usual) quite right.

But I’m not angry so much that the Federal Reserve is wrong time and time again. I’m angry that even now, the people at the Fed are disappointed not that the economy continues to struggle but that their handy justification for raising rates has been taken away from them. Just a week ago, The Guardian reported, Fed Chief Janet Yellen Says Interest Rates Will Rise “in Coming Months.” With the year almost half over, the Fed was set to raise interest rates two to three more times.

This is what Janet Yellen said two weeks ago:

Yes, most appropriate because I can guarantee you she has no friends who are struggling to find a job.

The only person on the Fed who seems to consistently make sense is Lael Brainard. And she was quick to grab onto the Jobs Reports and urge caution. But the question is whether it matters. After years of the inflation rate being below the Fed’s 2% target, most of the members of the Fed are not willing to let it go even up to 2% — much less above it.

The Fed Is Against You

As it is, the 2% inflation target is a number that Alan Greenspan pulled out of the air. And since he left the Fed, that 2% target has turned into a 2% ceiling. I find it aggravating that we are even talking about this. The truth is that all the ideas that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have for creating jobs mean nothing. And that is because the moment the the Federal Reserve sees the lives of working people improve, it will raise interest rates and put a stop to it. As it is, they want to do that without seeing the lives of working people improve.

The truth is that the Federal Reserve has far more power over you than the president or the Supreme Court or Congress or any other institution. And it is absolutely against your interests. We might as well just make the president of Bank of America the king and he can decide whether or not you can have a job and if you can, how much you can get paid. That’s what the Federal Reserve does.

California has a screwy system for our primaries. Instead of the parties getting to pick their candidates, everyone who is running is on the ballot and the top two candidates get to battle it out in the general election. The idea of these “top-two primaries” was to get more “moderate” candidates. But before getting to that, let’s discuss how it can totally disenfranchise the majority of the voters.

Imagine that you have a congressional district that is 60% Republican. And in the primary, there are 5 Republicans running and just 2 Democrats. Let’s suppose that they each get an equal share of their coalition. So each Republican gets one-fifth of 60%, or 12% of the total vote; each Democrat get one-half of 40%, or 20% of the total vote. So in the general election for a district that is overwhelmingly Republican, the voters get to choose from… two Democrats. That’s not Democracy; that’s madness.

Back in 2014, I wrote an article about the same issue, California’s Stupid Top-Two Primaries. In it, I talked about three districts where this was a real problem. Here is the most important:

But even in cases where the district is overwhelmingly Democratic and Republican, I still think it is wrong that partisans don’t get to vote for a candidate in their own party because of the top-two primaries. And that is looking like it is going to be the case at the state level when it comes to filling Barbara Boxer’s seat. According to Real Clear Politics, the top two candidates are Kamala Harris (30.2%) and Loretta Sánchez (17.4%). The best the Republicans have to offer is the devilishly handsome Tom Del Beccaro (7.0%).

Don’t get me wrong. As a partisan, I’m thrilled that not only is Barbara Boxer’s seat going to be filled with a Democrat but that it is going to be filled with a woman. I will probably vote for Sánchez, but I’ll be fine with Harris. (I have to admit, I haven’t been staying up on politics; this weekend will involve a whole lot of study.) So: go team!

But as a liberal, I hate this. In 2012, California was made up of 44% Democrats and 29% Republicans. And that comes out to about 60/40. I really do think that a Republican should be on the ballot for Senate in November. And a Libertarian and a Green and a Peace and Freedom.

There still remains the issue of getting more moderate candidates. Before I consider this, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that I think this is stupid. It’s like term limits. Everyone loves these kinds of laws (or in this case, change to the state constitution). It’s a way of telling other people how they ought to live their lives. I see no reason why Willie Brown should not still be in the California State Assembly if his voters wanted him there. And I see no reason why the Republicans shouldn’t be able to nominate whatever extremist they want.

But back in 2012, political scientists at UC Berkeley looked at the data and found that the top-two system did not give moderates any better a chance than the traditional system. So we have less choice. We have the situation where the minority party can win because of partisan disagreement. And we don’t even get the one thing we were supposed to get. California’s top-two primaries need to end.

On Sunday, while I was writing down my ideas of heroism for Memorial Day, Donald Trump was the only presidential candidate invited to talk at the Rolling Thunder Memorial Day rally in Washington. Rolling Thunder is a group that pushes for a full accounting of prisoners of war and those missing in action. There is more than a little conspiracy theory in the group. You used to hear it all the time: that there were thousands of Vietnam veterans who were still being held captive in Vietnam. It’s also kind of a biker thing.

Rolling Thunder’s big annual event is this Memorial Day rally, where they ride their bikes on a parade of sorts that ends at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The fact that Trump would speak at this even is ironic, if not funny. Jonathan Chait described it, Most Anti-POW Candidate in History Embraced by Pro-POW Rally. This is, after all, the man who dismissed John McCain’s heroism because he was captured. You would think that Rolling Thunder would hate Trump. But no.

