As I was looking for something to write about for today’s anniversary post, I came upon a mention of a massive one day murder of Gypsies at Auschwitz. I didn’t write about it, because it turned out that the date was wrong. It turned out that on 1 August 1944, the entire population of the “gypsy camp” was murdered — some 4,000 adults and children. It’s staggering to think about, although looking at some of the pictures of the victims, it was probably the most humane thing the camp personnel ever did to them.

I don’t bring this up to point out yet again just how awful the Nazis were. But after all these years, I find myself still trying to understand the Nazis. I don’t think the Germans are different than any other people. Certainly there are problems with its culture, but it isn’t any different in this way than any other culture. And I largely think that the vast majority of the German people were also victims of Nazism — even while they were culpable. So what makes people respond to a call for genocide with a shrug as they pick up a pitchfork?

Several years ago, I had a really uncomfortable experience. I was head of software development at this startup. And we had hired five Romanian programmers. They worked in Romanian, and I set up our system in such a way that they could work with the hardware remotely. I was totally against hiring them, but it was forced on me. Still, I found that it worked remarkably well. For one thing, the programmers were fantastic. But a couple of times we flew the Romanian team leader here to work directly with me.

He was a brilliant young man — and very nice. You absolutely couldn’t ask for a better person to work with. But one day, he asked me the most peculiar question, “Do you think Americans wouldn’t think so lowly of Romania if it weren’t for the Gypsies?” I was shocked by this blatantly racist question. But despite how I appear online, in real life, I’m very much a placater. I might be different today, but then, I was not interested in finding out why this young man thought so lowly of this particular ethnic group. So I gently told him that the only thing any Americans were likely to know about Romania were Nadia Comăneci and Dracula. And that was the end of that conversation.

I assume that my Romanian colleague had about as much direct direct experience with the Gypsies as I did. Even at the time, I immediately thought of African Americans: an underclass deprived of opportunities and then shamed for their lack of success compared to the “white” class that is given every advantage. In fact, not long before that, I had had a conversation with some young immigrants to America who were asking me the same kinds of questions with regard to blacks. They are valid questions that deserved answers, and I think I did a decent job with them.

The problem we have is not with the questions, but with the assumptions that many if not most people have: those who are struggling in our society are simply worse people. The specifics of who “those people” are don’t matter. I’m sure that few Americans could tell the difference between Gypsies and the non-Gypsies in Romania. We humans create more or less random groups that we put great significance into. It is the source of our greatest strength in that it is what binds us together. But the dark side is that we become exclusive, and it really isn’t necessary; there are more than enough non-human things that might kill us.

In the end, I suppose I’m not that surprised that the Nazis happened. It’s more surprising that we don’t see more of it. But I do think that we are getting better; we are more inclusive than we have ever been. But looking around at America, it is clear that we have a very long way to go.

Photo by Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com

Probably my favorite conservative, Bruce Bartlett wrote a very interesting article over at The Financial Times, Is the Fed Being Goaded Into Raising Rates Too Soon? As I’ve talked about a fair amount here, there is no economic reason for the Federal Reserve to even be discussing raising interest rates. And it seems so bizarre that I once thought I had missed something, so I asked Dean Baker, and he backed me up. There really isn’t anything behind it. So the question that Bartlett has raised is why.

He isn’t the first. Paul Krugman spent about a month recently obsessing over the question. And his conclusion was that the Fed is understandably closely tied to the banking community — in fact, 5 of its 12 members are appointed from the banks. And bankers make less money when interest rates are low. So the Fed is pushed by these “reasonable” and “objective” people who think that interest rates should go up. There is much to this theory, and I’m sure it is going on to one extent or another.

Bartlett offers the other side of this, which is basically that the Republican Party has gone insane. He noted three of the more thoughtful Republicans — John Taylor, Martin Feldstein, and Alan Greenspan — all argued that the Federal Reserve was going to cause inflation to go up in 2009. This, of course, goes against what conservatives of the Milton Friedman variety have always said. The liberals wanted fiscal stimulus (because, let’s fact it, it is the most direct way to address recessions) and conservatives wanted monetary stimulus. But in 2009, suddenly that was all wrong. The right thing to do was what we did during the Great Depression: nothing. Or even better: cut both government spending and the the flow of cash.

Apparently, the Republican Party itself has gotten so insane that even Ben Bernanke has decided that he is no longer a Republican. And really: how could any scientist who wants to be taken seriously continue to associate with the modern Republican Party. That’s especially true of economists, who show themselves to be complete hacks like Greg Mankiw who is for Keynesian stimulus as long as a Republican is in the White House. Of course, much of the blame has to be laid on the economics profession itself. Mankiw should have been shunned from the profession. But let’s face it, selling out is one of the big perks of becoming a successful economist.