Instead, they hate Hillary Clinton. One of the group members said that asking Hillary Clinton to show up would be like asking Jane Fonda to show up. Reason? They don’t need no stinking reason! But I think I can explain. Conservatives of the military ilk don’t care about soldiers or veterans or pretty much anything else you might think. They care about war. They care about beating their chests and claiming that they are the alpha dog. So Donald Trump is just perfect for them. The fact that he did everything he could to stay out of the Vietnam War doesn’t mean anything.

Conservatives Hate War Heroes

It all reminds me of the 2004 election. That was a very important election for me because it was the one when I really got involved in politics. Up until then, it had been very theoretical. I wanted such drastic things changed in society that I didn’t even pay attention to what was going on in the world. But in 2004, I was very much a Democrat — thanks in large part to President George W Bush who was really awful. But what I most remember from that campaign was the utter disgust I had about the swift boat attacks against John Kerry.

I don’t have any great love of the military; it is an unfortunate necessity. But I respect the men and women who do the job, even if I’m not willing to call them all heroes. What surprised me was that conservatives thought even less than I did about the military. Disagree all you want with John Kerry, but at least grant him that he served in the Vietnam War and acted heroically on at least two occasions. But no. The conservatives were eager to crap all over that for political gain.

Rolling Thunder Doesn’t Care About Soldiers

Conservatives care about war, not soldiers. Memorial Day is supposed to be about remembering soldiers who died in our country’s wars. But it’s the wars that conservatives are celebrating. The soldiers only matter in that you can’t have a war without them. Rolling Thunder should be ashamed to invite Donald Trump to speak to them. And they would be ashamed if they cared about the soldiers. But they don’t. They’re just keen for another war where Rolling Thunder can pompously ride their bikes and pretend care about soldiers. All they care about is chest thumping — like conservatives everywhere.

I listened to Hillary Clinton’s entire foreign policy speech. I wasn’t going to. I was just going to listen to a few minutes to get a feel for it, but it was so good that I got caught up in it. That was mostly because it was just a half hour long attack on Donald Trump. I’m far more interested in foreign affairs than most Americans, but that still allows me to be pretty disinterested in the subject. But listening to Clinton go point by point over Donald Trump’s ridiculous statements was great fun — except for the part about Israel.

Looking back on the last year, I have to say that I’m shocked that Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee. And I don’t say that in a political sense. I say it in a theatrical sense. If you’ve heard one Donald Trump speech, you’ve heard them all. I would have thought that the nation would have been bored by now. His answer to every problem is that he’s a great negotiator. Perhaps the best line in Hillary Clinton’s speech was, “He says he doesn’t have to listen to our generals or our admirals, our ambassadors and other high officials, because he has — quote — ‘a very good brain.'”

But as much as I enjoyed the speech and agreed with her on most things, I was especially bothered by one line about Israel, “They’re our closest ally in the region, and we have a moral obligation to defend them.” I understand: this is just divine knowledge in modern America: Israel is such a good friend of America. It’s just that I’ve found the claim harder and harder to take. In what way is Israel our closest ally? As far as I can tell, only by grabbing hold of us and refusing to let go.

It certainly isn’t the case that Israel is our closest ally in the region because of all the great stuff they do for us. It’s quite the other way around. And at this point, I have little doubt that Israel would become a loose cannon in the region if we didn’t hold them in check. I remember during the Persian Gulf War, there was a great deal of diplomacy that went on to keep Israel out of the war. And why was that? I mean, Israel is a country that probably depends upon its very existence to the unwavering support that the United States gives to it — both militarily and in the United Nations. But we have to worry about them messing up our own foreign policy.

I realize that Hillary Clinton had to give a shout-out to Israel. That’s the American way of politics. But it is just a convention. Israel hasn’t earned all the babying that we give it. And things are changing in the United States. I used to be a big supporter of Zionism, and now I’m really not sure if it isn’t just a racist construct that makes things worse. And certainly as the Israeli government has gotten more and more conservative, apparently determined to destroy any possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, it becomes a harder and harder country to support.

I figure we are at most 20 years away from US support for Israel being very, very contingent. Hillary Clinton isn’t wrong to say that Israel is our closest ally in the region. But as an American, it doesn’t mean much to me. And if I were an Israeli, I’d be terrified about it.

I came upon the website iSideWith yesterday. It’s been around since 2012 and it allows you to answer a bunch a questions and then see how well you agree with the different political parties and presidential candidates. Well, you know me: I love tests that tell me that I am who I think I am. So I answered the roughly 90 questions and got my results. And as should come as a shock to no one, I agreed most with Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party.

The test provides much more than that, however. It gets more interesting as you drill down. The people behind iSideWith clearly like this kind of stuff as much as I do, so they provide a lot of information. For example, they have a whole section of “polls.” These are basically just the results of particular questions on the iSideWith quiz. For me, this was the most depressing part of the whole thing.

iSideWith Polls

For example, 81% of the people who have taken the iSideWith test think that people should have to show photo ID to vote. Another 86% want term limits on Congress. And 73% think people on “welfare” should be drug tested. I picked these three issues because they are ones where facts really matter. There is no in-person voter fraud; term limits tend to make politics more corrupt; and people on “welfare” are less likely to do drugs than people who aren’t. (Also: why don’t we drug test the people on the mortgage interest deduction welfare program?)