Bartlett never got around to discussing just why the Republicans turned into such idiots on this issue. It’s certainly not, as Bernanke claims, that “the crisis had helped to radicalize large parts of the Republican Party.” They weren’t radicalized until a Democrat became president. Bartlett understands this, he finished his article with an allusion to what is really going on, “Had the Fed followed their advice earlier, the economy would undoubtedly be in worse shape — good for Republican electoral prospects, but bad for everyone else.” And that’s what is all about. The Republicans are traitors. They don’t care about the country in the least. This is why we constantly have to worry about them crashing the economy: they care more about their political aspirations than they care about the good of the country. They are reactionaries who think that it may be necessary to destroy the country in order to save it.

There is no theory that underlies what they are doing. This is just power for power’s sake. It’s tempting to think that they will be reasonable once they get into power. But I think all the rational Republicans have been chased away. The inmates really are running the asylum. And we could end up with a Republican president who thinks that we don’t have to worry about breaching the debt ceiling because he can just cut spending. This is the final act of the GOP — and maybe the country.

Last week, Jonathan Chait made a good observation, Hillary Clinton Is Reliving Al Gore’s Nightmare. But I think he is missing the true story here. He thinks that Hillary Clinton and Gore are suffering from residual guilt due to Bill Clinton. He dates Gore’s problems to the 1997 “fundraising for the White House” scandal as the beginning of Al Gore’s problems. But is that true? Was the knock against Gore that he wasn’t trustworthy? Not as I remember it. I remember the supposed problem being that he was “wooden” and had a tendency to exaggerate — not that his tenure in the White House would be scandal plagued.

After the 2000 election, there was lots of Washington journalist navel gazing. Had they given Bush a pass? Had they made stories out of literally nothing to tarnish Al Gore? Had they treated the campaign like it were an election for prom queen rather than president? The answer to all of these questions was yes. Remember Margaret Carlson’s statement, “Gore elicited in us the childish urge to poke a stick in the eye of the smarty-pants”? A lot of people made fun of her about that because they saw that this was exactly the mentality of reporters who were shaping what Americans thought of the two men competing to be president.

So I fully accept Chait’s contention that Hillary Clinton is in Al Gore’s position — just not that it has anything to do with Bill Clinton or anything else. The press has just decided on a narrative for Clinton and it just so happens to be the same narrative they decided for Gore: she’s not authentic. It’s a wonderful narrative for them because it is meaningless. In the context of a politician, what does it mean? I’m a big supporter of Bernie Sanders, but I haven’t missed the fact that his hair is always combed now. This is politics: it is about shaping perceptions of reality.

But let us not forget this: Gore won the election. Electoral College or no, he won. In a democracy, Al Gore would have been president. In fact, relative to my election model, he actually did slightly better than he should have. So I don’t especially worry that the Washington reporters are childish when they aren’t being totally useless. The American people are smarter than that. But certainly it doesn’t help to have all these fraternity and sorority rejects live out their fantasies of what it’s like to be part of the “in crowd” or the “mean girls.”

Clinton and every other Democrat is currently losing to the top Republican candidates in poll match-ups. Even Ben Carson is beating Clinton. But that’s because people know who Clinton is and they don’t know who Carson is. Thus, like young people in love, they assume anything they don’t know must just be perfect. Over time, when the actual election is under way, people will learn about the Republican candidate (who will absolutely, positively not be Ben Carson). And they will make the same decision they always make: the one based upon the economy.

So, does this mean that the political reporting about the presidential campaign is useless? Yes. There’s no need to beat around the bush. I so wish there were a law against political polling this early in the campaign. It provides literally no information. At this time in the 2000 campaign, Bush was beating Gore by 15 percentage points: 54% to 39%. Currently, Clinton is neck and neck with Jeb Bush. And that too means absolutely nothing — just like all the mainstream “reporting.”

See also: The “Clinton Malfeasance” Conspiracy Theory.

Last Friday, David Brooks wrote another in his series of insight-less articles, Hillary Clinton’s Opportunist Solution! In it, he said that Clinton’s reversal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is all done just to compete against Bernie Sanders. Breaking news: politician panders to voters! I wish I were a big name pundit at The New York Times so that I could write articles based on trivial and useless observations. And there’s a bonus: Brooks gets to frame the issues so that the Republicans he still somehow favors look good.

Check out how he started the article, “To win their party’s nomination in an age of growing polarization [presidential candidates] have to adopt base-pleasing, pseudo-extreme policy positions.” Oh, that’s right! Being against the TPP is “pseudo-extreme”! And Brooks knows that because… Well, he doesn’t say. It is just an unstated assumption. If a big city newspaper reporter is against something, it’s got to be “pseudo-extreme.” He would just say “extreme,” but either he or his editor understands that people actually know what “extreme” means and haven’t a clue what “pseudo-extreme” is. So writing the latter gives him the opportunity to imply extremism without the editors’ insistence on truthfulness.

But let’s look at the other side of this. Thus far, there are three Republican presidential candidates who have released budget proposals. And they’ve all done the same thing: given huge amounts away to the rich while busting huge holes in the budget. But these aren’t done to please the base. Indeed, I would say that Trump lost a lot of excitement from his base by putting out a budget that was the same as Jeb Bush’s except more extreme. What the Republican base seems to care about is red meat rhetoric, not specific policies. So is Brooks claiming that opposition to the TPP is equivalent to calling Mexicans rapists?

Books’ clever trick in this article is to say that Hillary Clinton has figured out how to appeal to the base and to the supposed centrist general election voters: she just says things she doesn’t believe! This is clever only in the conservative affirmative action case where it doesn’t require even the smallest amount of wit. Does Brooks not remember Mitt Romney’s campaign, and Eric Fehrnstrom’s “Etch A Sketch” comment? If so, he certainly doesn’t mention it. And rightly so! If he had, it would have undermined his entire premise. I’ve looked back and can only find once that the incident came up in my writing, and it was in a quote. That’s because I’m slightly more sophisticated than David Brooks, and I realize that politicians don’t always tell the truth.

In a broader sense, Brooks’ article is just another of thousands about Hillary Clinton’s lack of “authenticity.” And in this regard, he summarizes work done at the leftist Institute for Public Accuracy. Now, I really like them — they do good work. But Brooks would never accept all of their equally accurate work on Republican candidates. But the question really isn’t whether Clinton has changed her position, or as Brooks put it, “We all get to change our mind in response to the facts, but each of these intellectual inquiries happens to have led her in a politically convenient direction.” Well, it also just so happens that she has moved in the direction that is natural when one follows the evidence.

For example, Clinton would now like to see prison and sentencing reform. This is a reversal from where she was twenty years ago. But should we complain about that?! She was wrong before and right now. And there actually is more information today, even if it should have been clear then. Meanwhile, with a couple of notable exceptions, the Republican candidates are still locked into the same failed “tough on crime” policies from decades past.

I don’t mind people attacking Hillary Clinton if they have something real to attack her on. Brooks has nothing. And there is a way to exonerate Clinton from his charge anyway. All of the changes that Clinton has made in her positions are the same ones that Democratic voters — and to a large extent all voters — have made. So are all these voters inauthentic? If it weren’t that Brooks were pushing a tired narrative, his article would seem bizarre. As it is, it is just another trivial and useless column by a man who would be unemployed in a just society.

Afterword

The last part of Brooks’ column is about the “downsides” of the political opportunism that he’s assumed. A big part of that is about what a great humanitarian thing the TPP is for the poor people of Malaysia and Vietnam. Dean Baker rips him apart on this, David Brooks, Hillary Clinton, and the TPP. I highly recommend reading it. It explains some really important issues about the TPP, as well as calling Brooks on some of his nonsense.

One of my favorite concepts is the “fundamental attribution error.” This is where we tend to attribute internal causes for the actions of others but external causes for our own actions. Consider my favorite example: driving. I like it because everyone I know complains about other drivers to one extent or another. Ask someone if they’ve ever been cut off in traffic, and they will almost always jump at it like a dog on red meat, “Just the other day! I was driving…” But what’s more important is the reason that they were cut off: the guy’s just a jerk.

On the other hand, if you are driving with someone who cuts someone else off, they will tell you they had reasons. They are in a super big rush because their boss will kill them if they are late or the traffic was so bad that they had no choice or — and this is the most common — they just screwed up. And they are right! I’ve never known someone who drives around just looking for opportunities to piss off other people. But if you point this out to someone who has been cutoff, they will usually reject the notion violently.

I ran into this with a Christopher Hitchens fan who was mad at Richard Seymour. There was an admittedly vague sentence in Seymour’s book Unhiched. The reader understood the sentence to mean something that was clearly not true. I noted that he was misunderstanding what Seymour had written. And the reader’s response was, “Garbage.” Because it just had to be that Seymour was an evil man who wrote something he knew was wrong just to slander Hitchens. The much more reasonable explanation that Seymour had written a vague sentence that could be misinterpreted was not possible. Obviously, the reader would have had a different opinion if we were talking about his own writing.

Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling wrote something interesting in regard to this, Demand Deniers. It’s about the Tories in the UK. They believe that people don’t have jobs because they just don’t want them — rather than blaming it on outside forces. So they deny that the problem is the lack of demand that these unemployed and under-employed people experience. This, as Dillow noted, is a classic fundamental attribution error. But it is worse than that, because unlike people driving or even ignorant Christopher Hitchens fans, there is economic information on this subject.

But you can see where this comes from. The people making policy in the UK are all from the same class. They are all educated at the same top tier schools. They know that if they found themselves out of job, there would be plenty of people who would give them a job. So it must be the same for gardeners and auto mechanics and computer programmers, right?! It’s amazing that the moment that the left talks about inequality, we are blamed for class warfare. But these people live in a separate, closed off, society and that is just right and proper.

I’m not sure why we are so prone to the fundamental attribution error. But its result in the modern world is that we assume that the rich must be good, hard working people, and the poor must be bad and lazy. Public policy should be based on science, not such base instincts. We shouldn’t be running our economy based upon the same thinking patterns that bring us road rage.