After you take the iSideWith test, you can compare your positions with those of the candidates and the parties. I didn’t find that very useful because I know where the candidates stand. But I think this would be very helpful for people who don’t follow politics all that closely. And I think Bernie Sanders supporters could be helped a lot because they are likely to get results that are very similar to mine:

Now, I know: this is an imperfect way to determine who you ought to vote for. For one thing, iSideWith has me siding much more strongly with the Democratic Party than with the Socialist Party. I suspect that if we got into a serious discussion of capitalism, we would find that I was actually much more in line with the socialists. But the quiz does a good job of including those issues that are inside our Overton window. And in that context, I think the quiz is quite useful.

Bernie or Bust?

So it shows I most agree with Bernie Sanders. No surprise there. But I agree with Hillary Clinton almost as much as I do Sanders. And I agree with her as much as I do Jill Stein. And I wonder how many of my fellow Sanders supporters will actually vote for Stein over Clinton? People are wrong when they say a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump; it isn’t; it is a half vote for Trump. And I think that most Sanders supporters will come out something like me. The question is: with Clinton at 95% and Trump at 24%, is this really an election that you should sit out?

It’s funny. Even that 24% agreement with Trump is something of a myth. For example, on the question of whether labor unions help or hurt the economy, I said they help it. (I don’t think this is open to debate.) But according to iSideWith, Trump agrees with me, because Trump says labor unions, “Help, in theory but have recently become corrupt and should have their powers limited.” To me, that says he thinks they hurt the economy. They are already powerless and he wants to limit them even more?

Regardless, go over to iSideWith. You can take the quick test (Clinton was above Stein in that one, and Trump was only at 10%), or you can take the longer test by answering the optional questions. Let me know how you come out. If history is any guide, yours will look a lot like mine.

Afterword: Parties

Here is how I scored on parties:

1. Democratic: 96%
2. Green: 92%
3. Socialist: 86%
4. Libertarian: 51%
5. Constitution: 9%
6. Republican: 5%

Yesterday, I saw that Scott Lemieux wrote an article, Neoliberal Stooge Proves Democratic Party Needs to Be Blown Up. I didn’t finish reading it. Partly, that is just because I don’t think Lemieux does a very good job of sarcasm. But mostly, it was the line where he said that Obama was “proposing Social Security cuts attached to conditions Republicans would never accept.” Oh my! Grand Bargain apologetics again!

Then this morning, at New Republic, he wrote a similar article, Why Obama Turned Left on Social Security. It even uses the same words, “Tying ‘chained-CPI’ Social Security cuts to upper-class tax cuts no Republican Congress was ever going to pass was an indication that Obama was not actually trying to cut Social Security.” So Obama wasn’t for the Grand Bargain. He wanted to leave Social Security alone. But now he is in favor of increasing Social Security benefits because the party has moved to the left. Uh, not really.

But what really set me off was a follow-up article by Martin Longman, Obama Gamed the Grand Bargain Correctly. He wrote:

There’s another chestnut of Obama apologists everywhere. You see, Obama never fails; he is only failed by the political environment. Everyone knows that Obama was always for same sex marriage. It was just that he couldn’t come out in favor of it until it was politically safe because Obama is such a courageous political leader! And in this case, he had to act like the “adult in the room” with the Grand Bargain or else his friends in the mainstream media would have thought that he was just another politician with, you know, principles.

This was supposedly Obama’s cunning plan — or as Lemieux puts it, his “twenty-billion-dimensional-chess.” But what did he actually get? Did the media turn on the Republicans? Maybe I wan’t paying attention, but I didn’t see the media change its coverage in the least. It is always the same thing: there are the Democrats, there are the Republicans, and there is the truth, smack dab in the middle. As it is, the media is running to normalize Donald Trump. The truth is not something that the mainstream media uncover; it is something they define based upon where the two parties stand at any point. And Obama knows that.

What really bugs me is all this business of trying to find reasons why Obama’s policies are so much more conservative than liberals thought they ought to be. One of Obama’s more compelling personal traits is his honesty. When he said he was basically a Blue Dog Democrat, he wasn’t saying it to trick people; he was saying it because it was the truth. And when he pushed the Grand Bargain for years, it wasn’t because he knew that the Republicans wouldn’t take it. It was because he thought it would make him a bipartisan hero in the same way that welfare “reform” did for Bill Clinton.

Lemieux claims that Obama’s recent change is an indication that political change comes from the bottom up. Then why did Obama push for the Grand Bargain? There was no pressure for that — even among Republican voters. That’s why Lemieux and Longman have to make this ridiculous argument that Obama wasn’t really for the Grand Bargain. And had Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” fallen through, they would say the same thing about that.

But there is extra pressure on Obama regarding Social Security — it comes from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And good for her! But I give Obama no credit at all. When it comes to the Grand Bargain, Obama would have gladly sold us down the river in exchange for the cheers of the Thomas Friedman crowd.